No Rest for the Wicked dev launches rival review aggregator that calls critics 'untrustworthy'

Moon Studios director Thomas Mahler — the lead developer behind the Ori games and Early Access Soulslike No Rest for the Wicked — has launched VideoGamesCritic, a review aggregator he's positioning as a direct alternative to Metacritic and OpenCritic. The site's core pitch: professional critics are untrustworthy, so player scores should carry twice the weight.

The methodology pulls critic scores directly from OpenCritic, then blends them with a "trust-weighted" calculation built on Steam reviews, giving players a two-thirds share of the final score. The site also grades individual outlets by how far their scores deviate from the player consensus — and somehow manages to do this even for publications that don't use numerical scores, like Kotaku. To address the well-known problem of scores freezing at launch, more recent Steam reviews are weighted more heavily than older ones, which is Mahler's answer to cases like No Man's Sky, whose Metascore still reflects its disastrous 2016 launch rather than the game it became. Reviews from accounts with under two hours played are heavily downweighted, with credibility scaling up to the 10-hour mark — which does raise an obvious question about games shorter than that threshold.

The launch comes with some notable baggage. Last year Mahler publicly claimed Steam review bombing was going to bankrupt Moon Studios, despite No Rest for the Wicked not actually being review bombed — it had received straightforward criticism over a poorly received Early Access update. He then argued that press coverage of his own comments was itself evidence of journalistic failure, and added transphobic remarks before signing off. The tension between that position and a new site that hands two-thirds of its scoring power to those same Steam reviewers is hard to miss. His answer, posted on X, is essentially that the press is still worse: "Press still counts, it just can't outvote the people who bought the game."

Whether VideoGamesCritic gains traction beyond Mahler's own audience remains to be seen. The concept of a living, update-aware aggregate score has genuine merit, but the site's framing — critics as an untrustworthy bloc to be outvoted — is likely to define how it's received more than its methodology will.