Steam Game Review Bombed for Anti Mask Tirade in Patch Notes

Indie game Domina, developed by Dolphin Barn Incorporated has recently been review bombed on Steam as users found the game’s latest update notes contained an inane anti-mask rant that claimed covid-19 is a lie.

The gladiator management game was last updated on the 8th of March 2022, with one particular note being an out of nowhere rant about people wearing masks to avoid the spread of covid-19, with statements including that not wearing a mask would “get you laid”, and that men should be “unafraid of lies” (what are these lies? we don’t know). Here is the specific note :

“TAKE OFF THE FCKN MASKS – Next time you’re at the grocery store, try showing a woman your face. Be confident, unafraid of the LIES — you might get a girlfriend. Women like confidence. Women don’t like dudes who cover their faces in fear. What are you afraid of? Getting laid? Grow up.”

As you can imagine a crass covid denial rant, supported by incel-like logic hasn’t exactly warmed people to the game, leading to its current review bombing.

While reviews in total are “mostly positive”, the game’s recent reviews have dropped to “mostly negative”.

“Anti-masker devs using their patch notes as a glorified twitter feed. Embarrassing.” – big load

“Was a cool game to stream/watch but I guess that was thrown out the window by a dev who thinks he has to push anti-medical propaganda guised in a change log. Dude speed ran the “destroy your career” life achievement with one change log. Pro-tip to brain-dead devs: Keep your hacky political propaganda out of gaming.” – Coconutsales

A couple of trolls have come out of the woodwork to drop some positive reviews on the game, talking about how “based” the notes are but this has done little to stop the reviews’ overall downward projection.

In response to this backlash, the Domina Twitter account has done what many do when they’re forced to face the consequences of their actions online: blame cancel culture.

DOMINA

dev: *suggests courage*

woke mob: UHM NO, COURAGE IS BAD ACTUALLY
and thErEs nO suCh THing aS CAnCEL CULTURE ALSO

pic.twitter.com/zWKrYqWEf1

— DOMINA (@DominaGame) March 13, 2022

PC Gamer further found that the anti-mask rant wasn’t the first time Domina had strange takes in their Steam update notes. There was a previous bizarre rant about how men need to stop watching porn.

“some men still wont fight. they’re weak. there’s no accounting for weak men. weak men lack character. strong moral fibre is hard to come by. it’s earned through hard work and sacrifice and it cannot be had via onlyfans or pornhub. no, those fuckin’ things are demonic posessions waiting to show you a succubus tiddy in the hopes you’ll waste a load on her instead of spending that energy studying how to weld or grow a potato or learning a new language or how to program a computer. listen, kids … get off them porntubes and do something with your life becuase no one is gonna give you a goddamned thing and this whole mess we call civilization is only getting harder. we need solutions and we need smart men who can work hard and implement those solutions. masturbating to egirls isn’t gonna solve the energy crisis is it? get to work.”

While you try to figure out what any of that actually means, it seems these strange outrage posts are a gimmick the Steam account manager is using to drum up publicity for their game.

They say that any publicity is good publicity but it’s hard to say if that will really be the case. I didn’t know this game existed until I heard about the controversy, so I guess the devs succeeded in getting me to learn about it, but the vitriolic statements mean I now have no plans to actually buy the game and will likely go back to forgetting it ever existed. Most people will probably do the same.