Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUERisk Of Rain
Risk of Rain is an action platformer with roguelike elements. With permanent death as a primary feature, players will have to play their best to get as far as possible. Fight on a mysterious planet with randomly spawning enemies and bosses, either alone or with 3 friends in online co-op.
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Video reviews
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Community discussion
A 2D pixel-art action platformer roguelite from Hopoo Games where up to four players fight through escalating, time-scaled waves on a hostile planet while stacking passive items.
Risk of Rain is regarded as a genre classic: Steam shows Very Positive (about 93% of roughly 29.8k reviews) and Metacritic has a 77 critic score (PC) with an 8.0 user score. Critics called it addictive and worth the struggle, while noting dated presentation and rough controls. Today many players recommend it as an important, still fun game but point newcomers to the 2023 remake Risk of Rain Returns, which fixes many of the original's rough edges. Recent Steam sentiment has been dented by a 2025-2026 EULA change (forced arbitration and a class action waiver under Take-Two/2K ownership), plus reports of crashes and poor controller support. It is a finished game, not early access.
What players praise
- Difficulty-equals-time design creates constant risk/reward tension between looting for items and rushing the teleporter
- Item stacking: dozens of passive pickups combine until a run turns from barely surviving to screen-clearing chaos
- Distinct survivors with different abilities, unlocked through challenges, that change how each run plays
- Chris Christodoulou's soundtrack and lonely sci-fi atmosphere are near-universally praised
- Gritty pixel art that is readable once you adjust to the visual noise
- Fun online/local co-op for up to 4 players
- Good value: very cheap, frequently on sale, and with a strong modding community
- Runs escalate into a satisfying power fantasy by the late stages
What players criticize
- Dated presentation: PC Gamer (via Metacritic summary) criticised awful maximum resolution and tiny sprites
- Poor controller support, especially in menus and on Steam Deck; many keyboard-rebinding complaints, including awkward diagonal jumping
- Crashes and stutter reported by recent reviewers, including crashes during the final boss
- Combat feels repetitive: for many survivors it is run away, fire abilities, run again, which gets old in 2D and makes melee survivors and the sniper feel weak
- Difficulty can feel artificially inflated by the timer, with enemies that take ages to kill once you linger
- Enemies can spawn very close to the player, and some elites (e.g. Overloading Magma Worm) kill suddenly
- Opaque item effects and little onboarding make the first hours unintuitive
- Recent review bombing over the EULA/arbitration terms and distrust of Take-Two
Distinctive features
- Difficulty scales with elapsed time rather than stage count, so the player controls pacing and risk
- Enemy spawning uses a director point system that also creates elite variants when the player gets strong
- Near-total reliance on stackable passive items over permanent upgrades, so each run is about emergent builds
- Roguelite platformer blending 2D movement/platforming with bullet-hell chaos and boss-rush teleporter events
- Born as a two-student University of Washington project that raised over $30,000 on Kickstarter (goal $7,000) and won the 2014 IGF Student Prize
- Launched the franchise that became Risk of Rain 2 and the 2023 remake Returns
Divided opinions
- Original versus remake: many say Returns is strictly better, others say the original has more enemies and items, better exploits/cheese and a rawer indie charm
- Original versus Risk of Rain 2: some call the sequel superior in nearly every way, while others prefer the 2D game's levels and feel that it has less punishing RNG
- Difficulty: celebrated as fair and learnable by some, called unfair and artificially inflated by others
- Simple mechanics: loved as tight and approachable by some, dismissed as shallow by others
Repetition and friction
- Repetitive levels and a grindy unlock structure, cited by some as getting boring after a while
- Kiting-based play that some find unengaging (run, shoot, repeat) especially with melee survivors
- Lack of permanent upgrades is a dealbreaker for some players who want meta progression
- Stressful, steep difficulty for casual players, one negative reviewer compared it to The Binding of Isaac and did not enjoy it
- Late-run slowdowns and frame rate drops on weak hardware as the screen fills
- Having to accept a new EULA to keep launching a game already owned
Hoped-for improvements
- Proper controller support and menu navigation, including Steam Deck
- Higher-resolution graphics and UI scaling (addressed by Returns)
- Better netcode and co-op stability (Returns reworked networking)
- Stability fixes for crashes and periodic freezes on the Steam version
- Clearer tutorialisation and item descriptions for newcomers
- Reversal of the forced-arbitration EULA that players have to accept to keep playing
Launched on Windows in Nov 2013 after a 2013 Kickstarter; Mac/Linux followed in Oct 2014, PlayStation in 2016, Switch in Sep 2018 and Xbox One in Aug 2019; it passed 3 million copies sold by 2019 (Wikipedia). Steam-revenue-calculator estimates about $2.0M gross for the Steam PC version alone (Boxleiter-style estimate), and SteamSpy lists 500k-1M owners. Gearbox acquired the franchise in 2022 and released the Returns remake in Nov 2023, after which the original became the cheaper, rougher option. The 2025-2026 EULA/arbitration change and the Take-Two/2K ownership have triggered a wave of negative Steam reviews from otherwise fond players. OpenCritic's numeric average could not be retrieved; only the 73% recommend figure from Wikipedia was found. Note: web search quota was exhausted, so community detail relies mainly on Steam reviews plus fetched Metacritic/Wikipedia pages; Reddit and Polygon fetches were blocked.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (local file) ↗
- Steam store data: review counts, SteamSpy owners, revenue estimate ↗
- Metacritic critic 77 (12 reviews), user 8.0 (353 ratings), praise and criticism summary ↗
- Development, Kickstarter, platforms, sales (3M+ by 2019), review scores, IGF award ↗
- Remake improvements and original reception (Metacritic PC/PS4, OpenCritic 73% recommended) ↗
- Estimated gross and net Steam revenue ↗
- Steam page: Very Positive, tags, price, publishers ↗
- Attempted OpenCritic fetch; returned the wrong game so the data was discarded ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 1 (2023)
The original 2D side-scrolling action roguelike where each survivor has fixed abilities and runs are shaped by the items you collect. He played it years ago, including in clunky IP-based multiplayer, and recently again. He finds it flashy, satisfying and still fun today, especially for fans of Risk of Rain 2, though builds feel samey. He lands it at high B and is excited about the announced remake.
What the creator praises
- Gameplay is enjoyable, fun and flashy overall
- Characters each have unique abilities that stay constant across runs
- Items found during runs are what change the gameplay
- You can get really overpowered with the right item combinations
- Still holds up today; an oldie but a goodie
- Very satisfying to play, especially for Risk of Rain 2 fans
Issues raised by the creator
- Builds don't feel unique run to run; you end up powerful with much the same kind of stuff
- Item variation is mostly more crit, more attack, etc., nothing super unique
- Original multiplayer was barely functional and required manual IP setup
Design observations
- Fixed character abilities with all run variety coming from items
- Power fantasy of snowballing into overpowered combinations
