Risk of Rain was one of the first “roguelite” games that really captured my attention; there was something about the consistently increasing difficulty and overwhelming amount of enemies that never made me feel like I was ready for the situation… which made the dopamine hit of survival that much sweeter.
While overcoming the difficulty was initially the main draw, it quickly became trying to find all the secret rooms, items and new characters the game hid. Unlocking and playing every character (for better and worse) changed the game every single run through and I loved every minute of it.
Then, after everything was found and unlocked, my friend Sean and I began an initiative to play the game every day in a “Daily Challenge” self-imposed mode, popularized at the time by another roguelite game “Spelunky”. Our daily challenge was a bit cumbersome to set-up; a network of issues with programs like Hamachi to log into each others’ PC and network lag due to it made it one of the worst ways to play but we had a great time learning to work together to best the crazy amount of stuff thrown at us.
In the years since Risk of Rain, the series saw the rise of a sequel that was arguably more well received by the general population of gamers but still flies somewhat under the radar for most. A port of the game with online multiplayer was released in 2018 on the Nintendo Switch to varying degrees of bad but for the most part was a faithful version of the original on PC.
This month, 10 years later, Risk of Rain Returns brings the classic game back, exactly the way it was with new animations, refreshed graphics and a whole slew of great new features like character skill customizations, new characters, new stages, remastered soundtrack and an official online multiplayer mode. Amongst the new content, the wide array of challenge rooms to unlock the different skill options for each character has added almost a whole new game worth of interesting content and new ways to play the game in bite-sized pieces that I’ve found really engaging. Risk of Rain Returns is worth a lot to me for nostalgic reasons and way more than it’s humble asking price of $15. Highly recommended!
