Or, how I lost spent an enjoyable nine hours of my life (and possibly even more) playing a rogue platformer.
Risk of Rain’s mission statement is simple: Traverse a platforming stage, find a teleporter, activate it, and survive long enough to use it once it’s powered up.
Initially it doesn’t sound compelling. There are no skill trees. Its graphics are a sparse, minimized representation of a barren world. It is running and jumping with randomized items.
But that’s not entirely what it’s about.
Risk of Rain is about dying. More accurately, it’s about dying, and then selecting, “Try Again?”
Risk of Rain is difficult. It is constantly spawning enemies. On top of that, the longer you take to complete a level, the difficulty notches up. This means that the constantly spawning enemy types get meaner. Maybe they start setting the ground on fire. Maybe previously melee only enemies start launching missiles with their attacks. Maybe they are now poisonous. Maybe they send all of these enemy types and send in one more that heals nearby allies.
So it’s difficult.
But compelling.
There are items that increase your odds of survival against increasingly difficult odds. There are items that give your attacks bleed damage. Or poison damage. Or cause enemies to explode after you kill them. Or heal you when you do damage. Or give you damage reduction There are lots of items. But you don’t know what’s going to be available for any given attempt. There is an uncertainty factor here, one that means you can’t depend on a certain item combination to survive.Â
But the one thing that you can depend on throughout the game is your platforming skill and knowledge of the levels. While the locations of teleporters and items are randomized, as they say, Â “forewarned is forearmed.” Recognizing level layouts and where to look becomes an asset when the difficulty notches up every five minutes.
When I finished the fifth (and final) stage, complete with exhilarating (but importantly, not frustrating) multi stage Final Boss Fight, I really felt I had played a good game. Then the credits rolled and then I unlocked a new character with new abilities that I absolutely had to try out.
So while I have technically beat Risk of Rain, (Full disclosure: On the lowest difficulty setting) I am not done. There are other characters to unlock after all, and the running and shooting is a lot of fun. Plus, while you die pretty often, it always feels well, fair which is sometimes uncommon for rogue like games. They did a great job with enemy imbalance.
But the best part of Risk of rain is when you finally overcome everything it is throwing at you because you are just this incredible juggernaut of destruction.
Not going to lie, it feels pretty good.