Risk of Rain 2

Most third-person action roguelikes fix the power ceiling and ask players to survive; Risk of Rain 2, developed by Hopoo Games, removes the ceiling entirely. A scaling system continuously amplifies both the player and every enemy on the map, meaning a run that goes long enough becomes a mutual arms race that the player is expected to lose—or to win spectacularly before entropy takes over.

Each run drops a survivor onto a hostile alien planet and moves through a sequence of randomized stages drawn from over a dozen handcrafted locales, each populated with distinct monster rosters and large boss encounters. The run ends either by reaching and defeating the final boss or by death; players can also choose to loop indefinitely, accepting escalating difficulty in exchange for more time to build. Stage order and enemy spawns carry enough variance that no two runs resolve identically.

The item system is the mechanical center of the game. More than 110 items can be collected across a run, and their effects stack and interact with one another in ways that produce emergent, sometimes absurd power combinations. Eleven playable survivors are available, each with a distinct movement type, attack pattern, and a set of alternate skills that can be unlocked separately, adding meaningful replayability beyond item variance. Artifacts function as opt-in modifiers—toggleable rules that change conditions like friendly fire behavior, how items are distributed, or how survivors are assigned—giving experienced players tools to reshape the challenge. Prismatic Trials offer a rotating fixed-seed competitive mode. The game supports solo play or online co-op with up to four players total.

Risk of Rain 2 released on August 11, 2020 after an early access period. The update history shows sustained post-launch development: subsequent DLC expansions added survivors and content, and by late 2025 the Alloyed Collective update arrived, preceded by a four-part developer diary series covering new survivors including the Operator and the Drifter. A patch followed in December 2025. In early 2026 a Steam Deck controls update shipped, and a fourth content expansion, Hallowed Concepts, was announced in April 2026 with developer diaries detailing hexes and a new item tier.

Where Hades uses a fixed-power, narrative-driven structure with guaranteed incremental unlocks, Risk of Rain 2 offers a more volatile experience in which the run itself is the primary variable and a single lucky item chain can redefine what the character is capable of.