Risk of Rain Returns

Most remasters are an accounting decision. Bump the resolution, add achievements, ship it into the holiday window, harvest the nostalgia. Risk of Rain Returns is not that, and the difference is apparent almost immediately after the first drop pod hits the dirt.

The original Risk of Rain arrived in 2013 as a student project turned cult object — a scrappy, unfair, brilliantly-scored side-scrolling roguelike from a two-person team at Hopoo Games that ran on the strength of one very good idea. That idea was the difficulty clock: a timer in the corner of the screen that never stops, escalating enemy health, damage, and spawn density through named tiers with escalating menace. Every second spent farming gold makes the planet stronger. The game doesn’t punish greed with a death sentence so much as invoice for it, with interest.

Returns is a full reconstruction of that game. Every sprite has been redrawn, the animation is noticeably richer, and Chris Christodoulou’s original score — a standout soundtrack by any measure — has been remixed and extended. But the meaningful work is structural. Fifteen Survivors, two of them new, all of them rebuilt with alternate unlockable abilities that genuinely reconfigure how a character functions rather than swapping a damage number. Providence Trials, a suite of bite-sized challenge scenarios that teach mechanics the original expected players to learn by dying. A proper item logbook. Ten-plus Artifacts for run customization. And a rebuilt four-player online implementation that addresses the netcode failure that defined the original’s reputation.

The market positioning is interesting, and slightly awkward. This launched into a world where Risk of Rain 2 — the 3D sequel that sold millions — already exists, and where the IP had passed to Gearbox. Returns is effectively Hopoo’s closing statement on the 2D game, and it reads like one: reverent, thorough, and occasionally stubborn about preserving things a colder-eyed studio would have sanded off.

• The escalating difficulty clock: The core tension. Time is the true enemy, and every decision — open that chest, chase that gold, fight that boss — is a bet against a curve climbing in the corner of the screen.
• Stacking item economy: Hundreds of items that multiply rather than replace. Six of one on-hit effect doesn’t add up; it compounds. This is where the game’s famous “screen-annihilating build” moments come from.
• Fifteen Survivors with alternate loadouts: Not palette swaps. Unlockable ability variants that change a character’s fundamental job — turning a mobility tool into a damage tool, or a burst class into a sustain class.
• Providence Trials: Short, curated challenge rooms that function as the tutorial the original never had, while dispensing unlocks. An elegant solution to a real onboarding problem.
• Rebuilt four-player co-op: Online and local couch, with netcode designed to finally hold together.
• Ten-plus Artifacts: Run modifiers that let veterans distort the rules — enemy composition, item pools, spawn behavior.

The Gameplay Loop

You land. You have nothing. You kill small things for gold, open chests, and hunt for the teleporter that gates the next biome. Activating it summons a boss and a wave of pressure, and clearing it moves you on. Repeat across ten stages, then confront Providence.

Described that way it sounds routine. What makes it work is that the loop is a compounding-interest problem with a hostile deadline. Items in Risk of Rain stack multiplicatively in ways that produce genuine non-linearity — the difference between four Soldier’s Syringes and eight isn’t twice as good, it’s a different game. So the correct play is always to farm more. And the clock makes farming more the thing that kills you. That contradiction is the entire design, and it’s still, a decade later, sharper than most of the roguelikes that copied it.

The item variety is where the run-to-run character lives. A lucky chain of drops can transform a fragile survivor into something that clears rooms before the button press finishes — and the game is completely unapologetic about the fact that the reverse also happens. Runs will die stillborn on stage two because the chests gave nothing that talked to anything else. This is variance as a feature, and it’s fair to hate it.

What Returns Actually Fixed

The 2013 version had a knowledge problem. It hid enormous depth behind zero explanation, and expected players to reverse-engineer item synergies from the wiki. Providence Trials and the item logbook are the single most valuable additions here, because they convert opaque knowledge into taught knowledge without diluting the difficulty. The Trials are short, they’re mechanically specific, and they reward players with unlocks — which means the onboarding path and the progression path are the same path. That’s a smart structural fix, not a bolted-on tutorial.

The Survivor reworks are the other genuine content win. Alternate abilities are the kind of feature that’s easy to fake — swap a cooldown, call it a variant. These mostly aren’t fake. Several characters have loadout choices that flip their whole risk profile, and the unlock conditions push players into using them in ways they’d otherwise avoid. It converts a roster most would sample into a roster worth working through.

Where It Refuses to Budge

The real complaint isn’t the difficulty in the abstract — it’s the legibility of the difficulty. Late in a run, the screen becomes a dense field of overlapping projectiles, elite auras, spawn effects, and the build’s own visual noise. In that state, some enemy attacks do not telegraph clearly enough, and some hitboxes read larger than they look. Dying to something that could not be parsed is a different emotion than dying to a decision made wrong, and Returns’ design still generates the first one more often than a 2023 remaster should. The design leaves that debt unpaid.

The time-based scaling is the other point of contention, and one we’ll defend more readily. Yes, it’s punishing. Yes, it’s the thing that makes the game work. Anyone wanting a roguelike that allows taking time and optimizing at leisure is looking at a design that rejects those preferences by intent, and there is no difficulty slider that makes that untrue. But the Artifacts do give real levers, and the game is honest about what it is from the first minute.

The complaint we’re least sympathetic to is the one from Risk of Rain 2 converts who find the return to 2D limiting. These are different games with different pleasures. The 2D version’s readability of space and precision of platforming is a strength, not a downgrade — right up until the screen fills, at which point, see above.

The art direction is the clearest evidence that this wasn’t a cash-in. The redraw preserves the original’s silhouette language — the chunky, slightly grotesque alien fauna, the industrial-decay palette — while expanding the detail budget and animating everything with far more weight. Enemy deaths have follow-through now. Attacks have anticipation frames. It looks like the game people remember playing, which is the highest compliment you can pay a pixel-art remaster.

Christodoulou’s remixed score deserves separate mention. It’s progressive-rock-adjacent, it’s long-form, and it does something most game music won’t attempt: it builds slowly enough that a track’s climax can land at the same moment a run does. The expanded arrangements are nearly worth the price of admission on their own.

As a design matter, the game is at its most demanding in four-player online play — busy late-game sessions are the configuration most likely to strain any version of this engine, and the rebuilt netcode should be treated as a major improvement rather than a guarantee of perfection under maximum load. To be clear about the scale of that improvement: the original’s multiplayer was functionally broken, and this one is built to work. It simply isn’t built to work flawlessly under maximum load.

Steam is the better version, and it isn’t close. It offers resolution and display options that matter for a game this visually dense, plus the modding-adjacent ecosystem that always forms around this series. Mouse-and-keyboard is supported and suits the aiming-adjacent Survivors, but the game is built around a controller and reads like it — twin-stick-ish movement plus four cooldowns maps to a gamepad cleanly and to WASD-plus-mouse awkwardly. On a handheld PC, the run-length structure fits short sessions well, though the same small-screen legibility caveats below apply.

Nintendo Switch is the compromise you’d expect, weighted heavily by how it’s played. Docked, it’s the straightforward choice. Handheld, the small panel fights the game’s greatest weakness: when stage eight fills with particles and elite enemies, a small screen turns “hard to read” into “impossible to read.” What it buys in return is the single best argument for the Switch version — a roguelike built around short runs is close to the ideal portable format, and local four-player couch co-op with detached Joy-Cons is a configuration the Steam version can’t casually replicate. Online play on Switch is the configuration to approach with the most modest expectations.

Risk of Rain Returns is the remaster as argument. Hopoo went back with a decade of hindsight, fixed the things that were broken — the netcode, the onboarding, the animation budget — and deliberately declined to fix the things people merely found difficult. That’s a defensible editorial position, executed with real craft.

It isn’t flawless. The late-game legibility problem is a real design debt that a full rebuild had the opportunity to pay down and didn’t, and four-player online remains the configuration most likely to buckle at the edges. But the value proposition is strong: fifteen deeply-differentiated characters, hundreds of interacting items, a challenge suite, an artifact system, and a remarkable score, for $14.99.

We rate it a solid, flawed-in-ways-that-matter package: buy it on Steam if given the choice, on Switch if portability and couch co-op matter more than pixel clarity — and only if the clock sounds like a feature rather than a threat.