Risk of Rain

Risk of Rain is a 2013 roguelite action-platformer developed by Hopoo Games and published by Chucklefish, released November 8, 2013 for Windows — now listed on Steam as Risk of Rain (2013) to tell it apart from the two games that outgrew it: the 3D sequel Risk of Rain 2 and the 2023 remake Risk of Rain Returns. If you searched the bare name, odds are you wanted one of those; this card is about the original — the pixel-art game two University of Washington students built in GameMaker, funded with a $7,000 Kickstarter, and sold over three million copies. It holds Metacritic scores of 77 on PC and 81 on PS4, won the 2014 Independent Games Festival Student Prize, and introduced the single idea the whole series runs on.

That idea is written into the game’s first screen: difficulty equals time. Every five minutes the threat level climbs a notch across ten tiers, whether you’re ready or not — so every second spent looting for power is a second the planet spends getting deadlier.

Technical Specifications

The Contact Light Goes Down

The space freighter UES Contact Light is attacked and crashes onto the planet Petrichor V, scattering its cargo — and its passengers — across a hostile world. Each survivor fights through side-scrolling stages toward a teleporter, holds out against a boss and a swarm while it charges, and presses on toward the ship and its warden, Providence, the final boss whose brother Mithrix would anchor the sequel. The story lives in item logs and monster descriptions, a design Hopoo kept for every game since, and Chris Christodoulou’s score — the Kickstarter’s single most consequential purchase — became one of indie gaming’s most-streamed soundtracks.

Twelve Survivors and 110 Items

You start with the Commando and earn the rest through in-run feats: the Enforcer, Bandit, Huntress, HAN-D, Engineer, Miner, Sniper, Acrid, Mercenary, Loader, and the hidden CHEF — nearly all of whom returned, reimagined, in Risk of Rain 2. Items stack without a cap, so long runs curdle into the series’ trademark screen-filling absurdity, and the tension between greed and the clock made the game a co-op classic: up to ten players online in the PC original, each extra body speeding the loot and the danger. Launch-era criticisms were the 2013 indie standard — tiny sprites hard to read in chaos, a brutal early curve, and online play that needed port-forwarding and patience.

Reception and Legacy

Critics landed in the high 70s — “a small game with an enormous idea” was the consensus shape — and the audience did the rest: three million copies, console ports across every platform of the decade, and a sequel that became one of the defining roguelites of the 2020s. The original’s design fingerprints are everywhere now; the “difficulty = time” meter alone has been borrowed by a generation of survivors-likes and extraction shooters. Hopoo’s founders went on to Valve in 2024, and the IP to Gearbox — but the series’ DNA was fixed here, by two students and a GameMaker license.

Which Version to Play

The 2013 original is still sold on Steam (as Risk of Rain (2013)), PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox for a few dollars, and remains perfectly playable — but the modern answer is Risk of Rain Returns (2023, $14.99, PC and Switch): a faithful remake by Hopoo itself with redrawn art, remastered music, 15 survivors including two new ones, overhauled four-player online, and a 94%-positive Steam rating from nearly 17,000 reviews. Play Returns for the game; keep the 2013 build for the history — and for the ten-player lobbies the remake never brought back.