Risk of Rain

Risk of Rain is Hopoo Games' 2013 action platformer roguelike, the indie genre-bender that became influential enough to spawn a 3D sequel and a whole generation of imitators. The setup is simple: your ship has crashed on a hostile planet, and you have to push forward through randomly generated stages to find the teleporter back home. Permanent death is the central design choice — every run starts over.

The defining tension is that time equals difficulty. The longer you spend on any level, the higher the difficulty scales and the worse the enemy spawns get, so there's constant pressure to push forward rather than grind. Conversely, surviving longer means more time to find items, and the item system stacks: every duplicate of an item compounds its effect, so a long-running character can accumulate genuinely absurd combinations of effects. By the late game a fully kitted character is essentially a walking armageddon.

Ten massive stages each contain different enemies, shrines and chests, with twelve playable characters ranging from the Commando to the Miner to the Engineer, each unlockable through specific accomplishments. Drones serve as recruitable allies — missile drones, healing drones, attack drones — and the item and monster logs slowly unlock the planet's lore through repeated discoveries. Local and online multiplayer for up to four players turns the difficulty scaling into a coordination challenge of its own. The game's design philosophy — random per-run, time-pressured, build-stacking, generous with unlocks — became one of the genre's foundational templates.