Month: May 2020

Risk of Rain 2

A roguelike that is a lot of fun, but is mostly just a shooter with random gear if you don’t bring friends.

A Brief Update – 8/30/2024

About 4 years after this writeup was published, Risk of Rain 2 was sold to new developers. These developers recently added a incredibly buggy patch. This patch breaks enemy behavior, player skills, the final boss, and a variety of other parts of the game. Before buying, check if this issue has been resolved.

And Now The Old Review

I was gonna pass on writing about Risk of Rain 2, mostly for two reasons. One was because it has been out for forever. Then I went and checked, and its actually been just a bit over a year.

Huh. 2019 and 2020 have been really long haven’t they?

Then I didn’t have anything I thought was interesting to say. So.

So, some background if you haven’t played. Risk of Rain 2 is a sequel to Risk of Rain except not really. Risk of Rain was a 2D side scrolling game, and Risk of Rain 2 is a 3D third person shooter. Both are rogue likes, but the difference made by third D in 2 is pretty massive. The gameplay loop is something like this: start a game, pick a character, run around for loot while trying to finish the level. If you do finish the level, congrats! Proceed to a new level with more death and loot. When you die, and you will, rinse and repeat, but now you might have unlocked some new stuff.

Now do it again. And again.

One primary advantages that Risk of Rain 2 has over its predecessor is that the net code actually works this time, which makes playing it in multiplayer much easier, and also brings up the big thing I find interesting about the game: I think Risk of Rain 2 is actually a better roguelike in multiplayer than it is in singleplayer.

Here’s why: in singleplayer, there are very few situations where you actually get to make build defining choices. Unlike Immortal Redneck, pretty much every single item you might find or pick up is good. Outside of a few edge case items you get with a special currency that holds over between runs, no item is even a side grade. The worst an item can be is useless. It’s never going to really penalize you.

This matters because in Risk of Rain, the primary thing that is going to kill you is time. As a run progresses, the difficulty of the game ticks up, scaling the damage, health, etc, of bosses. So in order to get the most out of a run, you more or less want to be constantly pushing forward. You don’t really want to spend time farming money or items on a given level, because that will just make things harder in the long run, and the benefit of a single extra item doesn’t outweigh the time it took to get it. Instead, the game plan usually becomes scoping out a few items you can grab quickly, fighting the boss fast, grabbing those items, and charging ahead.

So again, in singleplayer, here’s what will happen: you’ll just grab every single item you can get your hands on. A given item won’t make you worse, so there’s no reason not to.

But in multiplayer, suddenly the builds become important. There are two reasons for this. One is that a fantastic item for one class might be at best mediocre on other. Everyone having a little bit of attack speed might not be as good as one person having a ton. And some items just stack poorly. So now when you open chests, the question being asked is no longer “Should I pick this up?” to which the answer is always “Yes,” it becomes, “Is this item more effective on me, or on my teammates, and if so, should they commit time to coming to grab it?”

I’ll give an example: Bustling Fungus. Bustling Fungus is a fairly straightforward item. When you stand still, after about 2 seconds, a field around you will appear, and will restore health to the source of the field, and any friendly allies standing in it. As a player, standing still will get you pulverized, so Fungus hot trash most of the time.

Unless you play Engineer. The Engineer puts down turrets have two important properties when it comes to Bustling Fungus. First off, the turrets function as if they have copies of all the items the Engineer, and… they never move. So the Engineer with Bustling Fungus suddenly becomes able to place down self healing turrets that also heal allies who just stand near them, even if the ally is running around. Suddenly the Fungus is pretty good.

The second thing is this that the number of items per player in a game of Risk of Rain 2 is mostly linear. So if you’re in a one player game, let’s say you get about 4 total items per level. Well, in a 2 player game, you’ll get about 8 total items per level. And either of the players can pick those up! Before, your build was likely to be pure luck of the draw, but now you can plan with your teammates to put those items where they’ll do the most good. Some like Bustling Fungus are straightforward, and some are more complex, but the increased variety and choices means you have a much bigger pool to try to build out of.

In either case, I think the key takeaway here is as follows: Risk of Rain 2 is pretty great. Steam says I’ve played almost 60 hours of it, so yeah, I like. But perhaps more important, if you do decide to risk those rains, bring some friends. It makes the game much more fun, and makes the building aspect much more strategic.

(Or you could just unlock and use the Artifact of Command, which lets you pick which item you want from a given tier, but I’m not counting that here.)

Running Secrets Of Shirakawa Castle – DM Thoughts

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish running the Secrets of Shirakawa Castle module this week, but instead I hope to have the second part of the review up next week. If you haven’t read the first part, the link to it is here.

This post isn’t a review, instead, it’s just a collection of quick thoughts on running the Secrets of Shirakawa Castle module before. The primary difference between this and review is that I view these more as areas where I screwed up running the module, and where doing things differently would have been more fun for the players. As such, this post is mostly intended for game masters intending to run the module. So without reading the actual module, this article may not be very useful for you.

The module itself can be bought here, on the DM’s guild.


1. Don’t be afraid to use Sei as part of the investigation.
-I’m always afraid of having NPC’s do too much in games. Its something I need to work on. With that said, the way I ran things, it was almost like he wasn’t there. If I were to do this again, I would try to make him a more active part of the game, especially if I was to run the module as few players as I did. Sei and their lore is a fairly key component to the module, and by downplaying them too much, I think I made things a lot more complex then they needed to be.


2. Actively monitor party resources.
Again, more on me then the module. I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention to how much HP/Spells/etc my players had. The module isn’t a met grinder, but it is punishing, and with exhaustion and other mechanics in play, it can become very easy to accidentally overestimate how much more the party can take without a short rest.


3. Let the players know that they have options to really explore the castle.
This is honestly my biggest regret. I’m pretty sure it’s how I ran the module, but when collecting feedback at the end, many of my players said they felt railroaded. Here’s the thing: Secrets is very, very open ended. Every room in the castle has a description and something to find in it. There are servants to talk to, a bathhouse to visit, and a small garden and pond. Each of these also has clues and information about the cause of the Yokai infestation. Players really can just wander and explore. If I was to run the module again, I think I would do a short tour of the castle, then have the NPC’s tell the players they can inspect wherever they want, and leave them.

These were my big three take aways. I expect to finish running the module next weekend, and after that I’ll post my final review of it. Hopefully these notes help anyone who ends up deciding to send folks on an adventure of their own!

Immortal Redneck – Finally Finished – Video Games!

So, I finally finished Immortal Redneck, by Crema. If the name sounds familar, it might be because they’re the folks that made Temtem. And raised a bunch of money on Kickstarter. But Immortal Redneck is their first game, and frankly, I’ve had way more fun with it.

I’ll talk later about Temtem, but for now, lets just talk about Immortal Redneck. If I had to describe it sufficiently, it’s a rogue like version of Doom, with an Egyptian theme. The game itself is fairly straightforward. You pick a starting character ALA Binding of Issac. This character determines your starting weapons, special activated ability, and usually has at least one more passive gimmick. Then you go into a pyramid, fight your way through to the stairs, go up the next level where enemies get harder until you die or get to the top. On the way to the top there are two bosses. If you get all the way to the top, or if you die, you restart, and can spend money you’ve collected on your way up to increase your hp/def/attack/unlock characters. It’s a pretty standard rogue like structure.

Here’s the thing though. If the reason you start playing Immortal Redneck is because “Oh hey, roguelike” I don’t think you’ll actually have a very good time. Most well regarded rogue-likes have an aspect of “learning” to them, and that isn’t really present in this. You don’t really construct a build. The only thing you can change about your set up as you proceed up the pyramid is your weapon load out, if you find something interesting to replace it with. The only real power-ups, “scrolls” can be good or bad, and you don’t know what they are until you pick them up.

I like Immortal Redneck overall though, because its fun. While it doesn’t follow the standard rogue like gameplay, most of the guns are a joy to play with, and just fun to shoot things with. While it does lean a bit heavily into references to pop culture with some of them, (looking at you little cricket and woolololo staff) most of them are just very satisfying to use.

In addition, the voice acting is pretty good. The only real voice lines are from the titular Immortal Redneck, but I found myself actually rather enjoying how he’s described. Making your character likable in a shooter like this seems difficult when all you can have them really do is spout one liners, but these make the redneck out as surprisingly likable.

I enjoyed Immortal Redneck, and if you like shooters I’d say give it a shot. But if you’re looking into it for the roguelike elements, it may not be your cup of tea.