Risk of Rain takes a gritty aesthetic and a distinctly creative approach to creating an action game. It was developed according to a cohesive design and balancing philosophy which, while difficult to figure out at first, leads to a very distinct and interesting experience. The way the game is paced is innovative, rewarding the player for increasing their speed, but at the same time this feels somewhat like a brute force solution to better, more fluent level and difficulty design. The game has a very steep learning curve and moderate skill cap which should be able to engage a wide audience of player skill levels and attention spans. It is worth noting that the game tries to extend its "length" far beyond reasonable by creating a long and convoluted unlockable tree which doesn't change or enhance the gameplay very much, mainly existing as a series of shiny virtual items to keep players repeating the mostly-identical levels over and over again. Definitely worth picking up if this fulfills a niche you were setting out to find an answer to, but if you stumbled across Risk of Rain idly then there are probably better, more accessible options with less obtrusive metagames.