Quick Look: Risk of Rain

Ooh, this is much better than solo Quick Looks.

This game looks as great as I was hoping it would be.

@patrickklepek: It seems like he's only a little bit lower than you. Still audible and all that.

This is great. More of these please. Its like you're in the office. Sweet.

It's rare that a Quick Look alone sells me on a game, but this has. Just bought it.

I'm glad you did another quick look with it now officially out on steam. 10$ price tag is hard to pass up...but I have so many games on backlog...

This game is DOPE.

Fake patrick approves of this game.

This kind of quick look is great. More please!

This game is absolutely awesome. Been playing it all day and it's kicking my ass HARD, but I'm a glutton for its particular brand of punishment!

This game has already been quick looked has it not? Still a great game and deserves attention. But I started watching the QL and was like, "Wait a minute.....I've seen this before."

@drchi: Patrick did a video when the game was still in beta. This is the final version for sale on Steam.

that looks pretty damn sweet.

the only thing i didn't like and can see getting really old, really fast is the whole hunting down the last few enemies so you can get to the next stage. definitely not a fan of that, as it seems to bring the game to a grinding halt (especially with time-management being such a critical factor).

@patrickklepek: Loving the content you and Alex bring to the site. Keep it up!

That worked pretty well! Hopefully you guys do some more of these.

Yep!

Can you level up stats? Are levels randomly generated? Is there permadeath? If all of these apply to the game, then yes, it is in fact a roguelike. Fuck all the defensive neckbeards that say otherwise.

Very cool idea to do something like this! Maybe you and Alex could record your own voices individually on your own ends and get him to send you his. It's a little bit more work, but not much, and I think it'd be worth it for the best quality audio from both of you. All you really need to worry about is a way to actually match the tracks up (a unison awwoooo/scooping noise before action maybe). Either way, it's really cool to see you and Alex trying out the potential of a Quick Look like this and sorry if you somehow address my suggestion in the video or something, I only just started watching it!

Ok I'm going to buy this game ,it looks awesome and man that music is great to.

Gonna have to grab this, looks great. Thanks for the QL guys.

Gonna cross my fingers and hope my girlfriend is interested in this game, because there is no one on my friend list with it.

This works alright but the beginning was fucking hilarious. Patrick says something he clearly expects Alex to respond to and gets a big fat zip in return

This is pretty good! Also rewarding to peer into Alex's sad, sad life experience for making me feel better. I really wish both these guys would visit the office for extended visits several times a year. I know Pat is due in.

We actually did do that! Unfortunately, the way I ended up recording the game, his side of the Skype call got embedded into the video, and I didn't have a way to boost his voice without also booting the game audio. Anyway, I think I know what to do in the future to avoid that, but it was an unavoidable problem this time. It's why my audio sounds a bit better.

Long Distance Quick Looks are the future.

Wow this game looks really cool. The powerups we're sweet. Whatever setup you guys had going seemed to work well and was more enjoyable having Alex along for the ride over the solo quicklooks.

No, No, Yes.

1/3, this game fails the Roguelike test.

Making some banter regarding how you get flack for calling things rogue-like (all the time), doesn't then make it ok to call a game rogue-like. You know what would be ok, to just NOT mention that term anymore where it doesn't apply. You don't need to make a cute story about it, just don't say it.

It was bad to hear rogue-like term horribly used in the past. It is WORSE to now hear it used all the time but also hear how you know you get flack for saying it but you are going to say it anyway blah blah blah.

Great music.

I've been playing it for a couple hours now and it's pretty cool. I'm not exactly sure how to unlock the other characters, and don't know if it's balanced when playing alone because it ramps up pretty quickly. There also seems to be a problem with Windows 8 and the music not playing when loading a new level. I closed the game and got an infinite loop of beeping until I restarted my computer, as well. Still, I didn't at all care for Spelunky and am enjoying this, for whatever that's worth.

With so many icons and so much text on screen, it can be hard to follow the action.

If Quick Look Solo is a thing, Quick Look Remote should be too. Keeping these identifiable from the normal Quick Looks was something I definitely liked about the Quick Look Solo title.

I was hoping you guys would try something like this, I like it good work guys

God damn it man. Who cares? I like the term, so there.

I never mind the term rougue-like cause it tells me alot about how the game plays... those people who mind are the insane ones.

I am psyched for the possibility of Alex/Patrick Quick Looks.

The killer soundtrack by Chris Christodoulou is available on BandCamp.

You should probably use that energy on something useful, rather than giving a shit about something like this.

@carg0 said:

Yeah, I bought into this game back in the beta after the first Quick Look Patrick did because I really like the look of it, the music, the characters, and the items. But something about the balance of the game still feels way off, both in the beta and the final release. I think the time management mechanic fundamentally ruins the whole game, or needs to ramp up way, way slower.

Sure, your guy levels up and increases his HP and damage slightly, but that increase pales in comparison with how each new area has enemies with way more HP than the previous, plus the difficulty is gradually increasing (which I think affects enemy spawn rate and likelihood of the palette-swapped enemies which are tougher). Whatever slight damage increase you get is in no way keeping up with the sheer HP increase of enemies.

It feels like the enemies in this game should die in something like the time span it takes to kill an enemy in Diablo, or at most the time span it takes to kill some enemies in The Binding of Isaac or something. But this only happens in the first area. Like, jeez, once you're in the second area or farther, and say about 15-20 minutes have passed, you're just kiting huge mobs of enemies constantly because your weapons do garbage damage and you're slowly whittling them to death. The movement speed increase item actually seems like one of the best items because, again, you are kiting enemies CONSTANTLY and some of them are kinda fast, and you can't tank damage for shit (this also makes melee classes completely unplayable).

I've made it to the 3rd area a few times, and it never felt like my stats were remotely up to snuff. I either rushed there, meaning I skipped buying a bunch of upgrades but the difficulty bar is lower, but even though there are less enemies in the 3rd area, they wreck me because I'm underleveled. Or I didn't rush there, in which case I have a bunch of items and leveled up, but there are way more enemies spawning and they wreck my shit because even with a few more levels it still feels like they have a completely unfair amount of HP, and they are legion.

I know this game isn't meant to be Spelunky or Volgarr the Viking in terms of "enemies die in 1-6 hits", but I really don't like how enemies just have silly amounts of HP. Even when I've found a ledge to stand on so I can just cheese enemies because they can't cross the gap or whatever, it'll sometimes take like 20-50 seconds to just clear a mob of enemies that's been chasing me, with me constantly holding down the attack button and spamming my abilities as soon as they're off cooldown. Literally constant DPS, and even then, the 20-second end of that range only happens when I luck into some powerful rare items.

The Steam forums don't seem to have any complaints about the difficulty, so I guess I'm just terrible at this game, or need to be advancing through levels like 5 times faster than I am, or something. I've played like 10-15 hours of the unfinished beta, and about 5 hours of the finished game. I don't feel like I'm improving at all. Sometimes I get good items, and at best that allows me to beat the teleporter rush at the end of the 2nd area, after which the 3rd area wrecks me. I know what the enemy attacks are capable of and what my own attacks do, but I don't understand how you're meant to reach the game's ending. At a certain point, mobs spawn at a rate slightly faster than you can kill them, especially when half your time is wasted on running (and you can't deal damage while running, unless you're using Acrid who leaves poison everywhere, but sadly you have to unlock him in the final version).

I just don't get it. At least in Spelunky or Binding of Isaac, I could envision how I could take less damage and do better. Even if I take less damage in Risk of Rain, the issue is still that mobs spawn faster than I can kill them, unless I find a cheesy spot where I can just hammer on the mobs for like 45 seconds straight without moving. In Binding of Isaac, you know when to advance because you run out of enemies and rooms on the floor, and in Spelunky you know when to advance because the ghost appears; in Risk of Rain, you could keep grinding out the first level forever so the only incentive is the nebulous time limit, and I feel like there is some optimal time the designer wants me to advance before the difficulty meter gets too out of hand, but I honestly can't tell if there's ever a way to feel "prepared" for the 2nd or 3rd level (or god forbid, the mythical 4th level?).

Perhaps Risk of Rain just doesn't properly scale to the number of players, because it feels completely unbalanced for single player.

The music is still totally bangin', though.

I like Rogoue-lite-likes or whateverthehellyouwanttocallit but I HATE, HATE, HATE time limits. So I guess I'll pass

Rogue-like is an informative term that conveys to me something about what a game is like. Certainly more people know about the original Rogue and subsequent hardcore "true" Rogue-likes because of it. The people who do not like this term are crazy people. Don't be one of these people. Do not listen to these people.

Neat looking game. Also, hope to see more of the remote Quick Looks pop up.

I am sitting on a plane, typing this comment, and am desperately sad I won't have a chance to play this game for another eight days. I wish there was a Mac version. :(

@patrickklepek: I'm sitting at work, typing this comment, and desperately sad I won't get to watch this for another 8 hours.