Quick Look: Risk of Rain

@patrickklepek: I've been playing this with my girlfriend since you first showed it off, so thanks for giving it a look!

This game reminds me of Spelunky and any game that reminds me of Spelunky must be consumed by me. :D

One question though, how does local coop work in this game? Split screen? And up to how many players can there be local/online?

This quick look sold me on the game and I bought it, but I wish you guys showed more of the stuff around the core game. How do you unlock classes? Is there anything that changes from run to run like unlocks in Binding of Isaac?

This game is really great, I have known the developer for about a year and was actually involved in the game getting it's publisher! He's actually just in highschool and developed it with his buddy outside of class. Glad to see it finally out on Steam and hope everyone picks it up because it is a very fun game!

God damn it! I didn't need another game I want to play. Music is fantastic.

So glad there's a quick look of this, it's really, really good. Same thing Alex described happened to me, planned to play for an hour, accidentally put in 4.

...aaaaaaaaand sold!

@gyrfal said:

The character and item unlocks work almost exactly like The Binding of Isaac. There's a character you get for beating the game, while the rest of the characters have more obtuse unlock conditions you should just look up. A bunch of items are available at the start, but the rest have unlock conditions that you can look up from the main menu (though some unlock conditions are hidden).

Exactly. The term "rogue-like" conveys plenty of meaning. A very hard game where dying is expected. Furthermore, the game has some sort of random generation stuff with maybe some RPG or similar upgrading mechanics. Rogue Legacy, FTL, this game, Spelunky, La Mulana, Nuclear Throne, and Eldritch all have those concepts at the core of their game.

Ok, they don't have shitty ASCII graphics and aren't totally tile-based, that does not mean that the term "rogue-like" cannot be modernized to some extent.

Then again, the number of people who get worked up about the terminology have been decreasing as time goes on, at least from my anecdotal experience.

This long-distance QL works v.well. If Alex and Patrick both had the exact same quality microphone, it'd almost feel like they were in the same room.

Yeah these things take time to change. And some games are more "Rogue-like" than others. FTL, for example, is basically a true Rogue-like (random maps, leveling up stats, permadeath, etc), whereas Rogue Legacy (I think) has a set map. At that point it's up to the person reviewing or QLing the game to let you know about that stuff, but the term "Rogue-like" still has value.

There's no time limit, it reaches a maximum difficulty and then doesn't get any harder, as long as you're being diligent about the time spent grinding for money to buy loot versus activating the gate and moving on you should have just enough items to be powerful enough for the next area.

Or you can grind out way to many items and become a god among men, like my friend did...

Good job with the long distance quick look, only suggestion is work on the sound volumes...game audio seemed too loud and Patricks level was way higher than Alex's.

This seems alright, but the graphics style is awful. It's like Jeff hitting smear on those Sega CD music videos, everything is just a mess of pixels and its way too tiny. How hard is it to do propper sprites nowadays?

EDIT: Also, forgot to mention, I like this format a whole lot more than Quick Look Solos. I didn't even notice that you two weren't in the same room.

@triviaman09: Rogue Legacy had a random map. The only thing that was permanent was that going from the general map layout. So the forest area is to the right, the attic is up and hell (or whatever) is down. Also, you do not have to beat all the bosses in one go. So there are some permanent stuff going on but still, on its surface, it is a rogue-like.

@mrklorox: Why would you need to call this a quick look remote? i agree with the labeling of quick look solos, but how is this any different from them being in the same room together? the only reason i could see is because you are one of those people that for some reason has something against patrick / alex content, and they are just as much a part of GB as Jeff, Brad, Vinny, and Ryan. Anyways, just look at the by line, if its by alex or patrick, chances are it will be a quicklook like this one.

as far as i'm concerned though, more of these patrick/alex quick looks!

Unfortunate that it is not procedurally generated. Although, for a game like this it would be very hard to make sure the entire map is playable when generated. Splitting the difference by making the levels out of shuffled pieces seems good enough.

I like this new format, guys! I know it's a bit complicated but I would love to see more Patrick/Alex quick looks. At least for multiplayer/co-op games, but I think it might even work with one of you playing a single-player game and the other person just commentating.

I hate to be that guy but this is even less like Rogue than most of the tenuously described as roguelike games. What you mean to say is that the maps are procedurally generated and the game is a little hard. That is not a roguelike.

@patrickklepek: This is better then solo quicklooks and just a tiny bit worser then the regualar quikclooks. but I think this is the best you guys can do thinking of where you live and so.

"Rogue-like-like-like-like-like-like"
So nothing like a roguelike, then.

I like it, but everything is so damn TINY. My eyes are straining just trying to see what's going on.

I agree. However, I don't think La-Mulana is a rogue-like. Though my time with it was limited, I'm pretty sure the map isn't randomized.Thus, La-Mulana seems to be more of a Metroid-vania with perma-death.

Spelunky drew inspiration from La-Mulana's setting and art style; the latter doesn't really have rogue-like elements though (with the exception of permadeath - which may be an optional thing, I can't remember).

Agreed. I forget the name of it, but I hope Alex gets the same mic Patrick acquired.

Okay, Patrick, I think you've now openly worried about using the term "roguelike" more than you've actually used it. It's cool.

If they somehow got this onto the Vita, I'd be very happy. Nice job with the QL Scoops & Alex!

@patman99: I see, thanks for the clarification. I really need to get around to playing Rogue Legacy.

@oginam: 'Roguelike', as a term, is rather troubling. Since 1980 it has meant a somewhat strict thing - turn-based, tile-or-ascii-based, randomly generated dungeon-crawling games.

Then, in like 2010, a whole bunch of people started to take influence from this 30-year old genre, and the broader internet started calling them roguelikes too. The semantic argument is on the broader side - ignoring history, 'roguelike' = like Rogue. But take that history into account, and this isn't the case at all.

ADOM, ToME, NetHack, DCSS, Cataclysm: DDA, Brogue, and to a lesser extent Elona and Dwarf Fortress' Adventure Mode are all clearly a part of the same genre, that has (before 2010) been called 'roguelikes', but then a bunch of people took the 'roguelike' = 'like Rogue' banner (which makes way more sense from one perspective) and it's been a clusterfuck of controversy ever since.

My perspective is that I really like ADOM, ToME, DCSS et al and will defend the only common name for them (Roguelike) to the death. Calling FTL or whatever a roguelike-like or 'roguelike-inspired' is acceptable, though.

Unlike the Quick Look Solos, which I won't watch, I'd be willing to check out more of these remote ones. Nice to get more content from Alex.

Who's IP address was that? Alex's?

Patrick seems to be in the habit of releasing personal information this week XD

I don't remember which game coined the term "roguelite", but it is much more fitting than roguelike for these games that are basically Diablo on Hardcore mode.

Man that Shadow Fall ad is terrible. On the bright side this game looks fun.

This game looks fucking awesome! So getting it this weekend.

Rogue Legacy is the game you are looking for. It is very much rooted in exactly what you are talking about, but has slightly too many progression elements regardless of death to be a "true" roguelike.

Just want to say how fucking awesome it is to have Alex on a quick look again in such a long time, especially on a co-op game :)

Game looks like a lot of fun.

I picked up this game over the weekend just based on the graphics and the gameplay style, but at first, the controls were not what I expected. I play with a keyboard and I wished it controlled more like The Nuclear Throne, but several hours in, I’m getting the hang of it.

nice work guys, hope you do more quick looks like this in the future, i really miss having you gents on QLs

This game is fantastic...I have been addicted to it for the past few days.

This was awesome. Hope to see more Patrick/Alex multiplayer Quick Looks.

I'm into remote Quick Looks. Nothing against solos but banter is better!

@patrickklepek: No reason to apologize. It's perfectly fine. Keep doing this though!

Thanks for the info, the music in this game is incredible.

Also cheers to @patrickklepek and @alex for making this QL happen!

Hell yeah east coast quick looks. Do more please!

I think it's about time we fully recognize that culturally "rogue-like" is a term that has completely transformed into a game has a true zero start, is designed around progressing as far as you can get against a hard but not impossible difficulty curve, and has some element of change between environments for each run.

At this point this term has too much contemporary meaning to current games that limiting ourselves to being hyper-specific to Rogue would be arbitrary, counter-productive against its changing use, and of little value. Is it's overuse a potential issue? Certainly but that's true regardless of whether Rogue clones are included or not in the conversation. And that's not to say games that model themselves specifically after Rogue can't be called rogue-likes because after all they share those broader elements with more modern rogue-like games like FTL etc.

Long story short, culture at large is moving in a certain direction that is important and meaningful and a minority of people want to argue loudly on their platform to hold it back. Diluting a term that meant practically nothing before to a majority of people who play games is a shit trade for this exciting new, although increasingly filled out, way to design games.

This looks quite fun. And nice job with the remote quick look, hope to see more of this.

Is there any matchmaking for the co-op, or do you have to invite friends directly? I am guessing the latter, which would be a bummer since I don't have any friends.

Man i love this game and the soundtrack is just perfect

Must have been the snow!

@sanj: We actually do have roughly the same quality microphone. It's just that due to the logistics of this particular recording, my skype audio got used instead of my direct recording, hence the quality difference. If we do this again, that shouldn't happen.

Two awesome things about this QL:

1. Alex and Patrick doing a remote QL. Please keep it coming.

2. This game... it looks fucking awesome... tell the developers to bring this to the PS4 and you sell me.