Video Game / Risk of Rain 2

"This relic tells a story... But it is not a fairy tale. It’s a tragedy. A story of betrayal, regret, and sorrow. A story of two."

— Logbook entry for Effigy of Grief

Risk of Rain 2 is a Science Fiction Roguelike Third-Person Shooter developed by Hopoo Games and published by Gearbox Software. The game is a sequel to Risk of Rain. It was released on Steam Early Access on March 28th, 2019, before reaching a Final Release on August 11th, 2020.

The game is mechanically similar to the first game, with the goal of locating a teleporter in a level and activating it as the difficulty increases every 5 minutes. The game sets itself apart by being in 3D, rebalancing various mechanics to adjust, and contains a vastly improved Co-Op Multiplayer with up to 4 players (which can be increased far beyond that with mods).

After receiving a foreboding Distress Call from the UES Contact Light (the ship from the first game) the Safe Travels is dispatched to go on a "rescue" mission. However, as the aforementioned distress call mentioned monsters, fighting, and the Contact Light being shot down and its cargo crashing down upon the uncharted planet closest to it, it's obvious that despite being called a "rescue", the true task of the mission is simple: Go down to the planet, retrieve as much reclaimable cargo as possible, and if possible, find out what the hell happened. And, naturally, kill every last thing that tries to get in their way.

The game's first expansion pack, Survivors of the Void, was released on March 1, 2022, adding two brand new survivors, new items, enemies, bosses and stages, an alternate final boss, a horde mode, and many more.

On November 6th, 2023, a mysterious DLC expansion under the name "EXXXXXXX-X" was unveiled and was teased in-game via the appearance of floating blue meteorites across the game's various stages. This was revealed on November 8th, 2023 to be the game's second expansion pack, Seekers of the Storm, which will add an additional wave of new stages, bosses, Survivors, items, and collectables. It will also be the first expansion developed exclusively by Gearbox Software following the sale of the IP from Hopoo Games.

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The game provides examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is (most likely) 99, but reaching it is practically impossible due to how quickly the experience required for next level scales and even if you take your sweet time beating the game, most likely for the purpose of unlocking the challenge of beating 20 stages in a single run, you'll only get to about lv25 on average.
• Action Bomb:
  • Rather than shocking you like in the first game, the Jellyfish now violently explode when they get close to you. The DLC enemy Larvae also do the same thing.
  • Glacial Elites also become one, going off in an icy explosion shortly after death. It's delayed and doesn't deal much damage, but freezes you solid for a few seconds, leaving you at the mercy of any other nearby enemies.
  • Void Reavers, Void Jailers and Void Devastators all implode a few seconds after they die. These are always instant death if you're caught inside (unless you're in the midst of Shadowfade or Trespass, both of which delete your hitbox), but have very obvious visual and audio cues, and can even take out fellow monsters.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: The game is built around this trope, with enemies slowly getting stronger all the time, making blasting through the stage without caring about your safety the best option.
• And I Must Scream: Defeating the alternate final boss in the Planetarium leads to a "Fate Unknown" screen after you enter the last portal — however, the logbook for the Planetarium reveals the horrible truth of what's happened; you've been eternally imprisoned in a never-ending simulation in the Void, unable to die nor kill yourself, with absolutely no chance of escaping. And even if you're supposedly able to leave the simulation and run free, there's no telling whether or not the life you lead after that will just be another falsehood and you might just wake up in the Void, doomed to repeat the cycle forever. Downer Ending doesn't even begin to cover it.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Beating the game or getting to the Celestial Portal on Monsoon difficulty unlocks an alternate skin for the character you were playing as, unless you're playing as the Heretic. A player might be forgiven for thinking that their reward for doing this would be to unlock her as a selectable character from the start of the game (and maybe another skin for her as well), but alas, this isn't the case.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Teleporters now have glowing "dust" that hovers in the air around them, making them easier to spot from a distance. Before, it could be hard to find, doubly so if it had a darker background to sit on.
  • Artifacts don't disable challenges when activated, allowing players to use them to make otherwise Luck-Based Missions (collect x number of items, for example) easier.
  • Void Cradles and Shrines of Blood, both of which deal damage in order to open, cannot be opened if you don't have enough health to spare, to stop you from doing something, uh... ill-advised. (To be fair, players could be forgiven for thinking "50% HP" means "50% of current HP" rather than "50% of max HP".)
  • Starting with the Survivors of the Void update, the pop-ups used for item pickups now show the conversions for many items that can change while in your inventory, such as for corrupted variants that replace their original items or items that are consumed on use.
• Apocalyptic Log: Some descriptions in the logbook detail notes from the survivors of the Contact Light crash who tried to hold out on the planet, especially at Rallypoint Delta. Given that it's crawling with monsters by the time the player characters reach it, they didn't hold out long.
• Arrange Mode: Simulacrum mode, added in the Survivors of the Void DLC, uses the stages, enemies, and artifacts, as well as the vents from the Void Fields, to create a wave-based endless mode.
• Auto-Revive:
  • Dio's Best Friend, a teddy bear of sorts, restores the holder's health after dying. The item is destroyed in the process. It can be especially powerful on the Engineer since each of your turrets get their own Dio's Best Friend.
  • Survivors of the Void added a corrupted version of this item, the Pluripotent Larva, which revives with the added caveat (or benefit, depending) of transforming all possible items in the user's inventory into their corrupted forms.
• Asteroids Monster: Survivors of the Void features a returning enemy from the original Risk of Rain, the Gup, an orange slime which upon death, splits into two smaller versions known as Geep, which splits apart into the even smaller Gip.
• Astral Finale: The final stage, Commencement, takes place on the moon orbiting Petrichor V. The alternate final stage, The Planetarium, takes place in a murky purple void with planets visible in the distance, though it's likely an alternate dimension entirely rather than set in space.
• Attack Drone: The player can use gold to repair robot drones that will fly around the player and shoot any enemy in range. There are numerous variations: a stationary Sentry Gun, machine gun drones, missile drones, flamethrower drones, equipment drones (repaired by and uses your current equipment item), and several item-based versions such as the Empathy Cores.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Added in the Anniversary Update, Captain's new alternative utility: OGM-72 'DIABLO' Strike. On one hand, it does 40,000% damage, or 400 times the Captain's base damage stat, often enough to One-Hit Kill many of the bosses. On the other hand, it takes 20 seconds from activation to damage, as well as damaging everything in its radius. As a result, it only consistently works on really large enemies that don't move much.
  • Benthic Bloom in the Survivors of the Void DLC. The corrupted form of 57 Leaf Clover, each stack of Bloom will upgrade three random stacks of items at the start of each level, turning them into random items from the next rarity pool (white to green, green to red). While red items do have very powerful effects, white and green items are often Boring, but Practical, and a lot of red items rely on these to maximize their effects. This can lead into situations where you have several Laser Scopes but only a 1% critical hit chance^note Which you could still increase by improving your luck, but since Benthic Bloom overwrites the 57-Leaf Clover, the only item in the game that increases your luck, it leaves you with no way to do this, or Aegis, Rejuvenation Rack, and/or N'Kuhana's Opinion with Interstellar Desk Plant as your only healing option. You'll quickly start losing items faster than you can replace them, a problem which will quickly get worse if you happen to roll into a stack of 57 Leaf Clovers, which will turn into more Benthic Blooms. Greed will be a run's downfall when grabbing this item.
• Balance Buff:
  • The Medkit was one of the most useless heal items in the game, as it healed for a flat 25 HP per stack that you gain and only activates if you get hit; its heal power becomes rapidly outclassed by other forms of healing as you gain more levels, which only became worse if you picked up Infusions. 1.0 heavily buffed it so it now heals 20 HP plus 5% of your max health per stack, meaning that it now heals a meaningful amount of HP even in late-game with enough stacks of it.
  • Prior to 1.0, the Warbanner would quickly become obsolete after early-game due to only spawning on level-up; leveling up becomes an increasingly rare occurrence once you enter mid-game, and the initial effective range is very small, meaning leveling up in a bad spot would place it in an area where it would give very little benefit without a lot of stacks. 1.0 made it so you get a free Warbanner whenever you start the Teleporter, essentially making it consistently viable for Teleporter events throughout the game.
  • More generally, minions were buffed in the Anniversary Update. Before, minions scaled with the player level and their damage output quickly diminished. Now, they scale with the same level as the enemies, making them useful for tremendously longer.
• Bittersweet Ending: Just like the first game. The survivors manage to leave the planet... but a part of the player character remains irrevocably changed. Some for the better — the Artificer discovers her passion for exploration, REX now has a chance to grow into something more, the Captain gains a new tale to tell, the Bandit is just thankful he's lucky to be alive — and some for the worse — the Commando has questions he cannot answer, Acrid is described as holding "delusions of freedom", and the Heretic is left with no focus nor satisfaction with her completed revenge.
• Bizarro Elements: while the Elite Aspects encountered in early game follow the classical elements of earth, wind, water, and fire, in the late game weirder aspects start to show up: Corruption, Perfection, Incorporeality, and Void.
  • In their experiments, Providence and Mithrix create things using the "compounds that drive reality", which are Mass, Design, Blood and Soul.
• Bleak Level: The Void Fields. Not only is it a place beyond time and space like other locations, but ominous music plays while you're in them. Leaving the cells, which you have to enable to get rewards, will obscure your vision a significant amount while you suffocate. It is also described as a "Cosmic Prison" and it is presumably where you get taken to if you or your allies die by a Void-family monster's Taking You with Me attack. The album release of the song also takes it up a notch, referencing the misery of the place itself.
• Body Horror:
  • Mostly Played for Laughs. Some of the items that show up on your character include syringes stuck in their thigh, a dagger sticking out of their neck, and various parasites growing on their body.
  • However, not played for laughs is Void Fiend's physical condition. The poor thing is actually a fellow Commando, but you can barely tell that just by looking at it, as too much time spent in the Void has mutated it into a half-human, half-crustacean chimera. In addition to the many things wrong with it, it constantly oscillates between its (relatively) normal form and corrupted form, with minimal control over such, and judging by how it begins to tremble as it nears transforming, it's probably painful for it to do.
• Border Patrol: Normally averted, as usually stepping out of bounds on a map simply teleports you back. The Abandoned Aqueducts, however, sic bizarre black tar… eel… things on you if you try to stroll off into the desert, dealing a slowing effect and heavy, persistent damage until you either turn around or die.
• Boring, but Practical: Some of the items, especially the common whites, are very useful, despite being basic. To wit:
  • Soldier's Syringes boost attack speed and scales pretty well, making them a top-tier item on everyone except Artificer since her basic attacks have a cooldown and she can only keep 4 of them stocked up at a time.
  • Tougher Times offers a small chance to negate damage entirely. It has pretty severe diminishing returns, but even a few will let you shrug off a not-insignificant number of hits. Literally no one won't benefit from it. Better yet, it can block any sort of damage, including Cast from Hit Points skills and the health sacrifice shrines!
  • Crowbars offer an Alpha Strike bonus for damaging a healthy enemy. The bonus is nothing to sneeze at, especially when stacked; pair it with a high-damage attack (like the Royal Capacitor, Preon Accumulator, Loader's dash, Railgunner's M99, etc.) and it's possible to One-Hit Kill nearly anything, up to and including bosses!
  • Speaking of bosses, Armor Piercing Ammo. A flat 20% damage buff against bosses, no frills, no nonsense. Each stack adds 20% more. A few of them can let you chew through bosses with ease, especially if stacked with the above Crowbar and a suitably-high damage opening attack.
  • Paul's Goat Hoof and Energy Drinks improve base movement speed and sprint speed, respectively. In a game where Dynamic Difficulty is based on time and the exit is randomly placed in every (large) level, every second counts, and while they may seem weak initially, they will start to add up over time, especially if stacked.
    • Related, though it's an uncommon, Hopoo Feathers. Adds an extra jump; doesn't help you with killing things, but outstanding for quick, efficient map traversal. One is a big boon, two or three pretty much eliminate mobility as a concern, and any more beyond that are just gravy. The only character who may not benefit from them is, again, Artificer, since her Ion Surge ability already allows her to fly indefinitely (if you have it unlocked and enabled).
  • Backup Magazines are another common, this time adding an extra charge to your Secondary power. Depending on the class, this can range from merely decent (Engineer, Commando) to good (Mercenary, Loader) to outstanding (Artificer, Huntress). Again, they're whites, so you're sure to see them often.
  • Focus crystals grants a flat 20% increase to damage when the player is within 13 meters of an enemy they're hitting and scales with no cap. While this obviously make it amazingly powerful for melee characters like the Mercenary and Loader, even certain ranged characters will often find themselves crowded up close by enemies, making it an excellent damage item overall.
  • The Repulsion Armor Plate is a plain looking item that just provides flat damage reduction, ala Tough Times from the original Risk of Rain. It does nothing else, but a no-strings-attached damage reduction is a godsend, especially on Monsoon, and the higher Dynamic Difficulty levels during a run.
  • This is also present amongst the flashier tier 3 items with examples, including Rejuvenation Rack and Dio's Best Friend. Rejuvenation Rack flat out doubles all healing received, something that all characters can really appreciate, especially REX who is heavily reliant on their healing skills to pump out damage. (Rejuvenation Rack also works extremely well with Aegis, which converts excess healing into barrier, and N'kuhana's Opinion, which damages enemies within a certain distance after the player is healed a certain amount.) Meanwhile, Dio's Best Friend acts as a one-time revive, which on Engineer has the added bonus of also resurrecting your turrets when they go down.
  • The 57-Leaf Clover allows its user to "rig" luck. This effect is deceptively powerful; for any item or ability that has a random activation chance, the game will reroll it once for every Clover in your inventory in the event that you fail an activation. This essentially just means that it directly boosts the proc rate of any random items in your inventory, which can turn some items like the AtG Missile Mk. 1 (a strong, but inconsistent source of damage due to its 10% proc chance) into monstrously powerful death machines, and cuts the requirements on item stacks nearly in half (5 Lens-Maker's Glasses for 100% crit instead of ten, same for Tri-Tip Daggers' bleed proc, etc.).
    • The corollary of this is Purity, an item that reduces your luck in exchange for reducing your cooldowns by two seconds. One Purity will exactly offset the luck bonus of one Clover. For certain loadouts, though, the reduced luck stat won't even matter - for instance, a scant two Purities and one Lysate Cell render Mercenary able to spam Eviscerate relentlessly to deal consistent damage while making himself all but immune to it. Bandit can do something similar with his Smoke Bomb move, given a mixture of Purity and Hardlight Afterburner.
  • Captain's basic attack is a shotgun that he can charge to focus the spread to the point of being able to snipe enemies. On paper it sounds like the most boring part of his kit, but each individual pellet of the shotgun has its own (fairly high) proc co-efficients. Stacked up with attack speed increases, crit and throw on some on-hit effects like Tri-Tip Daggers, AtG Missiles, and other such things will make Captain's Primary so powerful you'll never touch his other skills.
    • Likewise, Commando's basic Double Tap attack might seem boring at first, but with sufficiently increased attack speed and/or sufficient item loadouts, it becomes absolutely lethal, since it has a proc coefficient of 1.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: If the player activates a gold shrine and enters the portal from it, they will enter the Gilded Coast and fight a souped-up Stone Titan named Aurelionite. Your efforts will be rewarded with the Halcyon Seed, an item that normally summons Aurelionite during a teleporter event, but more importantly, if you have it in your inventory when Mithrix steals your items, it will reject him and give you a powerful ally for that phase of the fight.
• Breakable Powerup:
  • The Delicate Watch lets you deal more damage, but if your HP drops to 25% then all Delicate Watches you're carrying will break and cannot be repaired.
  • Power Elixirs will also be consumed if you drop to 25% HP, but a Power Elixir will heal you to 100%, essentially acting like a Single-Use Shield.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Void Fields are a hidden level accessible through the Bazaar Beyond Time. The entire level suffers from persistent Void Fog that drains your health, with the only safe zones being the nine Void Cells. Each Void Cell is a wave battle, but with a twist. To start, a single enemy type is sent after the player. With each subsequent Void Cell, a new enemy type is added or the enemies are given five copies of an item (alternating each time). This means the enemies not only get more numerous, but also far more powerful. The player can leave at any time and return to the regular level rotation, but beating all nine grants a legendary item and serves as an alternate path to the Planetarium.
• Call-Back:
  • Sky Meadow has quite a few. The parent enemies unique to that stage not only showed up in the first game, but they're also tinted yellow normally and have the ability to warp to your location; hinting that every single one is the fast elite from the first game, despite being able to get other elite abilities that are present in this game as well. In addition, the way you access the artifact portal is the same path you took to get that stage's unique artifact: jump down a hole, only you don't have to blast it open this time, and hop on some hanging platforms over a bottomless pit.
  • The equipment item that gives you the powers of Blazing Elites is called "Ifrit's Distinction", named after the boss who's no longer present after the first game. In addition, all fire enemies have two horns growing out of their heads similar to the style of Ifrit.
  • Tougher Times, unlike other returning items, is a roughed up version of Tough Times from the first game and takes the effect of another, similar item as well as its rarity.
• Cap: Some items have a hard cap such as Lens-Maker's Glasses once you achieve 100% Critical Strike Chance or 10 Stacks. Downplayed for other items which can stack indefinitely but scale exponentially, to the point where collecting more than 10 sees very little stat increases. Just as many other items avert it by stacking linearly, making their multipliers and benefits (theoretically) infinite, though the rate of increase is often small enough that 10 can be considered a sort of soft cap.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The Hellfire Tincture deals constant damage to yourself and allies, and deals 24 times that to enemies in an area around you for a short time.
  • One of the two main gimmicks of the survivor REX, who has two abilities that cost HP to use but has potential to do massive damage to enemies. Fittingly, ways to keep themself healed up is vital to an effective run.
• Cast from Money: Crowdfunder, which spends gold in order to do damage. Bad early on, where every coin counts, but by your third or fourth loop, Money for Nothing becomes a big thing, so it can be a reliable source of damage.
• Centrifugal Gravity: It's implied that the UES Safe Travels has it with rotating sections being seen in the opening cutscene.
• Colonized Solar System: The lore for a lot of the items lists their shipping addresses as planets in our solar system.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: All of the items have a colored borders depending on their tier. Commons are white, uncommons are green, rares are red, boss items are yellow, lunar items are blue, void items are purple, and non-lunar/void equipment is orange. Certain items are categorized outside of these tiers for gameplay purposes, despite sharing the same rarity and/or using equipment slots, to prevent the player from obtaining them outside of their specific events using the Artifact of Command.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Just like the last game, Elite Mooks are colored based on their abilities. They all also have increased health and damage.
  • Bluish-white enemies are Glacial Elites, which inflict 80% Slow on hit, and create a freezing explosion on death.
  • Blue enemies are Overloading Elites, which have half their health replaced with a regenerating energy shield, and attach delayed-explosion sticky bombs on each hit for extra damage.
  • Red enemies are Blazing Elites, which inflict Burn on hit, and constantly leave a harmful trail of fire as they move around.
  • Green-and-black enemies are Malachite Elites, who occasionally throw out spiked mines that explode on contact, leave behind a stationary turret that fires at the player on death, and inflict Healing Disabled on each hit. Have even-higher health and damage than other Elites.
  • Cyan enemies are Celestine Elites, which also inflict 80% Slow on hit, and constantly project an aura that makes all other monsters within it invisible. Have the same health and damage bonuses as Malachite Elites.
  • Blue enemies with white halos are Perfected Elites, who occasionally fire bursts of homing shots alongside their normal attacks, inflict Cripple with each attack, and have their entire health bar replaced with a regenerating energy shield. These types are exclusive to Lunar Chimera enemies found on Commencement, the Planet's moon.
  • Purple enemies are Voidtouched Elites, introduced in Survivors of the Void. These types don't spawn naturally, instead being created when a Void Infestor takes over any non-Void enemy. These Elites block one attack every 15 seconds, inflict Collapse on each hit, fight for the forces of the Void, and will release their Void Infestor on death, potentially allowing it to go Voidtouch another enemy if it isn't killed. Finally, on top of the normal stat bonuses Elites get, Voidtouched Elites Mighty Glacier have 50% more health, but deal 30% less damage.
• Costume Evolution: Played for Laughs. This time around items are not only displayed on your HUD but also attached to your character model in some way such as Lens-Maker's Glasses being worn as properly on your face or several Soldier's Syringes haphazardly jammed into the side of your character's thigh. By the time you've looped the game once your character will be unrecognizable due to the sheer amount of items they are wearing.
• Creating Life: Providence and Mithrix do this, resulting in the Stone Golens and Stone Titans, although each of the brothers feels differently about the subject. This contrast is made all the more evident in the logs relating to Aurelionite, in which Mithrix scolds his brother for making a construct with too much soul.
• Crutch Character: The carbonizer turrets, the Engineer's alternate turret skill, can end up with this issue if you can't find the right items. They have less range than the normal ones but can walk around and try to follow you. The biggest issue is that they don't benefit from sprint speed bonuses and they don't have any way to force them to catch up with you aside from walking, which at the beginning isn't an issue as they'll be able to keep up with an default Engineer easily. If you don't pick up items that help offense or non-conditional defense then they can easily become less useful as they can't catch up to you and don't have the vitality and damage to sustain themselves.
• Cursed with Awesome: Some of the Lunar "drawbacks" are more useful than they look.
  • Gesture of the Drowned halves the cooldown of your Equipment, but forces it to automatically activate whenever it's not on cooldown. The idea is that it makes it so you lose control over your equipment in exchange for having it activate more frequently... but you can pair it with Fuel Cells, an uncommon item that reduces your Equipment's cooldown by 15% and adds an extra stock of it, or just stack Gestures of the Drowned, which also reduces its cooldown further. If you find enough of either, it's possible to have your equipment activate near-constantly without input, which allows you to have stuff like infinite Jade Elephant/Spinel Tonic, or pick up a Royal Capacitor and gain the ability to smite anything you so much as look at, or get a Disposable Missile Launcher and pair it with some Pocket I.C.B.M.s and a Brilliant Behemoth to blow up everything around you.
  • The Defiant Gouge spawns enemies whenever you activate a Shrine, thus making every Shrine gain the same properties as a Shrine of Combat. At face value this means that you need to fend off mooks every time you want to use a Shrine, but later on in runs when you have more ways to effectively deal with large enemy numbers, this essentially nets you a free source of income by allowing you to summon fodder on command. Doubly so if the Artifact of Sacrifice is toggled, which also lets you farm items off any Shrine you activate.
  • The Hellfire Tincture is an equippable item that harms enemies, allies and yourself 15 meters around you, dealing percentage-based damage to yourself, allies, and specially enemies, who get dealt this damage multiplied by 24. It is a huge boon for melee survivors who have to get close to enemies to begin with, even more so considering that the Mercenary has conditional invulnerability with his dashes and Eviscerate and Acrid can regenerate health using his regular attacks or his Ravenous Bite ability. If that isn't a good deal already, Razorwire, which deals damage to enemies around you if you get hit, gives your character an "Instant Death" Radius when Hellfire Tincture activates, as it also works when you get damaged by it. Getting this winning combination will make the game a breeze until the second loop.
  • Purity is the lunar counterpart to the 57 Leaf Clover and does the exact opposite: it rerolls chance-on-hit items' proc chances if they succeed, giving them an additional chance to fail. This means things like crits, Tri-Tip Daggers and AtG Missile Launchers will rarely if ever function. In return, it shaves flat amounts of time off of all cooldowns. The catch is that reaching 100% proc chance on items that increase chance on stacking (like 10 Lens-Maker's Glasses/Tri-Tip Daggers) makes the negative re-roll impossible, because the worse side of a 100% roll is still 100%. Alternatively, if you're lucky enough to find one, a 57 Leaf Clover will balance out Purity's negative effect while letting you keep Purity's upside.
  • The decreased attack speed and decreased movement speed, respectively, of the DLC items Light Flux Pauldron and Stone Flux Pauldron can be largely offset with large stacks of either Soldier's Syringes and Paul's Goat Hooves, respectively, or Mocha, or both. And unlike 57 Leaf Clovers, all three of the latter items are white items. The downside is that you will need to stack a lot more of them to offset the Pauldrons' effects - Soldier's Syringe increases attack speed by 15%, Paul's Goat Hoof increases movement speed by 14%, and Mocha increases attack speed by 7.5% and movement speed by 7%, while the Light Flux Pauldron multiplies attack speed by 1/(1+n), with n being the number of Light Flux Pauldrons the player has collected; likewise the Stone Flux Pauldron's effect on movement speed. (However, neither of these can ever go below 0.1.)
    
    In short, to return to a character's standard speeds, you will need roughly seven Syringes and seven Goat Hooves, or fourteen Mochas, or some combination thereof, for each Light Flux Pauldron and Stone Flux Pauldron you stack. (This is not quite exact - you'll need slightly more movement speed bonus than attack speed bonus - but it's close enough for an estimate.) To return to higher movement speeds, you'll need more than that; for instance, to match the same attack speed bonus as 33 Mochas (which is necessary to make Railgunner's primary attack give her flight if she aims straight downward), you will need to add 46 Mochas or 23 Syringes for each Light Flux Pauldron. This is, naturally, only practical with the Artifacts of Command and Sacrifice active, which allows you to farm white items of your choice off enemies.
  • Shaped Glass halves your HP and doubles your damage output. This can in turn be offset with items that raise your HP, like Stone Flux Pauldron or Transcendence, though you also need increasingly more of these to offset Shaped Glass. It also disables your one-shot protection, no matter how many HP bonuses you stack. You should also exercise extreme caution when using this item as the Heretic, as her health degeneration is a flat rate independent of Shaped Glass' effects on her max HP. Transcendence disables this - and also trivializes fall damage, another major danger to her - but has its own drawbacks:
  • Transcendence converts all your HP to shields, which negates the effectiveness of many healing items, but also completely negates the effect of Malachite (which disables health-based healing, but not shield-based healing), and it also disables the Heretic's health degeneration, vastly improving her survivability. It also reduces all fall damage to 1, since fall damage is based on the player's maximum health (which is always 1). If players get Transcendence, they should plan for it in advance and avoid items like Bustling Fungus that depend on their maximum health stat. The legendary item Aegis, which transforms all excess healing into barriers, helps a lot with Transcendence; alternatively, if a player is willing to give up their survivor's utility skill, they can use three stacks of Strides of Heresy, or a single Strides of Heresy and a single Hardlight Afterburner, to create a Shadowfade ability that will last long enough for the player to fully recharge their shields while invulnerable. (However, Transcendence effectively disables the innate healing of Shadowfade itself.)
  • Another useful note about Stone Flux Pauldron and Transcendence is that their multipliers for players' health are applied separately, so if the player has four Pauldrons (which will multiply their base health by five) and nineteen Transcendences (which will also multiply their base health by five), their base health will be multiplied by twenty-five. Sufficiently large stacks of these items allow players to reach truly ridiculous health multipliers, which is especially useful if they also plan to stack large amounts of Shaped Glass.
• Deadly Disc:
  • The Sawmerang equipment shoots out three huge buzzsaws in a spread that damage enemies.
  • The Resonance Disc charges up when you kill enemies, and then shoots out at enemies and explodes on impact.
• Derelict Graveyard: Siren's Call, which is filled with crashed spaceships.
• Destroyable Items:
  • The Delicate Watch, added in the Survivors of the Void DLC, boosts all damage done by a survivor by 20%. However, every held watch breaks instantly if the survivor dips below 25% health. If the player has Power Elixirs (another DLC item, which instantly heals the player to 100% if they are below 25% health), these will be consumed first, one at a time, protecting the player's watches as long as the player has Elixirs left - unless the player just gets killed outright, in which case they all break.
  • There's also the Fuel Array, a secret equipment item. It can't be manually activated, but whenever its wielder drops below half-health, it causes them to explode, dealing tremendous damage to anything nearby but almost-certainly killing the wearer too. This also destroys the item, even if the wearer has any Fuel Cells that should let it be reused. Its primary use is to be given to the derelict robot in Abyssal Depths, unlocking REX in the process, though Engineer can get some niche use out of the item with his turrets.
• Developer's Foresight: The game penalizes the drop rate of items if you equip the Artifact of Sacrifice (removes Chests/Shrines of Chance but enables items to randomly drop on enemy kill) and the Artifact of Swarms (doubles enemy spawns but halves enemy HP) together, since the game would be far too easy if you can just survive the initial waves of enemies and farm items for a bit.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Some of the survivors and lunar items fall under this. Mercenary, Void Fiend, Railgunner, and Artificer are noted for being especially difficult characters to learn, but are all tremendously powerful if played well.
  • Shaped Glass turns you into a full-on Glass Cannon — it doubles your damage, but halves your health. Furthermore, the effect is a multiplier, so each stack will dramatically increase damage (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x), but dramatically reduce health (-50%, -75%, -87.5%). With the right build (and skill at not getting hit), this can let you mow down enemies with ease, but death will always be one or two good hits away, though certain shield/health barrier items can correct for that to some extent (see Cursed with Awesome above).
    • The Artifact of Glass makes the entire game behave like this - the player's health is reduced by 90%, but their damage output is multiplied by 5. This means that most enemies die in one or two hits, but so does the player. It also vastly reduces the average length of a game, and it makes certain challenges like Huntress' Piercing Wind much easier (since the player fails it if their health ever goes below 100%, the reduced health is less of an issue - there are other ways around this, but simply playing with the Artifact of Glass enabled is one of the least time-consuming). Combine this with the Artifact of Kin (which allows only one monster type to spawn per level), and there's a decent chance you'll get levels filled with melee enemies like Beetles, which makes the challenge even easier.
• Double Jump:
  • The Mercenary has an innate double jump. The Heretic takes this further with an innate triple jump.
  • The Hopoo Feather returns, granting an extra midair jump per copy of the item.
  • Though not a traditional double jump, some survivors have mobility skills that can be used midair as an improvised one. Commando's Tactical Slide, for instance, will give him an upward-angle boost if used in the air instead of on the ground. Void Fiend's Suppress is another such case. With sufficient cooldown reduction and/or speed bonuses, skills such as Mercenary's secondary attack and Railgunner's primary attack can also be used in this manner.
• Double Unlock: Just like the first game, there are several items and skills that can only be unlocked using items or characters that also need to be unlocked.
• Drop Pod: The Escape Pod for all intents and purposes. It brings the player to the surface in the beginning with no mention of the Safe Travels being in danger. MUL-T instead pops out of a crate, while Void Fiend falls to the planet's surface in a weird purple flower bud.
• Easter Egg:
  • There are three floating islands in A Moment, Fractured that are so far away that they can't even be seen from the main islands. If you manage to reach them with some combination of Hopoo Feathers, the Milky Chrysalis, the Artificer's glide and/or Ion Surge, and/or other mobility skills that allow characters to fly, you will find several massive, literal Easter eggs.
  • There's a light in Siren's Call that is blinking UP DOG in Morse code.
  • HAN-D from the first game can be seen in the background of the character select screen, and occasionally flashes "ZZZ" in Morse Code.
  • After defeating Mithrix, a glass frog will appear at the spawn point, where the player can spend Lunar Coins to "pet" it. If the Survivors of the Void DLC is installed, petting the frog 10 times will spawn a portal to the Planetarium and the fight against Voidling.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Contact Light itself is noted by some of the item logs from survivors to be an extremely strange ship with millions of artifacts that have been in transit for decades.
  • The environments themselves are full of mysterious artifacts from an unknown civilization, and as detailed in environmental logs are quite strange. The mysterious rings on the Titanic Plains recreate rocks already weathered and old whenever they're removed from the plains, and the tar seeping through the Abandoned Aqueducts is contagious.
  • The Hidden Realms are probably the most straightforward examples, especially the ones that are outside of time.
    • The Bazaar Between Time, accessed by finding Newt Altars in main stages and spending a Lunar Coin to activate them, has a group of small, floating rocks, which lead to a cave, housing a giant axolotl creature referred to as "The Newt" (who is not aggressive, but can be attacked and killed; however, if a player attacks him and fails to kill him within a second or two, he will throw them out of the store until their next visit), allowing players to trade in Lunar Coins for Lunar items, Reforge items of lower quality for a guaranteed higher-quality item, or "Dream" to choose which Environment the next stage will be. The portal to the Void Fields is also hidden here.
    • The Void Fields is a huge rock floating in an airless void and covered in strange shiny black stones and massive, kelp-like plants.
    • A Moment, Fractured is a bunch of floating islands with wooden planks sticking out of them at odd angles, glowing rocks that suddenly appear when you stand in certain places, and a massive obelisk that allows you to wipe yourself from existence or travel to A Moment, Whole.
  • Speaking of the Void Fields, its "Deep Void" counterparts - the Void Locus and the Planetarium - probably fit this trope best. A warped, chaotic mass floating in an inky violet span of nothingness, with carved stone and what looks like coral and seaweed jutting out of the environment in inexplicable places. The inhabitants all resemble sea life, but wrong - not to mention aggressive - and implode in a black hole on death. The realm is stated by several logs to be inescapable, with the creatures of the Void constantly watching and experimenting on anything they drag into this dimension. To top it all off, a prolonged stay results in horribly-deformative corruption that warps the mind and body alike, as poor, poor Void Fiend can attest.
• Endless Game: It is theoretically possible to keep going as much as your human willpower/physical ability would allow, since there is no limit to looping. However, you can end the game if you decide to Obliterate (a form of Non-Standard Game Over that qualifies as "winning" but not "beating the game") or fight the Final Boss (which is considered "beating the game"). Survivors of the Void also adds the Simulacrum, a wave-based, combat-centric mode that challenges players to just survive for as many waves as possible. Enemies in Simulacrum have a much higher maximum level than they do in the normal game - it's 99 in the normal game, but in Simulacrum it's a whopping 9,999. It is, however, possible to survive this long if you have the Artifacts of Command and Sacrifice active and sufficient knowledge of how to break the game.
• Epic Rocking: The soundtrack contains some very long songs. "The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky" (11:38) and "Petrichor V" (11:27) are the clear standouts, but "The Rain Formerly Known as Purple" (7:55), "Terra Pluviam" (7:41), "Disdrometer" (6:51), "Antarctic Oscillation" (6:27), and "Once in a Lullaby" (6:03) are also above the six-minute mark, while "Who Can Fathom the Soundless Depths?" (5:58) and "Köppen as Fuck" (5:48) just miss. The mean song length is about 5:24.
• Escape Pod: All player characters bar MUL-T, Acrid, and Void Fiend start the game landing in an escape pod. MUL-T falls out of the sky in a crate, Acrid spawns in something that looks similar to a Void Cell asleep until you press a button, and Void Fiend arrives in some kind of inky, fleshy plant bulb that opens and spits it out when the player commands.
• Fantastic Drug: While not explicitly stated as such, the Spinel Tonic induces some visual distortion and discoloration, including affecting your vision with a grain filter and fish-eye lens, giving the illusion of a high. There's also the fact that it enhances your stats and has a chance to negatively affect your performance if it wears off, thus encouraging the player to consume it constantly with Fuel Cells and/or Gesture of the Drowned. (The negative performance chance is affected by luck; stacking sufficiently many 57 Leaf Clovers reduces the risk of this to almost 0.) The item's lore also attributes its quote to "Sigibold the Drunken".
• Fantastic Nature Preserve: The Brittle Crown's lore reveals that Providence had turned the Planet into one, saving species from their dying worlds and bringing them to his own. His brother, Mithrix, was disgusted by this, as he'd rather let nature run its course.
• For Want Of A Nail: The game still centers around the mysterious arrival of a spaceship on an unknown planet, though the UES Safe Travels doesn't crash this time, unlike the Contact Light.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The game has a hidden surprise in the form of this. Going to the Settings menu or back from it will extremely briefly show an artifact code during the transition — it is completely obscured otherwise and requires either a well-timed screenshot or a slowed down/paused recording in order to be properly seen and read.
• Friendly Fireproof: Players and their allies are immune to any damage done by other players and their allies, and your enemies are immune to attacks by your other enemies. This is averted by the Glowing Meteorite and Hellfire Tincture, which can damage both the player using it and their allies. It is also completely averted if you activate the Artifact of Chaos, which turns on friendly fire for all allies and enemies. Mired Urn also used to avert this as the draining effect specified that it targeted nearby characters as opposed to just enemies; however, this was patched in the Anniversary Update to the extent that it no longer targets nearby allies even with the Artifact of Chaos enabled.
• Full Health Bonus: The Plasma Shrimp fires a homing missile every time you hit an enemy, but it only works so long as an associated shield granted by the item is intact, which is equal to 10% of your maximum health. Additional shield items can increase this buffer, making it easier to soak a few hits without losing the effect.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In any of the "Hidden Realm" locations, Captain cannot use his Orbital Probes, Diablo Strike, or Orbital Supply Beacon abilities. These abilities involve Captain calling something down from the UES Safe Travels above him in orbit around the Planet, which is naturally impossible when he's in an alternate dimension, as not only does the Safe Travels not follow him into said dimension, but whatever means he uses to communicate with the ship from the ground probably can't transmit between dimensions anyway.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The tar in the Abandoned Aqueducts is apparently alive, hostile, and (according to the log for the area, anyway) has horribly-mutative effects on life exposed to it. In-game, not counting enemies who use it as an attack, the worst it does is blur your vision, respawn you on dry land if you fall into it (like any other Bottomless Pit), and act as Border Patrol.
• Game Mod: The game's modding API is almost famously friendly, everything from balance to text rewriting to adding new characters is (relatively speaking) crazy easy. Some of the most popular mods add back in the missing characters and items from Risk of Rain 1 and Dummied Out content that was half-finished in the game files (which are not always mutually exclusive categories).
• Giant Enemy Crab: The base game has Void Reavers, while Survivors of the Void adds Void Devastators, two enemies that look more than a bit like crustaceans. Also added in the Survivors of the Void DLC is the Voidling, a new alternate final boss.
• Gilded Cage: The Gilded Coast, where Aurelionite was imprisoned by Mithrix, embodies this trope to a literal extent. This is also noted in its Environment Log:
  But a cage of gold - no matter how beautiful - is still a cage.
• Giving Up the Ghost: The Artifact of Soul causes all monsters to spawn a temporary Lesser Wisp on death.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Shaped Glass item turns you into this, as it halves your health but doubles your damage.
  • The Artifact of Glass makes a return from the first game, which makes you and all allies have only 10% of their health, but five times as much damage. It also removes the Last Chance Hitpoint that would ordinarily activate if the player is hit with an attack that does 90% damage and changes health-increasing items to a tenth of their normal effect, unlike the first game.
  • Items aside, Artificer, Bandit, and Railgunner all qualify for this trope by default. All three are capable of truly hideous damage outputs, but have low base health, no armor, and limited mobility (though "limited" is still more than some characters can say).
• God of Evil: The logbook descriptions of the Wetlands Aspect, Ceremonial Dagger, and N'Kuhana's Opinion mention a being known as N'Kuhana, who seems to be some sort of death goddess and whose worshipers practice Human Sacrifice.
• Goomba Stomp: The H3AD-5T v2 lets you jump higher and gives you the ability to slam down on top of enemies to damage them. It scales with height, so if you go up far enough, you can easily one-shot bosses with it. It also negates fall damage, so there's no penalty for using the ability.
• Gradual Regeneration:
  • All characters are given innate regenerating health to compensate for the inability to see every enemy and incoming attack in a 3D space. A character's regeneration rate is increased on Drizzle, but reduced on Monsoon. Cautious Slug strengthens it while out of combat, and the Bustling Fungus takes it a step further and offers significant regen in a small aura as long as you're standing still (or are one of Engineer's turrets).
  • Uniquely, Heretic inverts this instead, as her health drains over time instead of replenishing. To make up for it, her utility ability gives her a powerful healing effect for its duration. She also has more than twice the HP of any other survivor, hits for more damage, and moves faster.
• Guest Fighter: The Devotion update features the Prisoner/the Beheaded from Dead Cells as an alternate skin.
• Harder Than Hard: Eclipse mode is Monsoon difficulty with additional penalties added to it. Each victory in Eclipse unlocks the next tier of Eclipse difficulty for that survivor, which adds an additional penalty on top of the last one. It caps at Eclipse 8, which has (in following), halved starting HP, halved teleporter radius, lethal fall damage, faster enemies, halved healing amount, reduced gold drops, lower enemy cooldowns, and finally, making each hit you take permanently reduce your max HP.
• Healing Potion: The Power Elixir from the Survivors of the Void DLC will instantly heal you for 75% health when you drop below 25% health. This destroys the item however, and it cannot be repaired, just like the Delicate Watch.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The Bustling Fungus item gives you a potent health regenerating aura for you and allies, provided you stand still for at least 2 seconds. On most characters, this is pretty useless, since standing still is pretty much a death sentence. However, it turns out to be fantastic on the Engineer, since his stationary turrets get copies of all of his items. The effects of overlapping fields do stack with each other, so you can have your turrets heal one another and anyone else who gets cozy with them in your Beehive Barrier. Exaggerated if you also manage to get your hands on N'Kuhana's Opinion, which fires homing projectiles whose damage is proportional to your healing.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: All of the characters have at least one attack that either pierces enemies or has an area-of-effect, which is very important in a game that likes sending massive hordes at the player in the later areas. Many items also add more crowd-control to any survivor's kit, like Gasoline causing enemies to explode on death, or Brilliant Behemoth giving all the holder's attacks a blast radius.
• Hold the Line: Teleporters have been changed so that you have to stay within a certain radius from it to power it up, leading to the player having to survive the ensuing waves. You *can* leave the radius at any time - and on higher difficulties, you might have to if the area near the teleporter doesn't have sufficient cover - but the teleporter will pause its charge until you come back.
• HP to One: Acrid's poison, unlike the first game, cannot itself kill enemies, only reduce them to 1 health point left. However, this comes with a lot of Loophole Abuse, as the application of poison can kill enemies, items like Guillotine can still kill elites by having the damage tick down, and by the mid-point of a run, there's so many passive sources of splash damage it can only take popping one low-health enemy to make the entire battlefield fall to pieces.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Since there's no limit on the number of items you can carry at the same time, you can easily find yourself carrying ridiculous amounts of gear if you make it a point to open every chest you come across. It's entirely possible to end up carrying multiple copies of every item in the game if you keep replaying the levels long enough, resulting in your character looking more like a walking assortment of curios than a person/robot/alien.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Much like the first game, players get to choose between Drizzle, Rainstorm, and Monsoon difficulties when starting a run. The difficulty levels within a run remain mostly the same, although Very Easy has been excised, Medium has been renamed to Normal, and HAHAHAHA's name just keeps on going to fit the new scrolling horizontal design of the difficulty bar.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The vast majority of song titles in the soundtrack relate to rain or water in some way, though sometimes indirectly - for instance, "Köppen as Fuck" is named after the tropical rainforest's Köppen Af designation, and "They Might as Well Be Dead" is a line from The Beatles' "Rain". Beyond that, the Survivors of the Void tracks all refer to works of literature or song lyrics, as explained in Shout-Out below.
• Improbable Accessory Effect: While it's established that many items are magical, cursed, alien, or otherwise modified in a way, there's some that just don't make sense. A specific goat hoof that makes you move faster? Par for the course.
• Informed Equipment: Averted hard. Virtually every item you pick up will be shown on your character, regardless of how appropriately they're holding it. The developers stated doing this was part of the game's reason for its 3D leap. Heretic is the one and only survivor who plays this straight, as none of the items she's carrying appear on her person - ironic, considering she herself is literally made from items you have to find over the course of a run.
• Jetpack: The Milky Chrysalis grants limited flight. The Artificer innately has one that functions like the Rusty Jetpack from the first game, offering a slowed descent rather than actual flight. (Though unlocking her Ion Surge ability does give her perpetual flight.)
• Joke Item: The Trophy Hunter's Tricorn is an equipment item which gives the player a ghostly tricorn hat and a ghostly flintlock pistol that floats alongside them. It can instantly kill any boss monster that is capable of dropping a boss-specific item, causing the boss to drop said item. Once used this way, it becomes Trophy Hunter's Tricorn (Consumed), a regular tricorn hat that, when activated, calls out "Ahoy!" into the chat. Naturally, players wasted no time figuring out how to reduce the 60-second cooldown to a mere two seconds, allowing for much spamming of "Ahoy!" in the chat.
• Last Chance Hitpoint: The player is normally protected from being instantly KO'd from near full health (+90%), which will leave them with a single hitpoint and brief Mercy Invincibility. Playing with Shaped Glass or the Artifact of Glass disables this protection.
• Last Lousy Point: Monster Logs are just as rare as in the first game and are a major hurdle in getting a 100% complete codex (though they'll drop more often if you raise your luck stat significantly), but special mention goes to Irradiant Pearl. You need to find a Cleansing Pool, which can only spawn in 3 out of the 9 standard biomes and only spawn about 10-15% of the time to begin with, and trade one Lunar item for a Pearl, with only a 4% chance for it to be an Irradiant Pearl. Also, the Cleansing Pool doesn't spawn if you have Artifact of Command on. The drop rate was buffed to 20%, but even then it's still the rarest item by far. (Or at least tied with the Elite equipment - especially Shared Design - but none of them have log entries.)
• Leitmotif: The four-note Risk of Rain theme reappears throughout the soundtrack, though it is more cleverly utilized in the score. Several guitar solos end with the four notes, while the song "Risk of Rain 2" ends its melody with the four-note motif in a different rhythmic arrangement. Some other examples include the slow pads in "Through a Cloud, Darkly"; the gamelan in the bridge of "Disdrometer"; and the Hammond organ fills throughout "The Rain Formerly Known as Purple".
• Lethal Joke Item: The Regenerating Scrap has no immediate effect in-game - it's effectively an equivalent of the scrap you get from junking a green item at a scrapper, except that, as its name implies, it regenerates whenever you go through a teleporter or a portal. This makes it a lot more powerful than you'd first think, because if you aren't using the Artifact of Command, you can print new green items once a level (in other words, giving you your choice of the items at green printers on each level without having to sacrifice an existing item in your inventory). Moreover, regardless of whether you're using Command, if you collect five of them, you can visit the Bazaar Between Time for the cost of a single lunar coin and use the Regenerating Scraps to get a legendary item from the red cauldron. (This is both much likelier and much more powerful if you're using Command, in fact.) You can do this after each stage, as long as you have lunar coins and can access a Newt Altar (note that they don't always spawn on every stage). Red cauldrons also frequently (though not always) spawn on Commencement, giving players a final chance to exchange Regenerating Scraps.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The Crowdfunder, an unlockable equipment item. It's a gatling gun that fires your money as a weapon. Considering money is an invaluable part of progression, flagrant use can drain your reserves and leave you short of buying more items. However, combined with the Brittle Crown (which generates money every time you hit an enemy), it's self sufficient and can unleash one of the highest damage sources in the game. Even without that, by the final level (or after looping once), the Crowdfunder's drain will be far outpaced by the gold drops of the enemies.
• Life Drain: Both the Leeching Seed and Harvester's Scythe allow the player to heal whenever they hit an enemy; the Leeching Seed heals for less but activates on every hit, while the Harvester's Scythe heals for more but only activates on Criticals. There's also the Mired Urn, which allows you to suck HP from nearby enemies.
• Lighter and Softer: Compared to the gloomy skies and backgrounds of the first game, the second game is definitely brighter in terms of colors. There are still some fairly dark themes that get touched on, such as Genocide Dilemma, Gaia's Lament, Body Horror and more, but these are mostly relegated to background details and log entries rather than expressed through gameplay.
• Living Shadow: The "Umbral" bosses spawned by the Artifact of Vengeance look like shadowy doppelgangers of the player characters.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Killing the Final Boss triggers a Metroid-style escape sequence where the players must backtrack to the start of the level and Hold the Line until the escape shuttle can take off before the entire moon implodes and kills them.
• Loophole Abuse: You can get the Log Entry for the Defensive Microbots by picking it up. The catch is that the Defensive Microbots are a special Legendary that only the Captain can have normally and the Captain having it doesn't qualify as "obtaining" it for the purposes of unlocking the Log. So how do you get the Log Entry? Turn on Artifact of Vengeance, kill your doppelganger, and hope it drops the Defensive Microbots. Incidentally, this is also the only way you can stack the item.
• Lore Codex: the Logbook is a prime example of this trope, containing information about everything from items to places. Also doubles as a Monster Compendium.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Many of the game's challenges are inherently luck-based, ranging from finding and using certain objects to activating a Newt Altar in 8 different spawnpoints to reaching statistical thresholds that require large amounts of a handful of specific items to achieve. The Skills 2.0 update takes this to an extreme with two of the loadout challenges, one requiring that the Engineer gain fourteen allies^* which may sound difficult, but the Engineer's turrets reduce it to twelve (and their two turret limit is only a soft cap, summoning a third turret with 11 other allies still counts) to start, drones are extremely varied and spawn commonly, and there are several items which can summon allies, including an equipment item which summons four temporary ones on use, and another as the Huntress to find twelve crowbars. Depending on how complete your challenge list is, it might just be easier to reset the first level looking for a crowbar 3D printer than to actually try to fish all of them out of chests. Fortunately, the Artifact of Command can let you get around the luck-based nature of most item achievements, though not all of them.
  • Scavengers now start with several of the game's items on their person, and have a special ability they did not have in the first game: they can reach into their pack and take out an item, instantly gaining the benefits of that item on top of the ones they already had. This means that any fight against a scavenger could potentially become near-impossible if they happen to draw certain combinations of items. For example, a Gnarled Woodsprite, Dio's Best Friend, and a few Tougher Times can make one practically invulnerable, and some combinations of offensive items let them shred your health in seconds.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • The Artifact of Command returns, allowing you to select items from a rarity pool instead of taking whatever the game chooses. This does lock out certain features, but it significantly reduces the RNG aspect of much of the game.
  • The 57-Leaf Clover rerolls any percentage-based effects that don't trigger, giving them another chance to activate. Each stack adds an additional reroll. This significantly ups the odds of fixed chance items like the AtG missile launcher triggering. Get enough Clovers, and the missile launcher (or, perhaps even more potently, the Lost Seer's Lenses) will trigger with effectively every hit.
• Macrogame: Completing various tasks like finishing stages quickly or killing a certain number of enemies unlocks new items for you to acquire during further playthroughs, as well as alternative skills, skins, and characters.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • The Disposable Missile Launcher causes a large number of homing missiles to shoot out of you when used.
  • Collecting several Bundles of Fireworks will also cause this to happen every time you interact with an object.
  • The AtG Missile Mk. 1s Subverts it, as it only has a 10% chance to fire a single, powerful missile, and stacks just make the missile bulkier, rather than adding more of them. Getting it to fire repeatedly requires items that either increase the proc rate (57-Leaf Clover) or a high rate of fire to increase the likelihood of triggering the effect.
  • The Mini I.C.B.M. item added in the Survivors of the Void expansion makes every missile item fire an extra two missiles per launch, tripling the damage output of those items. Subsequent stacks of the item add 50% damage to each missile, but don't otherwise change its effect.
  • The Plasma Shrimp plays it straight. It grants a shield that, as long as it's intact, causes the player to fire a homing missile on each hit. This naturally adds up with a high fire rate. To balance it out, Plasma Shrimp missiles only track the enemy that triggered the on-hit effect, unlike AtG missiles that will seek out new targets if the original is killed.
• Made of Explodium: Risk of Rain 2 features many ways to make things explode, including things that maybe shouldn't.
  • The Imp Overlord's boss item, the Shatterspleen, has a guaranteed bleed effect if you score a critical hit, and causes bleeding enemies to explode when they die, dealing 400% of your base damage per stack plus a percentage of their maximum health in damage to all enemies near them.
  • Gasoline and Will-o'-the-wisp - garden-variety items that are respectively common and uncommon in rarity - will also cause enemies to explode on death, with the same initial blast radius. Gasoline lights enemies on fire in addition to dealing damage, and its radius grows quicker with more copies, but its initial explosion damage doesn't increase at all if you stack it, only the afterburn damage. Will-o'-the-wisp, meanwhile, doesn't ignite enemies, but deals much more damage upfront, which does increase with more copies.
  • Brilliant Behemoth, a rare item, takes this to almost-silly levels, as it causes nearly every single attack to explode on impact, even in impossible ways. Commando's Frag Grenade is a pristine example, as not only will the grenade now explode twice when its fuse hits zero, but it will also cause an explosion every time it bounces off something. Rolling it across the ground past a group of enemies tends to create a lot of damage numbers.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Borderline Exaggerated Trope. Nearly every survivor does something strange or atypical that's mostly, if not entirely, unique to them; before items come into the mix, almost every character plays uniquely. You could write a whole page on Risk of Rain 2 for just this trope alone! To wit:
  • Nearly all of the Huntress's attacks don't require aiming, as they automatically lock on to nearby enemies, meaning the player can focus full-time on mobility and evasion while plinking away at enemies. As a downside, skills that can lock on to enemies also require a target lock to be fired, except for her Special, Arrow Rain, which is manually targeted.
  • Unlike most characters, who only have a marginal chance to critically hit without items, Bandit will always deal critical hits when hitting an enemy In the Back. Naturally, his entire kit is built around doing this to maximize damage, and he synergizes well with items with on-crit (or crit-enhancing) effects. Bandit also has to reload his shotgun, used for his primary attack, one shot at a time, and it holds up to four.
  • Captain brings unusualness in spades. His primary attack has a variable choke based on how long you charge it before firing, he starts with a unique passive item that destroys incoming projectiles, any drones he recruits are automatically upgraded with this item, and his Utility and Special skills aren't allowed in secret areas. Hell, his Special skill plays the trope up all by itself - it has two charges that only replenish at the start of a level, creates stationary zones that last permanently for the rest of the level, has four variants instead of one or two, said variants can be assigned independently for both uses of the skill, and some of said variants let him do things no other character can by default, like recharge allies' equipment items or open chests for free.
  • Artificer is capable of hovering, plus igniting and freezing enemies, without any help from items. However, she also has a "reloading" mechanic for her primary attack, not unlike Bandit, though unlike him, hers functions like how other abilities store charges and recharge over time. At least her "ammo" recharges quickly.
  • Engineer has his turrets, who inherit all of his items; while Engy himself will usually only have middling damage output, the turrets are where the bulk of his power will come from. This allows him to create item synergies that are unheard of, if not outright impossible, for other characters.
  • Mercenary seems like a straightforward melee character on all fronts, until you look closer at his stats; his health regeneration is so low that it's practically nonexistant. To compensate, the many dashes and lunges afforded by his abilities give him plentiful invulnerability frames, meaning that, with proper timing, he can avoid damage altogether, even while in the thick of the horde.
  • MUL-T uniquely possesses not one, not two, but four choices of a primary weapon, of which it can equip two at once. This factors in to both its Special options; Retool not only lets MUL-T freely swap between both weapons, but gives it a second equipment item slot, while Power Mode instead lets MUL-T temporarily dual-wield both weapons and gain increased defenses, at the cost of speed.
  • REX has multiple abilities that are Cast from Hit Points, but either greatly heal it on hit, are profoundly damaging, or even both. Unsurprisingly, items that let it heal frequently are must-haves. Alternatively, each of its self-damage abilities can be replaced with ones that don't drain health, but are either weaker or more utility-oriented in nature. REX is also the only character who can inflict Weaken, which reduces how much damage the victim deals while increasing how much they take.
  • While most of how its kit works isn't too atypical, Acrid is the only survivor capable of inflicting the player's choice of either Poison or Blight. The former is a non-stacking, non-lethal, but reliable and longer-lasting Percent Damage Attack, while the latter is a stacking, lethal, but usually less-damaging, traditional damage-over-time. Compared to fellow melee fighters Loader and Mercenary, Acrid is much more about getting in to poison enemies, then getting out while they wither away behind it.
  • Railgunner takes what made Sniper in the original game so hard (but rewarding), and translates it into the third dimension, with some twists. Her attacks are normally incapable of critical hits, even with items, but while aiming, she's capable of seeing targets' weak points; precision hits against them instead always crit, and it's for this reason that any effects that normally increase critical chance will instead increase Railgunner's critical damage. Her primary attack is also two weapons in one, being an automatic homing-projectile rifle when fired from the hip, or a long-range, semiautomatic powerhouse when aiming. Said aimed mode itself has two variants, the slow-but-strong M99 Sniper or the more balanced-out HH-44 Marksman, and the former also has to be reloaded after each shot, giving your next shot a damage bonus if timed correctly.
  • Appropriate for a transformation-only character, Heretic is very unconventional. Her damage output and raw durability are terrific, something that doesn't come at the cost of mobility either, but instead at the fact that her health constantly decays instead of gradually healing like everyone else, requiring liberal application of healing items or proper use of her Shadowfade ability to counteract. Also, unlike other survivors, since her abilities are tied to items with stacking effects, she can continuously modify the base functions of her abilities in ways no other character can, though since said items are lunar items, it's not always a good thing.
  • Finally, there's Void Fiend, perhaps the most mechanically unusual of all. The character has two modes with their own sets of abilities, transforming every time its corruption gauge fills to full, then transforming back when it drains. Healing will decrease corruption, while taking damage increases it, and it will either passively charge or drain depending on Void Fiend's current mode; and Void-quality items held also permanently increase the gauge's minimum value. "Normal" Void Fiend is a long-ranged fighter with access to diverse offensive options, vertical mobility, and the ability to self-heal, while "Corrupted" Void Fiend is a close-range shredder with increased armor, unrelenting offensive power, and horizontal mobility, plus the ability to self-damage to stay transformed longer. Even experienced veterans who know the other mechanically-unusual survivors work often find Void Fiend difficult, as its corruption gauge forces the player to completely rethink how they interact with sources of healing and self-damage.
• Mêlée à Trois: As of Survivors of the Void, monsters that are part of the Void family, plus any Voidtouched Elites, are now opposed to all others as much as they are the player, and vice-versa. Should a Void Seed generate in a stage - which brings Void Infestors, Barnacles, Reavers, Jailers and occasionally Devastators with it - the native fauna will probably already be fighting with the Void monsters inside the Seed's radius by the time you reach it yourself. Of course, if you get too close, both sides will probably decide you're the bigger threat.
• Min-Maxing: An extremely valuable strategy, made especially viable if the Artifacts of Command and Sacrifice are enabled. For instance, the Lunar item Shaped Glass doubles the player’s base attack power while halving their HP. This can be offset with other items – the Lunar item Stone Flux Pauldron multiplies the player’s HP by 1 + n, n being the number of Stone Flux Pauldrons held, and divides their movement speed by the same amount. This in turn can be counteracted by stacking Mocha and Paul’s Goat Hoof. There are numerous combos like this that can turn any character into a Game-Breaker by the late game. (Note that, no matter how many HP boosts the player stacks, Shaped Glass also disables one-hit protection, so there’s still a mild downside to this strategy – however, carrying a Dio’s Best Friend or two can minimize its risk.)
• Mirror Boss:
  • The Artifact of Vengeance causes a shadowy doppelganger of the player to spawn once every ten minutes. The doppelganger comes equipped with all that player's items, making it ever-more dangerous the longer the game goes. It also drops one of the items it was carrying on death, which can be used to get a copy of exclusive equipment like Defensive Microbots that doesn't otherwise normally drop.
  • The Final Boss has the ability to steal your items in its final phase, with some exceptions, giving its attacks every property you previously had. Attacking the boss gradually returns the items to you.
• Money for Nothing: After a certain point, enemies spawn at such a high rate and drop so much money that you will be swimming in far more cash than you can possibly spend in a single stage. Even if the player has The Crowdfunder firing non-stop, they'll get far more money than it expends per second.
• Money Spider: Just like the first game, every enemy gives you money when killed, from Lemurians to Lunar Chimeras.
• Musical Pastiche: A few tracks in the game are clear tributes to other artists. "The Rain Formerly Known as Purple" is a tribute to Prince (especially the title track of Purple Rain), and "Petrichor V" is partly named for, and performed in the style of, Vangelis (especially his soundtrack for Blade Runner).
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: The Survivors of the Void expansion introduces Void items, which are corrupted versions of normal items which have similar but mechanically different effects. For example, the Weeping Fungus, the Void variant of Bustling Fungus, heals you while sprinting instead of being stationary. If picked up, Void items convert all copies of their uncorrupted counterparts into more of themselves, along with any subsequent copies you collect. This means a player only needs to collect a single copy of a Void item to reach multiple stacks, but will be locked out of the standard variant unless the Void item is somehow purged.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • Lunar items, because they can be purchased with Lunar coins earned across any run and have really good effects, also come with hefty penalties to balance them out. For some, this makes them Difficult, but Awesome, but others end up a Power Up Let Down.
  • The Artifact of Swarms doubles enemy spawns. It also halves their health and money drops, and decreases item drop rate if the Artifact of Sacrifice is active, to prevent the player from earning money and/or items far quicker than normal.
  • Similarly, the Artifact of Honor makes enemies spawn as elites, but doesn't increase the money they drop.
• Nerf:
  • The AtG missile launcher now has a fixed chance to fire regardless of item stack, which previously could be increased to 100% at 10 stacks. Stacks now increase the missile damage.
  • Each copy of Infusion only adds 100 health over 100 kills, whereas the previous version worked infinitely.
  • In general, the item pool is significantly trimmed down from the previous game, completely eliminating a number of items that could make the game ridiculously easy (most notably, 56-Leaf Clover).
  • The Artifact of Glass has a much bigger penalty for its damage bonus in this game. Not only is your health cut down to a tenth, all health items only grant a tenth of their normal effect, whereas the player could easily grab a few health items to recover their base health in the first game.
• Non-Standard Game Over: If you manage to loop the game and reach at least Rallypoint Delta, Scorched Acres, or Sulfur Pools, a celestial portal opens up and leads to an obelisk that the player can interact with to obliterate themselves, ending the run. This is required to unlock the Mercenary, and it also nets you 5 Lunar Coins for doing this. If you also have the Beads of Fealty in your inventory, the obelisk instead takes you to a different area containing one of four Optional Boss Scavenger variants, and killing it rewards you with 10 Lunar Coins and the game fades to black. The results screen at the end for either end says you were "killed by the Planet" and your "Fate unknown...".
• Not the Intended Use: The Captain starts with a special Legendary item called Defensive Microbots, which gives him an Attack Drone that automatically destroys projectiles that get close to him. This is meant to help boost his survivability and support abilities. At one point, you could also just chuck it into a Scrapper and get a Red Scrap from it. Since the Captain has Defensive Microbots as a passive, he regenerated a copy of it at the start of every stage if he lost the one in his inventory, allowing you to continually generate Red Scrap every stage and then trade your Scrap for free Legendary items. Alternatively, you could safely sacrifice your Microbots to a Shrine of Order (assuming you only have one other Legendary you want), as you would get them back by the next stage. However, this was patched out on September 2020.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • If anything is in a Void Reaver's implosion radius when it self-destructs, it's completely erased from this plane of existence, no questions asked. (Unless a character uses their Shadowfade or Trespass abilities to erase their hitbox until the end of the attack, that is.) A Dio's Best Friend can still bring destroyed entities back, though.
  • The Void Jailer shoots an orb that chases the closest non-void target (probably you) on death that does the same thing. The Void Devastator also suicide implodes on death, with a nasty bonus of five smaller implosion orbs launched from it that kill on touch. (Again, Shadowfade and Trespass will prevent this.)
  • The Lost Seer's Lenses from Survivors of the Void replaces all Lens-Maker's Glasses to grant a chance to instantly kill non-boss enemies on hit.^note "Non-boss enemies" in this context includes randomly spawned enemies that can spawn as bosses - if a Grandparent spawns as part of the teleporter event, the Lenses can't kill it, but if it spawns randomly, they can. "Boss" specifically refers to any entity spawned as the boss of a teleporter event or similar boss-type situation (i.e., monsters with red health bars). As a trade-off for this monstrously powerful effect, it requires a whopping 200 stacks to make it a guaranteed chance, compared to a mere ten for the Glasses. That said, as a practical matter, far fewer are needed to make the effect reliable, as the chance is rolled with each hit and is modified by items that affect luck, so a character with a high rate of fire doesn't need that many (but still more than the glasses).^note Possessing 20 Lenses is a 10% chance and one 57-Leaf Clover would raise that chance to 19%. Adding another Clover would provide a 27.1% chance; a third yields a 34.39% chance; and so on. (The corollary of this is that Purity will worsen the same chances.) The Lenses' main downside for most characters is the loss of the Harvester Scythe's reliable healing from guaranteed critical hits, but sometimes the best defense can be a good offense. (The survivors who are least likely to miss this are the Railgunner, who doesn't see an increased critical hit chance from the Glasses anyway; Bandit, who can get guaranteed critical hits by attacking enemies from behind; and Loader, whose primary attack provides her a temporary barrier.)
  • The Voidling may occasionally attempt to suck the player into it. If it succeeds, the player dies similar to Void Reavers. Especially notable in that invincibility doesn't protect you, meaning reviving with Dio's Best Friend results in immediate death unless you die at the end of its attack.
• Overly Long Gag: Since the difficulty is now measured on a scrolling slider, any difficulty beyond I'M COMING FOR YOU NOW is represented as an endlessly long HAHAHAHA.
• Physical Heaven: The Artificer's lore says that her race believes Heaven is a planet and explore space for it, grabbing any magical or sufficiently advanced enough to emulate it objects in the process to aid in their journey.
• Place Beyond Time: Portals lead to locations outside of time, and there's a mysterious alien who runs a bazaar in one of them.
• Pressure Plate: In the Abandoned Aqueduct, there is a sealed chamber that can be unlocked by finding and simultaneously holding down two pressure plates hidden in the level.^note Fellow players, Engineer turrets, Effigies, or the explosive jars in the level will work. Inside the chamber are a pair of Elder Lemurians that, when defeated, unlock and drop two specific items.
• Punny Name: A soldier who was friend with the one playing around with the Goobo Jr. In the data log, getting in trouble from it, is named Rchiard D. Baggins, or Dick Bag, although in this case he was being serious while his friend got him court martialed.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Void Infestors can infect enemies, granting them an Elite Aspect called Voidtouched.
  • Player summons, most notably Squid Polyps, can turn against the player if they get infected by a Void Infestor.
• Random Loot Exchanger: You can occasionally find cauldrons in which you can trade 3 random common items for a random uncommon item or 5 random uncommon items for a random legendary item, both of which prioritise items you've scrapped.
• Religion of Evil: The followers of N'kuhana believe that N'kuhana, a death goddess, cannot visit them because more people are being born than dying. They seek to rectify this by killing people to even the balance.
  As disciples, we will spread her words and opinions. As pupils, we will sow death. And should we be lucky... be granted an audience by Her.
• Sealed Evil in Another World: Mithrix was banished to Petrichor V's moon by his brother Providence due to his obsession with "perfecting" the planet's life forms. Though he was free to continue his creations, he was unable to return to Petrichor V, and remains trapped there by the time the UES Safe Travels arrives.
• Secret Character: To play as the Heretic, you need to collect all four Heresy items (Visions, Hooks, Strides, and Essence of Heresy), where then your survivor permanently transforms into the Heretic. The Heretic has a triple jump and a ton of health that degenerates over time, and their own unique ending message. This change is permanent, and if you scrap all copies of a Heresy item, that skill is replaced with a skill that just makes the Heretic squawk.
• Shock and Awe: Blue "Overloading" enemies have an electrical aura which causes damage to the survivor if they're close enough. The Unstable Tesla Coil gives this power to the survivor, and the Ukulele makes their shots do the same. The rare Elite equipment Silence Between Two Strikes also gives players some of Overloading Elites' powers and makes all their attacks into electrical explosions (note that it also converts half of players' health into shields, which can be a drawback).
• Shout-Out:
  • As discussed under Ascended Fanon on the Trivia tab, the planet's name of Petrichor V (minus the V) began as a suggestion for a possible song title for this game, and then became adopted by the fans as the planet's name. The V was added by composer Chris Christodoulou as a shoutout to composer Vangelis, who composed the score for Blade Runner and was considered a chief atmospheric inspiration for ROR2 by the entire Hopoo Games team.
  • The Preon Accumulator functions near-identically to the BFG from Doom (2016). There's even an achievement for MUL-T to kill an Imp Overlord (the closest thing this game has to a demon) with it.
  • The Wake of Vultures is this game's equivalent of the Headhunter.
  • Bandit's alternate skin strongly resembles Ibzan from Deadbolt, another title from Hopoo Games.
  • The Captain's OGM-72 'DIABLO' Strike deals 40,000% damage after 20 seconds.
  • The Survivors of the Void DLC items contain quite a few references in their logbook entries:
    • The Power Elixir item's description is one big Potion Seller reference; apparently the Elixir in question is but a downgrade from his "strongest potions", and was shipped instead.
    • The Mocha item has "Ninten Island" as it's shipping address and the shipping details are a message from the sender, containing an extremely specific temperature to reheat the drink to, ending their statement with "Coo". All this combined, it seems someone ordered a coffee from Brewster.
    • The Safer Spaces item directly quotes the baby armor scene from Insufferable.
    • The notes for Polylute has the writer find a sequence of notes in some carvings that starts with "d d d a G" before getting cut off. Musically-inclined Undertale fans can recognize the notes as the start of Megalovania.
  • There are also several references in the game's soundtrack.
    • The outro of soundtrack song "Terra Pluviam" directly quotes "Mission to the Asteroid", the opening song of Michael Land's score for LucasArts video game The Dig. Composer Chris Christodoulou has cited Land's score as a major inspiration for his own work.
    • The melody of "Risk of Rain 2" and "The Dehydration of Risk of Rain 2" directly quotes "The Ghost Writer" by Alexandre Desplat, from Desplat's score for the film of the same name.
    • The original title of "The Dehydration of Risk of Rain 2" was "The Dehydration of Risk of Rain 2's Main Theme by the Composer Chris Christodoulou". In his commentary for the album, Christodoulou mentions that this was a direct reference to the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but it was shortened because the artist's name appearing in a song title can cause problems with certain digital distribution platforms.
    • Another song is titled "The Rain Formerly Known as Purple" and contains a guitar solo and finale that is similar to the original song it's referencing. If the reference to Prince's "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" moniker isn't enough, the song's video on composer Chris Christodoulou's YouTube channel changes from the picture on the soundtrack cover to a visual of purple falling rain during the song's outro; and the official sheet music ends with Prince's symbol.
    • Nearly all of the tracks in the Survivors of the Void DLC have titles taken from various works of literature, poetry, and music, the only exception being "Prelude in D Flat Major." These are "A Placid Island of Ignorance"; "Having Fallen, It Was Blood"; "Out of Whose Womb Came the Ice?"; "Once in a Lullaby"; "The Face of the Deep"; "A Boat Made from a Sheet of Newspaper"; "They Might as Well be Dead"; and "Who Can Fathom the Soundless Depths?"
• Sickly Green Glow:
  • Acrid's poisons all glow a bright green color.
  • Malachite enemies, which stop anyone they damage from being able to regenerate health, are a blackish-green color.
  • N'kuhana, a death goddess and generally sinister figure, is associated with green. N'kuhana's Opinion is green and black and causes the player to shoot out flaming green skulls, and Malachite elites will rarely drop an item called N'kuhana's Retort, which is green and causes the player to have the same abilities as Malachite elites. The altar to N'kuhana hidden in the Wetlands Aspect is also filled with green light.
• Speed Run Reward: Speedrunning is generally encouraged due to the constantly rising difficulty, but there are also a few challenges that specifically require you to reach a certain point within a set time limit. Likewise, there's a bonus chest on Rallypoint Delta that can only be opened if you reach it in under ten minutes.
• Stat Overflow: Certain items like the Topaz Brooch or Aegis will allow you to get "barrier," health that extends past your maximum but depletes overtime.
• Stone Wall: The Stone Flux Pauldron, added in Survivors of the Void, doubles your health and halves your speed, turning you into one of these. (As mentioned above, it is entirely possible to offset the speed debuff, however.)
• Super-Powered Shrimp: Added in the Survivors of the Void expansion, the Plasma Shrimp item is the corrupted version of the AtG Missle Mk. 1. Picking one up makes your attacks have a missile volley as long as you have shields.
• Taking You with Me:
  • The Artifact of Spite makes all enemies release bombs when they die.
  • Void Reavers implode on death, instantly killing anything with a health bar when they do so.
    • The other Void entities added in the Survivors of the Void DLC have their own flavor of this. Void Jailers throw a smaller, homing detainment zone that follows the player for a while before imploding, while Void Devastators have a colossal version of the standard Reaver's implosion that takes several seconds to charge up, and upon imploding, fires a cluster of impact-detonating "fragments" with the same effect.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Aurelionite does this to Providence and Mithrix, after Mithrix decides to trap it in the Gilded Coast for having too much soul, which makes it capable of rebelling against the brothers. Implied to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
• Turns Red: Bosses can gain an extra attack once their health drops low, like the Wandering Vagrant's telegraphed explosion. The Grandparents' Solar Flare is especially dangerous, since it is substantially more dangerous than other attacks on Sky Meadow and gets more intense as it continues. Players who don't kill Grandparents quickly are in for a potential world of hurt.
• Uncommon Time: The score probably uses complex meter signatures more often than it uses Common Time:
  • "Thermodynamic Equilibrium" has 5 subdivisions in each beat of 4/4, but its bridge metrically modulates to 4 subdivisions in each beat of 5/4. Risk of Rain 2 Engineer Edition 2, Chris' official release of the OST stems, actually notates the song as "4/(5:4)", advising to treat it as 4/4 in a DAW while noting that each beat actually contains a quintuplet.
  • "Köppen as Fuck" is written in 7/4, but modulates to 4/4 (with a bar of 5:4 every 4th bar out of 8) during the slow, chugging sections. "Disdrometer" is also written in 7/4, but the snare alternates to 4/4 in some parts, giving it a lopsided feel. "Antarctic Oscillation" is also written in 7/4, though the latter also switches to 5/4 for the quieter sections.
  • "The Raindrop that Fell to the Sky" is in 5/8, though the first section has enough of a half-time tempo that it can also be counted in 5/4. Engineer Edition 2 notates the song as 5/8 but notes, "you can also use 5/4 to make it a bit easier DAW-wise."
  • "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Ukelele" is in 7/2 for its main sections, uses 4/4 elsewhere, and occasionally shifts to 6/4 and 7/4.
  • "Nocturnal Emission" is in 5/4, but its solo uses what the Engineer Edition 2 describes as "[5+4+5+7]/4".
  • "Hydrophobia" is largely in 4/4, but uses some 7/4, 6/4, and possibly other meters.
  • "Into the Doldrums" is in 7/8.
  • Beyond this, Christodoulou uses quintuplets in parts of numerous songs that are otherwise not in uncommon time signatures, such as "Antarctic Oscillation".
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Some of the rarer item drops you can get off of defeated bosses appear to be actual chunks or organs from the bosses themselves. Naturally, these give you abilities similar to the respective boss it was acquired from. There's also an item called Wake of Vultures that makes it so that the player briefly gains the powers of any elites they kill.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: In Siren's Call, you can find Alloy Vulture eggs scattered randomly around the map; destroying them causes them to drop healing orbs. However, destroy too many of them, and the game sics a powerful boss, the Alloy Worship Unit, on you. This is usually beneficial, since you need to kill the Alloy Worship Unit for an achievement and to unlock the Loader, and it also drops a guaranteed Legendary item on kill.
• Video Game 3D Leap: A modern example. Compared to the last game, Risk of Rain 2 takes several chances to flex its new 3D muscles, in gameplay and artstyle both, though it also results in some necessary changes (or exclusions) in places. For example, Huntress' previous niche, being able to move and shoot, is now a universal mechanic for all survivors. To compensate, she's the only ranged survivor that can sprint and shoot, and her Blink ability can be used in all directions, preserving her trademark mobility from the first game; her attacks also auto-aim unlike everyone else, so her player doesn't need to worry about aiming and can just focus on mobility.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Sundered Grove was initially exclusive to the Google Stadia version of the game for a brief 4 months after release.
• Who's on First?: The data log on the Parent enemy reveals that the family line were given incorrect nomenclature. The names go smallest (and not in this game) are Child, middle Parent, and massive Grandparent. Turns out the reality is the youngest stage is Parent and oldest is the Child. The conversation confuses the person learning this.
• Zerg Rush: The game spawns more and more enemies as the game goes on, and after playing for long enough, a player can easily end up facing hundreds of monsters in quick succession, including numerous enemies that are originally spawned as bosses. The Artifact of Swarms doubles enemy spawns at the start of the game.

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