Risk of Rain 2 and games as a waste of time

As someone who studies video games, I have a strange relationship to the medium. Like many of my peers, I want to talk about the deeper meaning in games, to argue against the parents in my head who call these things a “waste of time”. But I entirely play games to waste time! This medium probably can summon a vast array of human experiences and let us embody many different types of characters. I wouldn’t know. I don’t play that crap. Risk of Rain 2 doesn’t do that. Risk of Rain 2 is, unabashedly, a Waste of Time. 

Risky Rain (the second) has a plot of some description, conveyed in an opening cutscene that I skip every time I play the game. You’ve crash-landed on some kind of planet with creatures that want to kill you. None of this is really important.. In each stage, you need to find a teleporter that takes you to the next stage (after a boss fight), against a ticking clock.. The longer the clock goes on, the more difficult the game gets. Creatures become larger and take longer to kill. And you want to kill them, because killing them gives you money -> that you spend to open item-bearing chests -> that in turn make you stronger. You need to balance the time spent getting stronger in a level against the difficulty: do I risk (hehe) opening a chest that might give me a useless item when the game’s about to hit the Very Hard difficulty? 

Note the two horns on the teleporter. This is a reference to the devil (from the bible) 

This means that Risk Part II is well-designed. A truism oft-repeated in the games industry is that good games are “a series of interesting choices”. Risk makes its choices interesting by making time a resource that you’re constantly spending, and it constantly finds new ways of playing with this. Some chests take health as a currency: weighing your chance of staying alive against an immediate item. Gamble shrines can either pay an item out or not: asking you how long you want to spend on the level for a given item. And there’s a whole class of powerful items that you can use with cooldowns: do you want to wait for your boss-killing laser to come back before you activate the teleporter, or will you risk (haha) fighting it without? This elegant focus on time costs keeps the game engaging. I’m unsure if it does anything more. 

It really makes you feel like a hoarder 

I have a little ritual. Nearly every morning, I drag myself out of bed, turn on my Steam Deck (™) and open up One Flew over the Risky Rains: the Squeaquel. And watch, bleary-eyed, as an hour vanishes from my life, following the pattern that runs of this game often do. I select a character, deciding if I want to be stabbing creatures or shooting creatures (or, rarely, building turrets at creatures). I slaughter a bunch of creatures and open chests with their remains. There are some items I want. I pump the air if they show up. There are some items I don’t want, and I groan if I get those. In an hour’s time, I’ll either be dead, or hurtling around the map at warp speed, hurling bombs and shurikens at neverending waves of creatures and feeling Unstoppable, my character covered in so many items that they’re barely recognisable. I close the game and get dressed. 

I could have spent that hour learning a language, or creating some Art, or connecting with my fellow man. Conversely, I suppose I could have spent that hour jerking off or mindlessly scrolling on my phone. Living in an age with unfettered access to dopamine almost makes playing a dumb little video game feel Noble somehow. At least there’s a challenge gatekeeping your delicious brain chemicals. Indeed, one run of Take a Chance on The Weather: Electric Boogaloo is often enough for me – something I can’t say for scrolling various social media feeds. Being unstoppably powerful gets old, in the same way as eating my way through a family size packet of Domino cookies does. I’m not even sure if my half-awake brain would be able to create Art, anyway. 

It’s also hard to tell what exactly is a good use of my, or indeed anyone’s time. Older relatives in my life – who constantly express concerns about the amount of time youths play on video games – in turn have fond memories of whiling away entire nights playing Poker, or Durac, or Bridge: games about such meaning as “do I have a better card than you”. Clearly what is a “good” waste of time has something to do with what you grew up with, even if the act of playing a card game in person is a very social act. 

But of course, so’s R.I.2.K (the game has online co-op)! When I’m not whiling away an hour in the morning, I’m using it as meaningless background noise while me and my friends chat about our lives, punctuated with low-stakes game babble like “there’s pred here! that’s good on your build”. We aren’t particularly invested in what’s happening on screen, but the gameplay papers over cracks in our conversation in a very similar way to telling someone they need to draw, or reacting to a particularly fun play in a card game. Calling time spent with friends “wasting time” feels a little bit weirder than time playing solo, but it does have a different dimension to hanging out with them in person. I don’t really remember much of our runs in the same way I remember a drunk night playing cards. But the runs happen much more regularly than those. It’s much easier to set up a quick Risk run than it is to get people over in person. 

 

The game did inspire me to make these, so it’s impossible to say if it’s a waste of time or not 

So, maybe Wastes of Time have a use. But how good is The Risk, The Rain and The Two at wasting our time? Released in 2020 and kept alive by various expansion packs, choosing to play Risk in 2025 is to choose it over a vast ecosystem of time-wasters that are laser-focused on a core concept of Getting More Powerful. Vampire Survivors, for example, strips out all of the messy distractions in Risk – the need to explore an environment, the semblance of a Plot, even needing to press buttons that aren’t movement directions – in favour of a game only about slaughtering enemies and getting stronger. It has a co-op mode (and the developers are working on making it have online play), and has much shorter and tighter runs at 20 minutes apiece. 2025’s Megabonk purports to do something similar, with a similar tight focus on this core loop. Why play Risk when there’s more optimal wastes of time that are much more upfront about it? 

Here’s the rub: Risks 2: The Rains’ dishonesty about being a waste of time, its messiness, is an appeal. I don’t want to go into my hour long dissociation knowing that I’m wasting my time. I want to pretend that I’m playing one of those primo games with Meaning and Themes. I want to improve at a variety of useless skills: of navigating these select levels quickly, of prioritising which enemies to fight in an overwhelming crowd, of learning exactly how each character stabs or shoots people slightly differently. I am definitely better at this game 300 (!!!) hours in than I was when I started, and I find that satisfying. Even thinking the thought that I’ve improved at Vampire Survivors feels me with a deep sense of ennui that I don’t feel with Risk. Vampire Survivors also steals much more of my time: despite having shorter runs, I feel much more of a compulsion to immediately play another run. A run of Risk is just much more exhausting, and that leads to it ending faster. There are clearer limits on how much time I’ll waste.  

Before I write my verdict, a quick word on the expansions. A Chance Of Poor Weather (Two) added more DLC on November 15th, in the same vein as past expansions for the game. Like those, this new DLC added some more stages, some more items, some more characters to play as, and some more enemies. None of this is essential, but as a way of keeping the game fresh, of forgetting that you are, ultimately, wasting your time, it is very helpful. When you’ve been in a relationship for so long, it’s nice to spice things up. Maybe you’ll pick up the item that encourages you to press right click instead of clicking left click more. It’s the little things. 

So, should you get Risk of Rain 2 in the Year of Our Lord 2025? If you’re after a timewaster that doesn’t feel like a timewaster, a game to have on with online friends in the background, or just wish that Vampire Survivors had more buttons to press: please do! But if your main relationship with games is through the Disco Elysiums of the world – through Literature with Themes that makes the world feel slightly different after finishing – give this a miss. Your world sounds much richer than mine. Let it stay that way. 

Basic Information: 

Developer: Hopoo Games 

Publisher: Gearbox Software 

Release date: 11/08/.2020 

Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One S 

Genre: Roguelike 

PEGI: 10 

All pictures taken by the article’s writer, unless otherwise stated. 

Featured Image by Zoi Danai Asterataki

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