The timer climbs, the items pile up, and at some point you stop playing and just watch your own snowball flatten everything.

First signal, the gut one: when the community picks on instinct, with no criterion, Risk of Rain 2 only edges past 43% of games, in the lower middle. And yet the moment you look at the detail, it climbs. Controller feel sits ahead of 88% of the catalogue, desert island 87%, fun 82%, the soundtrack 80%. Then comes the line that explains it all: attachment collapses, ahead of just 8% of games. There is the tension. People love holding it, they keep coming back, they would happily take those endless runs with them, but they do not bond with what it tells them. Few votes so far, so treat it as a first read, but it says a lot.

That is the usual fate of a top-tier roguelike: the loop is king, characters stay tools. Hades puts narrative where this one puts pure system, and you can see the gap right there.

So, who is it for? For you if you like watching a build turn absurd while a soundtrack carries you for hours. Much less so if you need a bond with characters or a story that stays with you after the run.