Risk of Rain 2 DLC: which to buy after Hallowed Concepts

Gearbox put Risk of Rain 2 DLC number four on sale on 8 October 2026, and the timing is awkward for anyone who was waiting for a cheap copy of the base game. Hallowed Concepts went live alongside a Steam discount on Risk of Rain 2 itself — the usual pattern, where a publisher cuts the base game to pull new players towards the new expansion. What is unusual is what happened on the key resellers.

Across the 105 days we have tracked Risk of Rain 2 since 18 June 2026, the median cheapest offer anywhere was $1.22, and the lowest single price we recorded was $0.94 at Gameseal on 15 September 2026. Reading the same record today, 9 October 2026, the cheapest offer sits more than four times above that September floor. The launch did not make the base game cheaper on the grey market. It made it dearer.

The launch trailer, posted on the official Risk of Rain channel, which labels Hallowed Concepts as DLC 4.

What Hallowed Concepts actually adds

Steam's own store page is specific, which helps, because the announcement back in April was not. Two new survivors: the Acolyte, who the page says "bargains for more power with her own life force", and the Enforcer, a tactical pick built around creating cover and then closing the distance.

Beyond the characters, it is a set of new regions on Petrichor V and a new scoring layer. The Winnowing trials — Survival, Predation and Mortality — are discrete challenge runs rather than modifiers on the main loop. There are Hallowed Items, which you earn by enduring Hexes rather than by picking up chests, and a curio called the N'tormat whose pages unlock abilities at a cost. It is the most mechanically opinionated thing the series has shipped.

The core loop has not changed: the difficulty clock climbs whether you are ready or not. (Official Steam screenshot)

One detail matters more than any of the content, and it is buried in the store page's fine print: the expansion requires the base game, but in multiplayer a single owner enables its content for the whole lobby. Players without it cannot select the new survivors or permanently unlock the new items, but they will see the stages and fight the enemies. For a group of four, that is one purchase rather than four.

The full Risk of Rain 2 DLC line-up, and how each landed

There are four paid expansions now, and their reception varies wildly. These are Steam's own aggregate review figures, read on 9 October 2026:

• Survivors of the Void (1 March 2022) — Very Positive, 5,410 positive from 6,133 reviews.
• Seekers of the Storm (27 August 2024) — Mixed, 6,669 positive from 12,218 reviews.
• Alloyed Collective (18 November 2025) — Very Positive, 3,413 from 3,688.
• Hallowed Concepts (8 October 2026) — Very Positive, 324 from 364, one day in.

That Seekers of the Storm number is not a rounding error. It sits at roughly 55% positive against 88% for the expansion before it, and it is the only entry in the series that players actively warn each other about. Its launch shipped with balance and bug problems severe enough to affect the base game, and the review score never recovered even after patches.

Survivors of the Void, from Gearbox's own channel — still the expansion to own first.

In co-op, one owner unlocks the expansion's stages for the whole lobby — the single most useful thing to know before four people buy it. (Official Steam screenshot)

Which Risk of Rain 2 DLC to buy first

Start with Survivors of the Void. Four years on it is still the best-reviewed expansion in the series, it adds survivors that changed how people play the base game rather than sitting beside it, and it is the one that has had the most time to find its price floor. If you buy one, buy that.

Then Alloyed Collective, which at 93% positive is the quiet success of the set and the natural second purchase. Hallowed Concepts is third — not because it looks weak, but because a one-day-old review score from 364 people tells you very little, and expansions in this series have a history of needing a patch cycle. There is no urgency: nothing in it expires.

Seekers of the Storm is the one to leave alone unless you are completing the set. A Mixed rating on 12,000 reviews is a clear signal, and the content it adds is not load-bearing for anything else.

What the base game's price record says about timing

This is where our own data is worth more than the store page. Risk of Rain 2 on the key resellers has been a sub-dollar game for most of the period we have tracked it — 51 of the 105 days sat within 25% of that $0.94 floor. The price did not drift up gradually; it stepped up around the expansion launch, which is exactly when demand arrives.

Late-run Risk of Rain 2, where the item stacking stops being a build and starts being a screensaver. (Official Steam screenshot)

The practical reading: if you do not already own the base game, the Steam discount running now is the sane route, because the reseller channel is currently at the expensive end of its own range. If you do own it, there is no case for rushing the expansion. Check the live figures on the Risk of Rain 2 game page rather than any number in an article, including the historical ones above — those are what our record held when this was written, not what you will pay.

Worth knowing if you are new to the series: Risk of Rain Returns, the remake of the original 2D game, is one of the cheapest things we track. Its own tracked low was $0.57 at Gameseal on 17 September 2026, and unlike the sequel it has barely moved since — our record has it within a third of that floor today. It is a different game, not a lesser one.

Risk of Rain Returns keeps the 2D plane and the same escalating clock. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want the loop without the expansion maths

Risk of Rain 2 is unusual in asking you to make four separate purchase decisions. If that is the part putting you off, the genre has cleaner options. Hades sells one complete thing with no DLC at all. Dead Cells has expansions but they are small, cheap and clearly labelled. Enter the Gungeon folded its paid content into free updates years ago. Deep Rock Galactic is the closest thing to Risk of Rain 2's co-op chaos and sells cosmetics rather than content.

Dead Cells: the same death-loop structure, with a DLC list you can read in one glance. (Official Steam screenshot)

Our wider reading on this sits in the best roguelike and roguelite games on sale and Hades vs Dead Cells, if you are choosing between them rather than adding to a library.

The bottom line

Buy the base game from the official channel while the launch discount holds — our record says the resellers are unusually expensive on this title right now, and that is the opposite of the normal advice. Then buy Survivors of the Void, and only that, until you have run out of things to do with it. Skip Seekers of the Storm. Leave Hallowed Concepts for a month and let the patch notes tell you whether it landed; at 364 reviews, nobody knows yet, including Gearbox.

If you are buying keys rather than from Steam, read are keyshops safe first, and what a historical low price actually means before you treat any single figure as a floor.