GamingPickz

Risen

Delve into a gritty, raw and atmospheric fantasy world in which every action has a consequence. In the epic world of Risen, filled with mysterious earthquakes, fearsome monsters and unimaginable treasures, forge your path with the sword, learn the art of staff fighting or become a powerful mage.

Action RPGOpen WorldRole-PlayingSandbox

Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.

Would you recommend it?
Player score
8.9/10
10,815 reviews
Released
2009
Developer
Piranha Bytes
Platforms
2 systems
Critics
77
Steam Deck
playable
Download
5 GB
We have not written a full review of this game.This is a catalogue entry: everything below comes from a source we can link, checked on a stated date. There is no score and no verdict here, because we only publish those after a reviewer has played the game and written it up properly. Our team may well have played this one. Until someone writes the review, we are not going to imply a verdict we have not put our name to.

What is Risen?

Delve into a gritty, raw and atmospheric fantasy world in which every action has a consequence. In the epic world of Risen, filled with mysterious earthquakes, fearsome monsters and unimaginable treasures, forge your path with the sword, learn the art of staff fighting or become a powerful mage.

Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.

The record

Catalogue facts
First released2 October 2009
DeveloperPiranha Bytes
PublisherTHQ Nordic, Deep Silver
PlatformsXbox Series X and Series S, Steam Deck
GenresAction RPG, Open World, Role-Playing, Sandbox
Languages7 supported

Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q1513013, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.

How was Risen received?

Players89%positive of 10,815 · Very Positive
Metacritic77critic aggregate, PC
Achievements50on Steam

Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.

Accessibility

1 declared features

Seeing

None declared

Hearing

None declared

Input

  • Full controller support

Difficulty

None declared

Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.

What does it support?

Technical support
CapabilitySupport
Controllerfull support
Cloud savesYes
Cross-platform playNo
Mod supportNo official workshop
Online playSingle-player only
In-game purchasesNo
Steam Deckplayable
Download size5 GB
Add-on content1 DLC listed
Age gate17+

Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.

What does it cost?

$14.99

Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.

Is Risen worth it?

89% of 10,815 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. It costs $14.99 on Steam, and critics score it 77/100.

That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.

How long is Risen? How long to beat it

Total play time for Risen is about 45.9 hours to do everything, and around 28.5 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.

Risen length by how much you play
How you playHoursPlayers logged
Just the main story: straight through the critical path28.5h113
Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do37.7h314
Completionist: everything: 100% the game45.9h104

At its current price of $14.99, beating the main story works out to about $0.53 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.

Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.

Where Risen sits on the grid

Compare the whole catalogue

Risen plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.

1 games have both

01000100Players →Popularity →

Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.

Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.

  • Xbox

Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.

See the ultimate grid

How positions are decided

No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
  • Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
  • Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
  • No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
  • A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
  • Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.

Estimated sales for Risen

These are estimates, not reported figures. Piranha Bytes has not published unit sales for Risen, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.

324K–649KEstimated copies soldon Steam, lifetime
$1.6M–$6.4MEstimated player spendbefore Valve's cut
$1.1M–$4.5MEstimated to the publisherafter the 30% platform cut

How this was calculated

Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.

Sales estimate working
Reviews on Steam10,815
Sales per review30 to 60
List price$14.99
Assumed average selling price33% to 66% of list

What this cannot tell you

Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.

The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.

The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.

Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.

If Piranha Bytes publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.

Risen price & deals: is it on sale?

We have one reading so far: $14.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.

What readers say about Risen

Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.

Loading reviews…

Problems players report

We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Risen on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.

  1. Crashes and freezes29 of 300 (10%)

    -glitches and crashes -Main quests are tedious and repetitive -No incentive to explore the world.

    Steam review, 6 September 2018 · 18 hours played · 25 readers marked it helpful

    Game just crashes with no error every now and then .

    Steam review, 28 January 2023 · 261 hours played · 20 readers marked it helpful
  2. Will not launch or install11 of 300 (4%)

    Doesn't work every time I launch it instantly gives a black screen and shows a fatal error, tried all sorts of solutions but it still won't work.

    Steam review, 27 June 2020 · 1 hours played · 7 readers marked it helpful

    After last patch the game wont launch

    Steam review, 29 March 2023 · 20 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful

A further 34 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.

Did it run on your PC?

Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.

Where Risen appears

The ranked lists and finder pages Risen qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.

Get the weekly rundown

One email a week: what moved in the rankings, what launched, and what dropped in price. No more than that, and unsubscribing takes one click.

We send the weekly email and nothing else. Your address is never sold, shared or used to build a profile, and it is not readable by anyone visiting this site. See our privacy policy.

Games like Risen

24 games overlap with Risen on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Gothic 3, Gothic 1 and Risen 3 - Titan Lords.

All 24 games like Risen

Part of the Risen series

Risen is one of 3 Risen games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:

Every Risen game, ranked

Risen head to head

See Risen compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:

Common questions about Risen

What platforms is Risen on?

Risen is available on Xbox Series X and Series S, Steam Deck. It first released in 2009.

How much does Risen cost?

$14.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.

Do players recommend Risen?

89% of 10,815 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.

What is the Metacritic score for Risen?

77 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.

Does Risen work on Steam Deck?

Valve rates Risen as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.

How big is the Risen download?

5 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.

Who made Risen?

Risen was developed by Piranha Bytes and published by THQ Nordic, Deep Silver.

Is Risen worth it in 2026?

89% of 10,815 Steam reviews are positive (Very Positive), and it is $14.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.

Is Risen on sale?

Not at the moment. Risen is at its $14.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.

How long does it take to beat Risen?

about 28.5 hours for the main story, 37.7 hours with the main extras, 45.9 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.