What the expansion adds
Every figure below comes from the developer's own launch announcement. Confirmed by official sources.
- New survivors
- 2 — Enforcer (unlocked by default) and Acolyte (unlockable)
- New Curio
- The N'Tormat
- New enemies / bosses / elite type
- 3 / 3 / 1
- New standard stages
- 3, plus several trial stages
- New interactables
- 6
- New item types
- 14 Hexes and 11 Hallowed Items
- New standard items
- 3 — one lunar equipment, two boss items
- Unlockable skins
- 16 survivors get a new skin
- Music
- Score by Stavros Markonis (also composed Alloyed Collective) with a track featuring Nando Garza
Trials of N'kuhana
Pocket realms entered by ringing a gong, with three flavours and a shared timer.
Hexes
Fourteen items with no upside at all — you carry them only to trade them away.
N'Tormat Pages
A Curio that does not use your equipment slot, and the powers you can bank into it.
The design idea: power at a price
Earlier expansions handed out large power boosts with minor or temporary drawbacks — Void Cradles, Halcyon Shrines, Computational Exchange and drone buffs all let a run snowball with little resistance. Hallowed Concepts pushes both sides of that bargain: you can steal enormous power, but the run gets meaningfully more dangerous in exchange, and the trade is woven into the stages you already play rather than walled off in a separate DLC path.
The route in runs through the cult of N'Kuhana: complete the Wake event, reach the Trials, find the Shrines of Compulsion, then obtain the N'Tormat and gather its Pages.
Ships alongside a free base-game update
The 1.21 update adds the optional Karma system for the moon confrontation, grants six original survivors a brand-new skill each, and rebalances older content — most notably the Halcyon Shrine, which is far less likely to appear on Stage 1.
Read the full 1.21 patch notes →What is paid and what arrives for free
The expansion and the patch that ships with it are separate purchases in one sense and the same download in another. Buying Hallowed Concepts gets you the survivors, the Curio, the new stages, enemies and bosses, the Hexes and Hallowed Items. The 1.21 update that lands alongside it is free for everyone: the Karma system, a new skill for each of six original survivors, and the balance pass over older content.
The practical consequence is that base-game players still get a meaningfully changed game on launch day, while expansion owners get the new content on top. Which entries can appear in a run then follows the expansions you have enabled, which is why two lobbies on the same patch can see different item pools.
Where it sits in the expansion line
| Expansion | Released | List price |
|---|---|---|
| Survivors of the Void | 2022-03-01 | $14.99 |
| Seekers of the Storm | 2024-08-27 | $14.99 |
| Alloyed Collective | 2025-11-18 | $14.99 |
| Hallowed ConceptsThis page | 2026-10-08 | $14.99 |
Dates and prices come from the platform store listings. Prices move with sales, so treat the figure as the list price rather than what you will pay today.
Where this information comes from
- The launch announcement dated 8 October 2026, which lists the content manifest and the free update.
- Four developer diaries published between 21 May and 24 September 2026, covering design goals, Hexes and Hallowed Items, the Trials, and the two new survivors.
- The Steam store listing for the expansion, which carries the price, release date and the developer's own theme description.
Where the developer deliberately held a detail back, this page says so rather than filling the gap.
Official walkthrough and launch trailer
Risk of Rain
The developer's own inventory of what ships in the expansion and what arrives free
- Frames Enforcer as a returning character who switches between holding a position and attacking from it.
- Describes Acolyte as the unlockable half of the pair, built around melee.
- Keeps the paid expansion and the free base-game update as two separate lists rather than one announcement.
- Is the video that names the release date, which is why it doubles as the launch reference for this page.
Risk of Rain
The official launch trailer
Embedded without a transcript: this trailer has no English captions available, and captions gate transcription rather than embedding.