The Binding of Isaac - Indie Game Greatness

With the recent news regarding the release date of The Binding of Isaac Rebirth's DLC "Afterbirth" for the PS4 I figured now would be a good time for me to talk a little bit about the game itself. The Binding of Isaac Rebirth has become easily one of my most enjoyed video games I've played in recent years and with good reason.

Rebirth being a remake of the already very well made and unique original version of The Binding of Isaac means I can give a brief summary of what made both versions good and what makes this remake better. The game's premise is loosely based around the Biblical story of the same name only in this instance the story is about a young boy named Isaac who believe's his mother has gone insane listening to the "voice of God" telling her to try and kill him. In a blind panic, Isaac opens up a trap door in his room that leads to the basement and jumps down inside to hide from his mother, or at least that's what the game claims in its opening sequence. The game is rather abstract in its presentation with a lot of symbolism making it difficult to tell what is actually going on in little Isaac's life. Is he just imagining the games events? Has he gone insane? Has he died and is stuck in limbo? A lot of fans speculate what Isaac's mysterious story tells. What little we do know is that Isaac is a very imaginative young boy from a religious household with an abusive mother and this is reflected in the gameplay.

One of the many room types the player may encounter

 The gameplay itself functions like a top down rogue-like shooter where Isaac must traverse between randomly generated rooms on a randomly generated level, fending off the enemies in each room until he can progress towards the boss for that floor in order to dive down to the next stage. The twisted and symbolic nature of the game is already immediately apparent when the player has to use Isaac's actual crying tears as projectiles to defeat his rather gruesome enemies. If Isaac dies then its game over and the player will need to start a run from the very beginning again.

There are a lot of different items that could appear for Isaac

 The twisted imagery and challenge combined with the cutesy artstyle makes for a game that is both bleak and dark yet silly and not to be taken too seriously at the same time. Everything about the game design is randomly generated and down to how the player best adapts and makes do with whatever random item power ups or stat boosts/decreases the game provides you. You might get really unlucky and be stuck with various rubbish items that don't boost the stats you want and generally make the game more challenging, or you could get very lucky and get the item that let's Isaac vomit blood laser beams from his mouth to vaporise his enemies.

There are dozens of different items within the game that alter Isaac's stats, the properties of his tears or outright change his method of attack. This can lead to literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of items that can drastically change how Isaac plays and how he can handle different situations in the game. On one run he could be spitting out giant slow charging but high damaging balls of chocolate milk that sets enemies on fire, on other runs he could be firing bombs that explode into bundles of spiders that aid you in battle. The physical changes they cause to Isaac's appearance to reflect the items he has is also an interesting little touch. The random nature of the item pool, rooms and enemies you face allow for a crazy amount of replay value to this game, even more so with the fact that the more successful runs and challenges you complete in the game the more new items and bosses get added to the random game generation and even unlock new characters that function differently to how Isaac does at the start of a run without getting any items yet.

Isaac looking very warped after collecting
all these different items

The items themselves are all just as crazy, twisted and silly as you can imagine from a game about a child trying to escape his psychotic mother into a basement full of headless children and sentient poop which they fight off using their tears. Many items in the game make references to different religions, mythology, folklore, pop culture, internet memes and video games. For every set of demon wings and angel halo's there are items that do things like temporarily turn Isaac into a parody of Pac-Man. There was clearly a lot of thought put into this game to feature all it's little easter eggs, references and symbolism from its creator in a neat little package that is both cute yet very dark at the same time.

The original Binding of Isaac game was created in Flash which, while playable, had its limitations. Sometimes certain combinations of items would be too demanding for Flash to try and run at a consistent frame rate. Other limitations also meant you couldn't just save the game on your current run and leave to come back and play later, once you started a run you either had to complete it, leave the game open if you didn't want to lose your progress or simply leave and try an entirely new run next time. Rebirth thankfully managed to fix most of these issues and allowed a function that let you save the game on your current run if you perhaps needed to leave the game at some point to go and do something else whilst still deleting the run saved data if Isaac dies, meaning the challenge of only having one life in the game is still there and you can't just restart and attempt where you failed last time. The new Afterbirth DLC that was added to Steam a few months ago features even more items, more levels, more bosses, more item combinations that didn't combine before and new levels.

If you're looking for a game that stands out in the market currently over saturated with samey triple A experiences, then the Binding of Isaac Rebrith and Afterbirth are something I highly recommend. Its unique, dark, has a good sense of humour, challenging and has plenty of fun replay value to be had!

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