The Binding of Isaac

Well, this is the first real post I'm going to make, so I figured I'd make it about the game that's been taking up a pretty significant portion of my time.

What you are looking at up there, is the splash art for The Binding of Isaac which is available on Steam and created by the dudes who gave us Super Meat Boy.  The game itself isn't exactly new, as with most games, due to my massive backlog I don't play new releases usually for a LONG time, unless I've been particularly excited for it.

Anyway, before I get into talking about this game properly, I'll give a quick overview of the story.  Basically, you play as Isaac, a naked baby who is a victim of abuse from his fundamental christian mother.  Isaac's mother believes that she is hearing the voice of god, who has commanded her to sacrifice her only child to prove her love for him.  Isaac then promptly jumps into the basement and so begins your quest to kill your own mother.  AWESOME!

OK, so the story is kind of dumb but that's OK for this kind of game.  Basically what Isaac is, is a Rougelike.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it means that you have to deal with randomly generated items, loot and enemies in order to go kill the big bad at the end and if you die, you die permanently and have to start over.

Now I'm not a huge rougelike player, I have enjoyed things such as Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and the like but I've never really been any good at them.  Isaac streamlines the dungeon crawling thing and makes it very accessible to those who aren't familiar with this genre.  There is no character creation, no option of race, gender, class etc. just a few naked babies to choose from (which are basically all Isaac wearing some kind of wig or eye patch or something) and a big dungeon to explore.

Now this isn't exactly a long game, it's actually pretty short as far as most rougelikes go.  The game has about 5 stages from the outside, which expands to 8 or so when you beat it for the first time.  But don't let that fool you into thinking this is an easy game, oh no, its HARD and it will kick your ass every which way until your crying like a little bitch in the corner of the room.

The game starts out out weak as shit, your bullets do sod all real damage and you have very little health, but the game provides you with HUGE amounts of treasure to find to upgrade your naked baby into a god killing powerhouse.  However, the game only turns you into a god killing power house every once in a while and will most of the time give you crap items and then fuck you over with a really hard room of enemies or a really annoying boss.

I mean, check this goddamn screen shot out

In the 56 runs I've had of this game so far, I've beaten it a grand total of 2 times.  Oh yeah, the real kick to the nads here is when you beat it that one time, it doesn't count, you gotta beat it AGAIN to make the mom kill count.  That first time just gets you the epilogue and the final few stages.

But this is the beauty of Isaac.  Even when the game gives you a crap set of items the challenge never feels unfair, it still always feels like you have a chance and no matter what shit happens to you, there is always that vague hope that the next item room will give you that one thing you need to win.  Plus the other great thing about this game is the sheer variation in the items.  My count reads 107 and that's not even nearly all of them and whats crap to me will not be crap to another player, so each person can really adapt to their own kind of play style.

I could talk for hours and hours about this goddamn game, but instead of gushing on here maybe I'll try and find a way to record some footage and gush there instead because this is turning into a bit of a wall of text.

However, before I wrap this post up, there is one thing I want to mention, and that's the DLC.

That up there folks, is the logo for The Wrath of the Lamb DLC for this game, and oh my god is it a case of DLC done RIGHT.  When I look at most DLC for games recently it just irritates me as tacked on garbage or shit we should have got anyway, but this, this is a perfect example of how DLC can be used to really improve a game.

This shit adds so much goddamn content.  Alternate levels, new rooms, new bosses, new versions of Isaac to play as, new endings, new enemies, NEW GODDAMN EVERYTHING!  It adds difficulty as well as a shitton of new stuff that makes the game feel fresh.  I can't commend the developers enough for providing DLC of this quality.  Also its cheap, I snagged it for a mere $3 off Steam, and who can't afford that!?

So hopefully you'll give The Binding of Isaac a go, I'm done gushing on here.  Any more gushing about this game will hopefully be done in hilarious videos of me failing to win.