The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The Binding of Isaac was one of the first games I wrote about on this blog way back when and recently a new version came out and it's fucking fantastic!  BoI:Rebirth is one of the ONLY games I have pre loaded off steam in years so that should be a good indication of just how good it is.

The Binding of Isaac is a rougelike game about a small child trying to escape from his mother killing him.  You must make your way through a randomly generated dungeon picking up items and killing enemies with your tears.  Like most games in the genre, permadeath is a large part of the game so if you die then you have to start all over again with everything reset to its starting values.  As you play and have successful runs, you start to unlock stuff like characters, challenges, items, locations and much much more. 

Basically, if you were a fan of the first Binding of Isaac it's essentially more of the same thing.  It's basically another expansion back disguised as a full game but the amount of additional content and fixes to certain things is so huge that it's absolutely worth the price of admission.

The Binding of Isaac is one of those games that just eats your fucking time without you even realising it.  You'll fire it up thinking "oh I'll just have a quick run or 2" and then 6 hours later your still playing it with absolutely no signs of stopping.  While the game doesn't contain any multi player features, if you have a group of friends to share stories of your successes or complete bullshit deaths the game becomes even more fun because everyone has their own unique story about some shit that happened to them.

Rebirth takes sharing the stories to a whole new level though because now you can share your dungeon seed with another person and they can re-live your run for themselves.  When you pause the game you are given a 6 character code that you can pass on to someone else and when they input it they will be given the exact same dungeon you were in.  However playing with a seed doesn't count towards unlocks or anything like that but you can still challenge each other if you feel like you had a particularly tough time.

If you aren't already in on the whole Isaac thing, go and buy the game right fucking now.  I'm serious, just close this window, fire up steam and fucking buy it.  Binding of Isaac is some of the most fun I've had with any indie game ever and it's the kind of game basically everyone can enjoy.