A Game of Strange and Creative Fun
The Binding of Isaac is a downloadable rogue-like from the minds of programmer Florian Himsl, and the artist and designer behind the acclaimed Super Meat Boy, Edmund McMillen. Bearing McMillen’s trademark twisted art and narrative, the game acts as a loose and bastardised retelling of the Bible story of the same name. In its opening we are introduced to Isaac, a young boy who lives with an abusive mother obsessed with Christian TV programmes. Under the command of messages she believes she is receiving from God, she takes Isaac’s clothes, locks him in his room, and finally tries to kill him. Escaping through a hatch in the floor, Isaac finds a dungeon under his house which he must journey through, collecting items and defeating grotesque creatures along the way, in preparation for slaying his crazed mother.
The Binding of Isaac carries most of the standard characteristics you’d expect to find in a rogue-like; you journey through a randomly-generated dungeon fighting enemies, the game is highly focused around the loot you collect, and with a high risk of death at every turn and a perma-death mechanic in place, it’s more about how far you can get through the dungeon on each play-through than it is about beating the game every time. Where “The Binding” starts to deviate from this formula is that instead of combat consisting of simply butting stats with enemies, the game is essentially a four-way shooter, allowing you to move Isaac with the WASD keys and fire with the arrow keys. It also takes considerable influence from The Legend of Zelda; measuring health in hearts, making bombs and keys essential items in the game, and filling each screen with a top-down view of a rectangular room.
While there is something to be said for the traditional RPG battles that many rogue-likes present, the core combat of The Binding of Isaac just feels like it hooks your attention better, remaining active and gripping, while being simple enough to bear repetition. The game is also well-paced, with floors of the dungeon feeling just long enough to provide a good deal of challenge and discovery, but being just short enough to make it feel like you’re progressing at a rapid rate. Individual games also generally last long enough that it feels like you’ve really gotten somewhere within them, but are short enough to make it feel oh so easy to hit that replay button and jump right back in. However, while the combat and pacing may be rather well done, The Binding of Isaac does have a bit of a problem when it comes to the items you collect as you go.
Perhaps it’s an inescapable symptom of being a rogue-like, but this game is one of those experiences where it feels like your success is based primarily on the hand you’re dealt. My best runs in the game have simply been when I’ve happened to randomly stumble across lots of helpful items, while my worst have been when I’ve only been able to scavenge a few that were of use. This of course can leave you feeling like your skill only matters so much, and that your potential to triumph is to a fair degree out of your control, but it does come with the trade-off of making many of the powerful items you acquire a joy to collect and use, at least, when you know what the items do.
The game has the unfortunate habit of only showing the effects of the items you pick up for a couple of seconds in the bottom right corner of the screen, and worse, doesn’t display the effects of many of the items you pick up at all. The benefits of some of these items become obvious from gameplay, but many of them aren’t the kind of thing you’d work out unless you looked them up, leading you into situations where you can end up choosing between two different items to equip with no real idea what either does.
Aesthetically, the game chooses to take on the kind of cartoony grotesqueness that Edmund McMillen has featured prominently in his games in the past. It looks good, it’s unique, the art is creative, and there’s a kind of fascination involved where you often want to keep playing just to see what new weird and disgusting things there are to discover around the next corner. There were moments where I kept wondering if McMillen had gone a little too far though. It’s arguable that this is part of the game’s appeal, but fighting against the corpses of children who’ve hung themselves or being able to obtain a foetus that cries blood as an ally might not be everyone’s cup of tea. On a more positive note, the whole thing is backed by the exciting music of Danny Baranowsky who you may remember from the Super Meat Boy soundtrack.
When it comes down to it, The Binding of Isaac is a little gross, and play-throughs often feel like more of a roll of the dice than the test of skill they would first appear as, but it’s still a great rogue-like. Gameplay is engaging, it’s morbidly fascinating, and it’s very compulsive.
