The Binding of Patrick: 02/26/2014

So glad this game is getting more attention on the site. Loving the new focus on rougelikes. Hopefully we get to see Dungeons of Dreadmore sometime soon. Keep up the great work Patrick!

Been playing this game for awhile now and It's great to see it being played from a, willing, beginner's standpoint.

Patrick, any chance of pulling in Remo for some tips? I know he played the hell out of this game a year ago. Or, do your Spelunky issues run too deep?

Just got my tarot cards today! :D

Edit: Awesome run today! Well done

I honestly can't play this game with anyone other than Magdalene.

Brad playing dota which I've spent hundreds of hours on, now Patrick playing BoI which I've spent ~200 hours on. Shame I never manage to catch it live, though I'd probably spoil too much with hints. Anyways, good job Patrick, finishing Mom on the... 5th run? That's really fast!

Sick art

Singing spelunky at the beginning has to be the best part.

What the hell happened to patrick at 7:38? Is patrick a secret lizard man from space?

I've logged 8 or 9 hours and never beat mom. Patrick "RogueMaster" Kleppek beat her right away. Bravo sir!

For me Cain was too useful not to play as, but I never unlocked the dice for Isaac.

@xite: I find the dice to be a bit overrated anyway, though perhaps I just have terrible luck with it.

@patrickklepek If I may give you just one tip about secret rooms, it's this: there's no need to test more than one wall per suspected secret room. You were fixated on one specific part of the map in this run as a possible secret room, but as soon as you bombed it and there was no secret entrance you should have just moved on and tried a different part of the map.

You'll probably see how this works better once you come across one of the items that lets you see secret rooms. I won't mention which items those are. :)

Overall good run today, though! Looking forward to seeing how well you fare once you get past Mom. It gets significantly harder.

@patrickklepek You keep saying that you are hammering on the buttons to continuously shoot. You can just hold the button down to keep shooting continuously.

Loving this. It inspired me to go back to BOI myself and finally see it through to the end. Mom's Heart and beyond is really rough, especially with Wrath of the Lamb, but I've been having some great runs.

@towersixteen: I find the dice to be amazing. Even on good runs you'll probably run into several items you don't want or need, and if you find them early enough you get several chances to reroll them into something useful. Getting a few extra useful items is well worth it, and helps prevent terrible runs where you get nothing but useless spacebar items in the treasure rooms.

@patrickklepek I think you were pretty spot on with most of your choices. Maggie's extra health and heart are good for learning the game, but after learning enemies/bosses you'll be able to play through most of the game with taking low enough damage that you can heal through pickups. Some health is important, but for lower levels combat-assisting items and powerups are far more necessary. Otherwise you did well in strategizing about when to use bombs/keys/money depending on your resources. It's same as Spelunky in that you try to maximize what the game gives you. I normally try to keep around at least a key for a treasure room and a bomb for anything valuable.

Wait, serious question, is this game actually supposed to be humorous? It just seems disturbing to me.

@narujoe93 said:

Yeah, I really hope he meant "holding down the button continuously". This game would get very tiring if you were tapping the shoot button constantly.

Anyway, Pat got beat by Mom, but I can't blame him. I still think Mom is basically the hardest fight in the game, pre- or post-expansion. You can't hug any of the center of the walls for more than a second without her arm wailing on you, she spawns some enemies that actually have a fair bit of health or shoot projectiles, and when she spawns multiple enemies, sometimes you just get surrounded. She throws a lot at you, all at once.

@mithhunter55 said:

Just got my tarot cards today! :D

Edit: Awesome run today! Well done

:O Amazing.

I would say that the final 3 story bosses are much harder.

Patrick's lack of appreciation for the music in this game is depressing. Other than that, this is a great feature. Having put ~800 hours into the game, It is great to see someone new learning all the kinks and strategies.

It will be great when he learns to adapt his Gurdy strategy on Mom.

@beachthunder: But you have so much more room to maneuver in those fights, and if you make it through the Depths and Womb to those final 3 story bosses, your build is probably halfway decent. I guess I feel like Mom is often the decider of whether I'm going to make it to the credits or not, because if I can beat her, usually that particular run is good enough that I'll make it all the way to the end.

@xite: I exclusively used Cain until I got the Dice.

Yeah, I definitely get what you're saying, It's certainly a threshold. Although, there's an easy way to beat Mom instantly.

Also, the last few bosses can really throw a lot of stuff at you.

@bisonhero: I don't really have that much trouble with mom (at least not anymore). This is a poor explanation of my strategy (mostly because I don't really have a concrete strategy): constantly keep moving and stay in the middle of the room. I, personally, dont pay too much attention to the enemies she throws at you, and tend to avoid them. After that, my main attack point is her leg. Move left, wait for the legs shadow, move right, leg drops down, shoot, repeat. Sometimes I'll shoot at the other stuff that pops out of the wall, but that isn't my focus. The rest is really up to luck (the items you get and how much health you have). I haven't died on her in a very long time, so I must be doing something right.

@narujoe93: That is a good way to do it. I stand just above the West portal so it only triggers her arm, but it doesn't damage me. Proceed to keep hitting her arm and taking care of the enemies she spawns and bam, she is dead.

@anbilow: it's supposed to be very dark humor.

Black comedy or gallows humor is often disturbing, but I think the game's grotesque-cute artstyle can be oddly endearing.

So, for anyone who wants to know more about the secret room:

Also, I got real worried early on in this run. When he picked up Lemon Mishap, I first thought it was

Luckily, it wasn't. Good run today Patrick!

I'm so happy Patrick has finally discovered how great this game really is. When it came out they kind of shoved it aside and didn't really seem to care for it, but it is a fantastic game and a wonderful timesink.

It's a roguelike

He really is just fucking around now, isn't he? Whatever. I count my victories where I can. Not everyone cares enough to respect history when indie fads roll in.

@littlejehova: I would also love to see Patrick play Dungeons of Dredmor, but I feel like the game would not fit the show compared to Spelunky and BoI. Being careful and taking your time can mean 30 minutes on a single floor. Runs that make it past the first three or four floors can go on for a rather significant amount of time, way longer than one hour. The RPG and loot mechanics are definitely fun, but probably not as fun for an audience to watch.

@crippl3: Do you know if that still applies in the expansion? I could have sworn that it was harder to find the secret room using that strategy than in vanilla.

Perhaps this has been addressed before but is there a way you could limit the volume coming through your microphone? whenever you exclaim it can get very loud and occasionally painful especially with headphones.

In any case keep up the good work, really enjoying all the content you've been putting out.

There will never be victories associated with whining about genres.

I'm really enjoying this feature. Thanks Patrick!

Another great episode. Beat the game for the first time today, thanks for the inspiration Patrick!

Anybody else getting weird jump cuts, like about 22 minutes in when Patrick beats Gurdy and visits the Devil guy? It just skips him going in, and I know it wasn't cut for time because Patrick doesn't do that.

If Partick starts streaming an actual Roguelike, I hope to god it's not Dredmore. It has the nice graphics, sure, but it's far and away the least mechanically interesting traditional roguelike. There's very little in the way of interesting interaction going on in there, at least compared to, say, Nethack or ADOM.

Hey Patrick, some arcade room feedback for you, sort of spoilery.

Loving the stream by the way. I'm yelling at the screen less and less each episode.

@patrickklepek Any of the walls surrounding a secret room will work as an entrance.

So if you use a bomb and don't find it, youʼre at the wrong location.

There is a rule which should let you determine where the secret roomʼs location is, but the random generator is bugged, so the room is sometimes in the wrong place—itʼs one of the things that the SpiderMod fixes.

The best way to treat an arcade room, is to blow up all of the machines and the guy. You get much more in return than relying on pure luck.

C'mon man. This is certainly less roguelike than NetHack or more recently Dungeons of Dredmor, but it certainly isn't the most offensive application of the classification. It might not strictly adhere to the "Berlin Interpretation", but it's easy to understand how it could be seen as falling under a broader definition of the term.

The plot to this game is so deranged.

@mdnthrvst:

I personally have trouble respecting people who get genuinely upset about genres expanding but to each his own.