A TBT post on a Thursday, that’s wild.
Welcome to a post about my favorite game of all time… debatably. The Binding of Isaac was originally a flash game made by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl in 2011. The game itself is a top-down dungeon crawling roguelike. You play as the titular Isaac as he traverses his childhood traumas and defeats disgusting monsters with equally disgusting items.
The Binding of Isaac has evolved considerably since then, having been remade as The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth in 2014. Rebirth has seen three major expansions in Afterbirth, Afterbirth +, and the final, Repentance. Each expansion added more items, bosses, enemies, and synergies to the game. As it stands now, the game has 732 items to collect and combine. Because of this massive amount of variety to be had in each run, there is near infinite replayability in this game even before you take into consideration the 637 achievements required to unlock everything the game has to offer.
I… have an unhealthy amount of hours in this game. As of writing this, Steam tallies it up at 1,618, and that’s not counting the hours I’ve clocked on other platforms like the Switch. TBoI (that’s what I’m calling it for the rest of the article) is an absolute masterclass in having an addictive gameplay loop.
Aside from the gameplay just being near flawless, the game basically lets you do as much as physically possible. What I mean is that if you set your mind to finding a certain item or getting a certain thing to pay out, chances are you can do it. Even for as much as I’ve played, I’m still finding new content in this game.
Ran out of things to do even with the slew of content available? Good thing Repentance added official mod support! New mods are being added every day, so there is absolutely zero chance you’ll ever run out of those.
Getting back to the game itself, each run you’ll fight your way through a series of floors and bosses to reach a final boss. The game holds several final bosses and a few optional bosses (though I suppose any boss is technically optional in any given run). Each run has a “seed” specific to it and it alone, meaning everything you encounter will always appear exactly the same in that seed, including RNG. You could theoretically pick one single seed and practice it forever, but I feel like that would get boring and wouldn’t do the game justice.
The game’s story (yes it actually has one) draws heavily from Christianity and McMillen’s own experiences growing up as a child in a very religious household. Isaac is born to parents who both have considerable vices: his father is (speculated to be) a gambler, and his mother is (also speculated to be) a drug addict who (is blatantly) a religious zealot. Isaac’s parents have an intense falling out and divorce one another. Isaac, feeling responsible, falls into a deep depression. One day, spurred on by “the voice of God”, Isaac’s mother tries to sacrifice Isaac to God to prove her devotion. Isaac slips away into a trapdoor in the floor, and the game’s events begin.
My mind is so rotted from this game that I’ll go to church and be thinking “OH MY GOD! BINDING OF ISAAC REFERENCE!!!” throughout the whole service. 10/10 game, absolutely recommend.