Review: The Binding of Isaac
By Miodrag Kovačević | September 30, 2011 | Reviews | No comments | Share
The Binding of Isaac is the brain-child of Edmund McMillen of Gish and Super Meat Boy fame, as well as Florian Himsl. The plot is loosely based on the story from the Old Testament; in the game’s version, Isaac had a care-free life with his mother. He’d play and draw all day and his mother would sit on the sofa and watch Christian TV. One day, Mom heard a voice, supposedly from God, who told her that her son was corrupted by the evil in this world, so Mom took away all of Isaac’s things. The voice called again saying that Isaac had to be cut off from all the evil in this world and confess his sins, so Mommy dearest did just that. Finally, the voice asked that she take away her son’s life as proof that she loved God above all else. Isaac saw his mother coming with a kitchen knife and panicked. The little boy found a trap door leading to the basement and jumped through it before the crazed parent reached him.
The Macabre
While the aesthetics are something I usually refer to last, they are impactful enough in this case to be a defining feature. As you may have already assumed from the plot, The Binding of Isaac has quite a few religious references, to such an extent that the game could only exist as an indie title on the PC, since I can’t see any publisher touching it with a 10 ft. pole.
I think the first playthrough is probably the most disturbing one, especially if you go in blind. Isaac runs around naked and scared through the depths of what seems to be Hell itself, fighting off monsters with his own tears and writing a suicide note as a game over screen if you lose. The eerie music and the enemies offer such an unsettling atmosphere that I could only compare it with a Silent Hill title. It wasn’t scary; it was just so very wrong and so very disturbing.
As I delved deeper and picked up more power ups, twisting the once pure looks of Isaac into something demonic and disfigured, I was afraid I was doing something wrong, something I would be punished for later. This was meta-knowledge, however. I had heard that the game had multiple endings and I thought that all the Satanic pacts I had made would cause me to regret it all after finishing the game. There was this lingering feeling that I couldn’t really win no matter what I did.
As I played more, I realized that the endings were based on the number of times you beat the game, not any decisions you may have made. Slowly, more and more jokes emerged and I realized the game wasn’t as sad a tale as I had initially thought. Well, it was sad, but it had enough jokes to ruin whatever sense of dread haunted me initially. Despite this, a few details slipped that shocked me even after the illusion was broken. For instance, when you pick up the wooden spoon that raises your speed, spoon-shaped bruises appear on Isaac’s face.
Zelda Dungeon Shooter-Crawler
In the vein of highly descriptive “X meets Y”, The Binding of Isaac would most easily be described as a mix of the dungeons from the first Legend of Zelda and shoot ‘em ups. The levels, items and enemies are all randomly generated, so each playthrough is unique. However, the game takes a page from roguelikes, giving you only one life and no saves between levels, meaning you have to play everything in one sitting.
The main feature is the replay value, and many elements contribute to it, the most notable one being the visual appearance of your character. Literally every item you pick up changes Isaac’s looks. Lipstick, shoes, belts, everything. In addition to this, you can also customize your projectile weapon in many ways, turning the initial single tear shots into charged homing triple shot chocolate milk bubbles. The game basically feeds off the gamer addiction of having higher numbers and more stuff. You want more hearts, more projectiles, more speed, more everything. It’s always “maybe I’ll find something in the next room.”
The cost of randomness, however, can cause you to waste your time. Even if it’s fun to explore and find new items, you might also find items that don’t raise your stats, or items that raise stats you don’t need. I had such a problem when I didn’t find a single item that upgraded my projectiles in any relevant way. The boss kept spawning flies that locked on to me and I couldn’t clear them all fast enough before the next wave spawned. All this meant that damage to the actual boss was minimal and I was more or less fighting a losing battle. It can work just as well the other way around. I’ve had builds that literally dominated anything in my path, turning the game into a stress-relief application.
The only thing I noticed that wasn’t random were the special rooms. Each level, regardless of layout, contained a gauntlet room, a shop, a golden room and a secret room.
One feature that I thoroughly enjoyed were the bombs, or just explosions in general. Rather than merely being Bomberman bombs, there were multiple uses. You could find secret rooms, break down boulders to make bridges over gaps, or even break down closed doors to escape a room you couldn’t handle. I was even more surprised when I saw you could use bombs to break open slot machines, earning a few coins without pulling the handle. This made the explosives a currency worth more than the actual coins, since the game rewards smart use of the bombs.
Technical Difficulties
While I am the last person to discuss in which engine a game should be coded, I still have to ask: why Flash? This fact alone caused some major issues for me as well as other users if the Steam forums are anything to go by. The most notable being the constant slow downs when things got busy. My PC is hardly high end, but it should be able to run something like The Binding of Isaac if it could, say, run Dead Space 2 with a constant 60FPS. The slowdowns were more annoying if anything, as they actually made certain moments easier and only cost me health in one fight.
Another inherent problem, which I am glad I looked up, were the save games. A fair warning to anyone playing: do not delete any Flash-related cache or data from your PC, as it will delete all your save games and stats.
I could deal with all of this, but the random crashes devastated me. The game died on me twice, for no apparent reason. Both times occured near the very end of the game with a good build, effectively making me waste 40 minutes twice. The fact that I had unlocked new characters and items and the data was lost didn’t make things easier.
There should be a patch this weekend, so these issues will hopefully get fixed.
Judgement
The Binding of Isaac is fun mostly because of item hunting and that primal human instinct to get bigger numbers. There’s no shame in such design, but it’s worth noting that it’s the main driving force behind the gameplay. The actual combat is very repetitive once you’ve realized the abilities of each enemy type. The game is hard, don’t get me wrong, but after you’ve learned how to strafe, it gets much easier.
Unlike Super Meat Boy, where you had to unlock everything and get the best time possible, The Binding of Isaac offers very little to do after you’re done unlocking and have gotten all the endings. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you; I have 7 hours racked up so far and will surely require much more to actually get 100%. However, if you’re the type of person who was never into such titles, it is unlikely that Isaac will convert you.
Score: 7.0/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
