The Binding of Isaac: An Honest Opinion

I figured I'd better start off relatively small. This being my first review, I didn't want to jump into something huge, and then get totally lost and have no idea how to write what I wanted to write. So, I decided to pick a downloadable indie game, now available for download on Steam.


The Binding of Isaac is a Steam game that was released way back in the mythical month of September, (that's September 2011, depending on how far in the distant future you are when reading this), designed by Florian Himst and Edmund McMillen, the latter of Super Meat Boy fame. If you've played that, you pretty much know what you're getting into here. The easiest way to describe Isaac is by telling you it's the unholy spawn of  The Legend of Zelda and Super Meat Boy after a night of sweaty sex in the back of a poorly maintained Corolla. So, basically, it's Super Meat Boy given a Zelda-y action-adventure game twist.


If you're at all biblicaly inclined, you know the story of Isaac: Abraham is told by God to kill his son Isaac, takes his son to the top of a mountain to sacrifice him, angel appears to stop him, blah, blah, blah. In the game, the story is given a little twist. Basically, Isaac's mother goes crazy after spending all her time watching the Christian channel on TV, and starts hearing a voice in her head. Eventually, as voices in your head are apt to do, it told her to kill someone: namely, Isaac. In order to escape her, Isaac jumps down into the basement, and winds up in a private hell.


The meat of the game is fairly simple. You have to navigate your way through 5 dungeons, all with a very Zelda-like feel, in order to evade the knife of your murderous mother. That, in a nutshell, is the game. But as you may expect, it being from the creator of Super Meat Boy, that's no easy task. The Binding of Isaac can get really tough at times. The best way to describe that is by telling you that if you die at any time during any of the 5 dungeons, that's it. It's game over. No checkpoints, no save spots, no second chances. You have to start from scratch.

How he's writing in his diary when he's dead, I have no idea.

Aside from the difficulty, the perma-death, and the messed up, vaguely biblical story the game is pretty much a standard Zelda clone. There are treasure chests in the dungeons with items inside: keys, coins, bombs, and other things to help you on your way. There's a boss to fight at the end of each dungeon, although, unlike Zelda there isn't a special boss key to find. Kill all the enemies in the room where the boss door is located and it opens up. I rather liked that change to the formula, since I hated having to track down stupid boss keys. It always just felt like padding.

Speaking of bosses, and just enemies in general, the enemy design in this game is one of the weirdest I've ever seen in my life. There's really only ever a bare suggestion at what it is you're supposed to be fighting: the rest of the time, it's just disembodied heads, or bodies with engorged heads, or flies (okay, that's not quite as weird, but still, why flies?), and other, stranger things. If the game had even a hint of realism to it, the enemies would be downright disgusting to look at. As it is, you get a moment of 'what exactly is it that I'm fighting?' every once in a while. The bosses are even stranger. Once I fought a distinctly humanoid thing with an extra head attached to an umbilical-cord thing running to its stomach, and both the humanoid thing and the head were trying to make my life a living hell. Actually, they were trying to end it, but let's not get nit-picky here. Another time, the boss was two worm things with a weird human-like heads. I get the feeling that all the enemies are supposed to be symbolic of something, but I don't know what that would be, so they're just plain old weird. Also, I feel something would be amiss if I didn't comment on the way Isaac himself looked. Yes, that's him: the completely naked boy with a face covered in tears. Which are, by the way, your primary weapon to start with. Again: weird.

You can't see it in this picture, but those worm things poop. Just thought you should know

 There was a particular nuance in my language describing the bosses that I wonder if you caught. I said "once, I had to fight..." Now, in a regular Zelda game/clone, that would mean in the same playthrough, in a different dungeon. Not so in Isaac. The dungeons of every game are randomly generated, and the bosses never come in the same order. I haven't played quite enough to know if the game is restricted to the same five bosses, just mixed and matched, but I doubt it. Every new game also has different items, and different reward drops from the bosses. Effectively, you're never playing the same game twice. In an age full of seven-hour titles, a game that could go on and on forever is a nice change. Also, every time you get through all five dungeons, you unlock something that will appear (if you're lucky) within the dungeons during your next playthough. There are also other characters you can unlock, so you don't always have to be the little naked crying boy, and they even have different stats, so it's not as simple as just throwing a new skin over Isaac and calling it a day: they're whole new characters to play through the game with. And yes, the new characters, and the new items you can get all follow the same thread the game has been tugging at since it started: they're all kind of weird.

That is an item. More specifically, it is a fly. Why do I need a fly? I already have a Shoop-da-Woop.

The Binding of Isaac is not an easy game, by any stretch, but it is a fun one. Randomly generated dungeons, new items to unlock, new characters to play as, and a psychological need to disobey one's mother mean that this is well worth the price of admission. The game isn't perfect, though, even if I've kind of been singing its praises. There are a few glaring flaws or just general shortcomings in its design.


Single playthroughs are very short, which can be good and bad at the same time, depending on how much you want to play. It's not like getting through the five dungeons and then starting from square one if you still feel like playing is a big deal, but a little extra length could have made it so that one playthrough at a time would have slated anyone's thirst. There is also no way to save your progress, which is fine while you're playing, since it adds a challenge, but it also means you can't temporarily save your progress if you have to stop playing. An option to save and quit, where the save file was erased as soon as you resumed your game would have been nice. There isn't really a whole lot of depth or variety to the gameplay, but it's a small downloadable game, and that was almost certainly a deliberate design choice, so me holding that against it would be sort of insane. There's also problems inherent with random generation. Sometimes the random rooms generate fairly poorly. For example, in one room I entered, the only enemy inside was a single fly, who, upon realizing that all of his friends had deserted him, attempted to run away, while I, needing to get into the next room, was forced to run around shooting my tears at him. Another time I encountered an entire floor full of rooms that were empty of enemies or features of any kind, save one that had a single key sitting in the middle of it. There are also times when a room generates with a chest in the middle, but there are pits surrounding the chest, and with no way to jump, (unless it's a power-up I haven't come across yet), there is no way to get to these chests. Similarly, sometimes enemies will spawn in the middle of a room, the section of the floor they're on surrounded by pits, and when you kill them all, an item drops out of reach. Those are the dangers of randomly generating your levels, and this game isn't going to escape unscathed. It's unfortunate, but the more you play the game, the more you're going to come across minor gripes because of randomly generate rooms. It's a risky thing to throw into a game, although it has crossed my mind that, this game being as difficult as it is, those kinds of things were done on purpose, just to frustrate you a little bit, but even then, it seems unnecessary. 


I want to make sure people understand what they're getting into: yes, it is a Zelda clone, but it is not a full Zelda experience. It's more like the first half-hour or forty-five minutes of a Zelda game on repeat, with the potential for a few minor gameplay gripes to pop up every now and then. Now, if, like me, you're a fan of old-school Zelda, then The Binding of Isaac should scratch an itch for you. It's fun, challenging, and manages to be endearing, even though the design is extremely strange. All in all, it's a nice little game, and it does for action-adventure titles what Super Meat Boy did for platformers: gives them the unequaled ability to kick your ass. That's my honest opinion, anyway.