The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (2014)

The Binding of Isaac is a weird game with a twisted art style, story and enemies. You fight your way out of your mother's uterus, while fighting against bleeding anuses, cysts, headless people, tape worms and other vile creations. The goal is the same every time, fight your way through various levels and eventually break free of your prison.

This reskin, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth adds nothing new or original in the base game. All of the improvements and new features are only available through the various, weird DLC’s.

This game is hard as balls. It is part of its charm and is on par with games like Super Meat Boy. I like a good challenge, although some deaths are a little cheap.

In terms of graphics, the game looks simple but nicely animated at the same time. The gore is detailed the environments are nicely done.

The music is excellent. For some reason it captivates the weird and disturbing aesthetic of this game in a flawless way.

The controls are fluent, are easy to understand and just work.

In my own personal taste, I have a dislike for games that reset completely when you die, after collecting a lot of items, gear and coins. This is one of the reasons that I do not care for this game too much.

My problem with this game is that it is too repetitive. Sure, this can be a certain charm, but with The Binding of Isaac, I had enough after a few games. Sure, the enemies, items, environments and crazy stuff all around you changes every time you play, but the principle is still the same and gets kind of boring.

Every playthrough is also a gamble. Sometimes you get overpowered items that obliterate everything in your path, other times you are stuck with a debuff that messes up your playthrough.

To top it off, this game has very weird DLC’s, with names like Afterbirth, Afterbirth +, Repentance and Repentance +. I simply have no clue what the difference is between the normal and “+” variants or why they would make it so confusing.

These DLC’s are not cheap either and the whole set costs around 50 euros. I find this ridiculous for a simple Indie game. And yet again, the game is exactly the same as before, only with new levels, enemies, a new game mode (Some Bomber man clone) and Multiplayer support.

To be fair to it, the Multiplayer functionality is pretty fun, and the game becomes much more enjoyable when playing with friends, or in my case, my wife.

In the end, the repetitiveness, ridiculously high total price and weird DLC naming of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth makes me not recommend this game. It is simply not for me.

This is the absolutely best rougue like I have ever played and still do. And enjoy as well.

At first the concept is a bit confusing. In it's base the game is a top down shooter where you progress from room to room, beat the boss of that floor and move on to the next. This is all backed up by a rather strange story and game is heavily influenced by bible mythos though twisting and bending it for it's own purpose.

You go through different floors, picking different items that you have no idea what they do. Things get unlocked, paths of the game change. You beat one boss, another one gets unlocked. Whole floors get unlocked even. But with every play you learn something new - how to fight a certain boss, what a certain item does and how to find things you had no idea existed just a few plays ago. And it's so addictive.

Some runs are hard and frustrating, other with a right combination of items become a walk in the park and it's so enjoyable. Items, and there is a lot of them, synergize with one another creating great combos and combinations.

The replay value of this game is just mind boggling. And the community around the game is both great and large. Definitely recommend that game as it's the best in this category.

Fountain soda machines are the modern alchemy. I've likely had everything that's labeled on one and could probably write a tier list on some EVO subforum dedicated to soft drinks, arguing that Dr. Pepper is the Brawl-era Meta Knight. Soft-drink experience and repetition breed boredom. Curiosity necessitates experimentation. There were three soda choices when I visited Germany: Coke, Orange Fanta, and Mezzo Mix (A combination of Coke and Orange Fanta that's darn tasty). Maybe this Fuddruckers will let me try to recreate it? 1 part Coke, 2 parts Fanta, not quite. 1-1? Nope. 1.5-1? Bingo. If you've ever brought Erlenmeyer flasks to a Wendy's, I bet we could be friends.

Isaac's biggest strength for me is exploring the interactions that various items have that were hinted at, but never fully realized in the original game. Homing Shot + Laser = Homing Laser and you've got Gunstar Heroes in my Binding of Isaac. Combine the Unicorn Stump, which grants temporary invincibility every room but removes your ability to shoot, with the Sacrificial Knife, an orbiting piece of cutlery that does massive damage but puts the wielder in danger to use, and you've got a game-winning combo from two otherwise weak items. Discovering these combinations gives me the satisfaction of discovery and exploratory utility, the sense of being MacGyver trapped in a dungeon with only an onion and bag of mushrooms. I have created accidents and they are glorious. Really. My Steam screenshots folder is full of them, each one a blessing from the Random Number Generator gods.

Nearly everything else about this game fights me in this goal of discovering item combinations. The music grunts in a bored ambience at least until I load up a playlist of podcasts to distract myself with the legendary goofs of the McElroy brothers. The technical visuals conflict with the visual theme, where poop is rendered to look polished and less like the scribblings of a garage band's composition notebook like the original Binding of Isaac. If the theme is low-brow and scatological, why not own that visually instead of covering it up? The style is a further South Park-ification of the original, making design choices that went from tolerably gross to indefensible, making punch lines of enemies like "Mega Fatty" in the same horrid way that games have done with overweight enemies for years.

A friend commented to me that they can usually tell whether they can beat BoI within the first 10 minutes of a run and it's a fair assessment. Some items are "carry" items that can often single-handedly get me through the game, while others are useful in such rare cases that they feel wasteful. Assuming I was skilled enough to consistently reach the depths of the game regardless of item comp, having more wasteful items further draws out the game session to the point where I'd rather restart the run in hopes of wielding a more interesting itemset. Yet it's also fascinating that the game doesn't "owe" me to provide the tools necessary to beat the game with anything other than the most grueling challenge. Another friend described this as the opposite of the hero's journey, where I exist solely as an accident in this world and it doesn't care if I win or not. Since this is centrally a story about child abuse, that message fits in a gutwrenching way, a message of frequent powerlessness and confusion, a message of frustration that things aren't supposed to be this way and lacking the means to correct it. Games have frequently told me they're not supposed to be that way. Life isn't supposed to be that way. But here we are. There's a toybox there in Binding of Isaac, but it really doesn't care how I play with what's inside. Or even if I play at all.