Hello and welcome back to my blog!
I am a fan of roguelike games and have played many over the past few years. But somehow, I missed one of the most popular roguelikes, The Binding of Isaac. I knew it was very famous among the genre and probably the biggest game when it comes to these dungeon roguelikes, but somehow it didn't entice me.
When Isaac’s mother starts hearing the voice of God, demanding a sacrifice be made to prove her faith, Isaac escapes into the dark and dangerous basement. There he faces droves of deranged monsters, lost brothers and sisters, his fears, and eventually the creature who gave him life.
Well, I decided to give it a proper go and see why people love this title so much. At first, I had a pretty mixed reaction, while I liked the controls and the various number of items and characters, it does a bad job of explaining what you get.
I don't hate games that make you experiment and learn on your own rather than teaching everything explicitly but the items in the games can get really overwhelming and this makes each run very chaotic.
There are a lot of things to like in the game as well. I loved the enemy variety and boss fights. I don't know how many they have, but it seems to be a lot and mostly random what you will face. This makes every run very unique and fresh. Sometimes your build makes it easy to defeat a specific enemy that you thought was pretty tough.
The game withheld information from you and doesn't tell you what each item does. It makes the game very unpredictable and a bit overwhelming to learn as a new game. Even the death screen tells you very little.
I love the little note they leave in their diary.
I unlocked a few more playable characters, each with their starting stats. Some even have cool abilities that make the run fun. I liked Eve, who has low health but deals more damage and gets some cool abilities when she gets to one health. She is a glass cannon, but really fun in the normal mode.
Another interesting thing we have in the game is the shop and a donation machine. This donation machine seems to be the only thing which doesn't reset to zero after the end of the run. So, I am guessing this is how we get powerful as we go. Interestingly, it only has 3 digits so I am not sure what will happen after we give it one more coin after 999. That is a big mystery for me. I just hope it doesn't reset to 0 lol.
There is a lot of content in the game too. I have the Birth of Issac Repentance which is a DLC expansion to the base game. They claim that it has all the content of the previous games + more enemies bosses and challenges all at one place. I tried a couple of challenges, but these are much harder than the normal mode.
It also has a co-op feature where you can play online with someone. I tried it with Beril, but the gameplay was a little laggy. I'm not sure if it was because of high ping or just an issue with the game.
I am thinking of adding mods that will help me with item descriptions. I don't think without it I can make it lol. These will be just quality of life mods, so I can have more fun. I might look up more useful mods if there are any that help me a little more with some of the things, like understanding luck in the game.
I will reserve my judgment of the game until I have seen more and played more runs. For now, I feel like I haven't even seen 5% of the content this game offers. I love the fact that starting a new run is pretty quick, and it is quite addictive, too. Also, you never know what you will find in the next room, so that keeps you on edge all the time, and one good item has the ability to completely change the fate of the run.
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Screenshots are from the game, The Binding of Isaac.