No doubt by now most of you will have heard about Edmund McMillen’s 2011 game The Binding Of Isaac before, as it gathered a lot of praise at the time and wowed critics and gamers by its unique style. With the sequel (sort of) on the horizon and a Steam pricing of £3.99, the game is up for this week’s Pocket Change Play – but is it worth the price of a cheap bottle of Rosé?
TBOI has its roots in flash gaming (this is the last one I swear), McMillen’s major body of work consisting of original, alternative flash games hosted on Newgrounds. After skulking around on the aforementioned website for around nine years, McMillen burst into the indie gaming scene with Super Meat Boy and gained some level of reputation with his two-man dev team Team Meat. Continuing to use the flash engine, McMillen joined forces with long-time collaborator Florian Himsl to make the game we’re covering this week.
TBOI is pretty disturbing in its content, touching on religious zealotism, infanticide, turds and the demonic. This is a game where your mother’s sanitary products are special items and your main weapon is the tears of the ever crying protagonist. Isaac is a naked, constantly teary baby who has narrowly avoided murder at the hands of his mother and is put through the ringer in a series of randomly generated dungeons. The art style is one fans of Super Meat Boy will be somewhat familiar with, although a lot more grotesque imagery is on display with maggots and flies occupying the arenas. At its foundation the game is a twin stick shooter in a similar vein to classic Smash TV, each level of the game more challenging than the last while the player amasses upgrades that morph Isaac into a more powerful yet twisted creation.
While I’m sure the game will appeal to a twisted niche in the internet stratosphere all by itself, I have to concede that the game is quite fun. There’s a huge amount of unlockables and secrets to find in the base game, and even more if you shell out for the DLC (that pushes us over a fiver though, I’m not made of money). Each game can last up to around an hour for a complete run-through and several playthroughs through the game are necessary to enjoy all the game has to offer. Seekers of a challenge need look no further, the difficulty of the game sometimes teetering on frustrating, watching half-an-hour of progress dissolve before your eyes due to the permadeath inflicted by McMillen.
Players can milk quite a lot of game time from TBOI, depending on the patience and threshold for defeat of the gamer. If I were to criticise the game, I’d have to point out the optimisation issues present in the game as a side effect of the flash engine – but the game is definitely worth the price for those looking for a challenging twin-stick shooter with a twist.
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