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Given that its thematic preoccupations include religious mania, mental illness and child abuse, The Binding Of Isaac is a disconcertingly comfortable kind of game to actually play. Descending into its smartly randomised dungeons may bring you face to face with buzzing blood-gorged flies, weeping tumors and tottering homunculi, but these subterranean chambers are also filled with tantalising loot, chattering slot machines, and glinting piles of gold. As one half of the team behind Super Meat Boy, designer Edmund McMillen’s clearly completely at home amongst cartoon viscera and oozing gristle; once again, he’s crafted – with the help of programmer Florian Himsl – an imaginative and quick-witted arcade experience that manages to be both depraved and strangely sweet by turn.
At the heart of the affair is a crafty recasting of one of the Old Testament’s greatest hits. When his mother starts hearing heavenly voices calling for his sacrifice, Isaac must retreat into the depths of the family’s fetid basement in order to escape from her murderous advances. The set up – and the set dressing - plays heavily on Christianity’s historic preoccupations with suffering, but once the game’s moving, religious satire must compete for your attentions with the warm embrace of the Rogue-like.
And so you’re off into familiar action RPG territory, picking your way through a series of dungeons, defeating a congregation of suitably disgusting bosses with your projectile tears, and leveling up powers and stats by collecting a variety of unlikely items. These range from over-the-counter pills to Tarot cards, women’s underwear and even malformed siblings (they act as turrets): some are immediately useful, some are initially confusing, and a nasty handful can be lastingly hazardous. The game’s short by the standards of the genre, but it’s pleasantly wide with it. Everything about Isaac encourages repeated playthroughs, and each subsequent trip through these procedurally rearranged gauntlets will reward you with fresh enemy types, a handful of new weapons or power-ups, and a glimpse, if you’re lucky, into a few mysterious secret chambers. Compact as is it is, then, this is still a lasting treat for your inner FAQ writer.
Level design owes a large debt to The Legend of Zelda, even if it invokes a Hyrule that’s been liberally filled with blood, oozing pus, and piles of human waste. Elsewhere, the controls offer an endearingly primitive take on Robotron: 2084, with your twin-stick inputs limited to four, rather than eight, directions each. Grafting shooter mechanics onto an RPG template’s a smart choice, allowing you the flexibility to tackle some of the game’s busier rooms with flair, while simultaneously keeping things moving along swiftly enough to minimize the frustrations that inevitably come with permadeath. Gimmicky upgrades slot nicely into the framework too, and some of them will really change the way you play - allowing you to regain health with every kill perhaps, or letting you charge your shots, split them into three, or even fire off blasts from an eye-mounted laser.
Funny and miserable, disgusting and endearing, the end result is a game that’s smart enough to have things both ways, offering an often brutal critique of certain religious sacraments, while wallowing comfortably inside the rituals of one of gaming’s oldest genres. The presentation is uncommonly vivid, the implementation is as precise as you could hope for, and, if we’re being totally honest, wading through blood and feces has rarely been this appealing. [8]