This week, I’m returning to the world of indie games (the other indie game covered was Terraria) and I’ll be talking about a relatively new game for me, The Binding of Isaac. As a quick overview before I talk about the game for anyone who’s confused, games are typically divided into two major classes: indie and AAA (triple A). AAA games are the blockbusters that everyone knows and loves, such as Call of Duty, Halo, and Grand Theft Auto. These games are produced by major studios with thousands of employees and often have budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The other type of video game is “indie” or independent games. These are released “independently”, and have much smaller budgets, usually much less than $1 million. The teams working on indie games vary, but indie games tend to be released by companies with anywhere from 1-20 developers. They are sold at a much cheaper cost, usually around $10-$15 compared to the standard $60 for a AAA game, but that doesn’t mean they are any worse than AAA games. On the contrary, indie games have experienced a huge rise in popularity recently due to the innovation and uniqueness brought by the developers.
Anyway, back to the game. For those of you who have played the original Legend of Zelda games, The Binding of Isaac is designed very similar to that style. This genre is known as “roguelike”, which has a fairly vague definition but it essentially means that the game progresses level by level, utilizes tiles, and contains some aspect of permanent death. The Binding of Isaac is a topdown 2D game, meaning that the camera is at a perspective above your character and your actions move the character up, down, and from side to side around the room (this is different from other 2D styles, such as side-scrollers, in which the character just moves from left to right across the screen).
http://http://i.imgur.com/V5cKZ4O.jpg
The game opens with a brief introductory story that gives context to what you’re actually doing. In the cutscene, Isaac’s mother is told by God to kill her son (this story is a reference to the biblical story in which God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, as a test of Abraham’s faith). Isaac flees from his mother, ending up in the basement, which is filled with a host of terrifying creatures. Isaac’s predicament makes him very distraught, and, as such, he is constantly crying. This sets up for the main quirk of the game: Isaac’s tears are the only weapon that he has to defeat his enemies.
The game progress in a series of floors and rooms. On each floor, there is a set number of rooms for you to explore. Almost all rooms will contain some enemies, and some will contain unique gameplay elements such as a slot machine to spend gold earned in the game on a possible bomb or extra life. It is up to the player to determine how many rooms on a floor they want to explore, and the only required aspect of a given floor is that you fight and defeat the boss. Defeating the boss earns you an additional item which helps make you stronger in some way, whether it be higher damage or an increased fire rate, and allows you to move down to the next floor. In the game you progress deeper and deeper through the floors, passing through the basement, the cellar, the catacombs, the depths, the catacombs, until eventually you fight the final boss, Mom. After beating Mom the first time, there are multiple endgame options, which include killing Satan and killing an angelic version of Isaac. It’s weird. But, more importantly, it’s fun.
https://gfycat.com/CrazyEasyHermitcrab
(copy/paste the link to watch a gif of the game in action!)
The game typically lasts approximately 40 minutes or so for a single run, assuming that you don’t die early. Every run is essentially the same, as you always start with the same conditions and have to work your way through the game until the final bosses. But what makes the game so addicting and so replayable is the enormous possible combinations of items that you can get. Items in the game have variable and wild effects; one makes your tears freeze enemies, one makes your tears bounce off of walls, one turns your tears into giant laser beams, one makes you invincible when you’re standing still, and etc. The items synergize in unique ways, and what really keeps you playing is the thrill of potentially getting an amazing combination that lets you mow through all of the enemies in your path, such as firing a shotgun-like spread of tears that home towards the enemies and explode once they get there. It’s hard to describe, but the potential items truly keep the game fresh every time, and it’s always fun to play for either a quick session or for three hours. If you have a couple bucks and are looking for a fun adventure game for your computer, I’d definitely recommend The Binding of Isaac.
http://gfycat.com/BlackandwhiteGorgeousBlowfish
(copy/paste the link to watch a gif of the game in action!)