The original The Binding of Isaac released in 2011 and was designed by Edmund McMillen, who had risen to fame a year earlier when Super Meat Boy introduced hundreds of people to the indie scene. The game, like Meat Boy before it, was an instant success and in April of 2013 it was announced the game had sold over two million copies. I myself am a big fan of the game as well and I have fond memories of the time when my internet was down for weeks and it was the only game I had installed. Like many other fans, I was really excited for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, but when it finally came out this November, I was surprised when I found myself being rather bored with it.
The premise of The Binding of Isaac is that you play as a young boy who is on the run from his religious nutjob of a mother, who believes sacrificing him will please her God. He has entered the cellar beneath his house, which contains a ridiculous numbers of floors that include absurd locales like caves, catacombs, cathedrals and even the insides of his mom are explored. Each floor consists of a series of randomly generated rooms and each time you visit a new one, enemies may spawn that you must defeat before the doors open up again.
Each room has stuff like rocks, mushrooms, pits and spikes that give it a different shape, which creates over 500 unique rooms per chapter that can be generated. As you explore, you will also find shops and treasure rooms where you can obtain new items. These items vary from simple stat boosts to special effects that change how Isaac defends himself. Your most basic attack is crying, which fires a steady stream of tears at your foes, but with these items you can upgrade tears to be poisonous, fire in two directions, petrify your foes and the list goes on. You can even get “familiars”, which are separate creatures that fight alongside you.
Aside from making your character more powerful, the items also change the way he looks by adding more complexities to his sprite. With so many items, rooms and enemies to discover, it will take ages before you have figured out everything there is to know about this game, and once you start getting into it, Isaac is capable of keeping you hooked for weeks. If you are new to the series, then Rebirth is a great opportunity to introduce you to the game, with its updated visuals and audio, smooth 60 frames per second, and heaps of content.
However, some two million individuals are not new players and it’s these people that may find Rebirth to be a touch underwhelming. When it was released in 2011, the gameplay of Isaac helped popularize the return of the roguelike genre, more specifically the more casual “roguelite” branch that was starting to form at the time. Since then, many fantastic games came out that looked to Isaac for inspiration, takings its gameplay and adding their own twists and expansions to it. Rebirth could have been a great attempt at making the franchise relevant again, but instead it simply adds a whole slew of new stuff; it’s fun to play for a bit and see the new items in action, but due to the familiar gameplay, boredom set in after just a few runs.
The game’s most obvious handicap is the enemy AI, which usually just randomly wanders around the room hoping to somehow hit you. Other common patterns are foes that just chase you relentlessly or remain in one place and fire projectiles at you. This is one of the fields in which a lot of newer roguelites have improved, so I was disappointed to see nothing has changed. The bosses that await at the end of each floor still look great, with the new 16-bit aesthetic making their sprites absolutely beautiful, but they too feel simple compared to the boss-fights in games like Our Darker Purpose. Even so, their designs are still pretty funny, with bosses varying from religious entities like the four horsemen of the apocalypse to gross stuff like macabre monsters and sentient heaps of poo.
Many issues with the items have also not being resolved, including the annoying habit the game has of giving you items that cancel each other out. If you, for example, have a charged shot and then find the upgrade that turns your tears into lasers, this does not mean you will get a charged laser shot. Instead, it will simply replace your charged shot with the lasers, meaning your upgrade may have made you weaker instead of stronger. There is also a ton of items that don’t help you at all or are just bewilderingly ineffective, some even exist solely to screw you over (Libra, Wiggle Worm and Dead Cat), which means it’s easy to feel like you are being robbed of a much-needed upgrade. Some of these can even instantly ruin your chances of success.
One major change that was made to the items, however, is that each one now comes with a subtext. This was done because it was never really clear what an item did in the original game, so you either had to look at your stats or experiment to figure it out, but a lot of people (myself included) simply alt+tabbed to the wikia every few minutes. While it’s nice to finally have it, the descriptions are only on the screen for a quick two seconds and if you miss it there is no way to read it again afterwards. The items are listed in the pause menu, but since there is no mouse control in the menus there is no way to hover over them. It’s also kind of pointless, since it’s not like you can drop an item if you discover it doesn’t synergize with the rest of your arsenal, so the only solution is to look them up beforehand or memorize every single one of them.
While these issues were frustrating to me, the thought that the next great run might be right around the corner is still effective at drawing you back in. I often closed the game down after a few boring runs or sessions where I kept getting horrible items, only to then boot it up again minutes later to try again. When you do finally get a run that goes somewhere, or heck, even a series of great playthroughs, the game can be fun even for veterans. The new characters were also really fun to play as, especially “Eden”, who starts the game with a randomized set of stats, items and haircut.
The much-hyped multiplayer was a bit of a disappointment, though. The idea is that a second player can press start on a controller at any time and borrow one of your hearts to spawn as a randomized familiar that has all your abilities. They can drop in and out at any time and your statistics are halved to maintain the challenge, so it’s functional, but not necessarily fun. Another new addition to the game are large rooms that scroll, as opposed to previously where all rooms fit on a single screen; these are bothersome to deal with on your own, but with two players you have to keep close to each other or the scrolling messes up. The second player can also easily be killed because of how little health they tend to have and if you don’t have enough hearts yourself, then the second player can’t spawn at all. Combine that with how rare health drops can be and the second player may find themselves unable to participate for long periods of time.
As I mentioned before, the game has received some major technical upgrades: its framerate has been doubled to a butter-smooth 60 frames per second, the game now utilizes 16-bit graphics presented in a 480×272 resolution, and it now uses a new engine instead of Adobe Flash; the result is a make-over that has undeniably improved the visuals of the game. I was especially fond of the details that were added to each room, such as the tiny mushrooms that joyfully bounce up and down or the critters that dart around. The music was provided by a group known as Ridculon and, while I notice it less than the visuals, I must say I appreciate the new tunes quite a lot.
In conclusion, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth updates a three-year-old game significantly and has a lot of content to discover, but it stumbles in regards to the all-important gameplay. If you grew bored of the original Isaac before, then Rebirth is unlikely to rekindle the love, but new players who aren’t too familiar with roguelites will likely find it quite enjoyable. I would also recommend it to those who were still playing the original to this day, but let’s be honest here: those people already bought it weeks before it even released.
(5.5 / 10)
Average
(5.5 / 10)
