Enemies spew blood, you find icons like a rosary and crown of thorns, and your primary weapon is your constant stream of tears. Isaac has been chased into the dungeon by his crazed mother, and the strange combination of religious and occult symbols, as well as the apparent fixation on bodily functions reflects the obsessions of a seven-year-old boy. Of course, it must be said that the, well, theme can be troubling. Little pink, beating hearts replenish your health, and the items you find, purchase, or earn for defeating bosses can help even the odds as you head deeper into the increasingly-difficult (and bizarre) levels of the dungeon. You collect keys to open locked doors to shops and items, and bombs to use against enemies and terrain.
Isaac is definitely a love letter (albeit a twisted one) to the early Zelda titles – in its procedurally-generated dungeons, you encounter traps, obstacles, and myriad enemies. Like Dark Souls, death in Isaac almost always feels like a personal failing, rather than the game punishing you for daring to wander outside its creators’ idea for how you should experience the game. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is firmly in that camp – it’s difficult, sometimes to the point of being comically unfair, but it also rewards and actively encourages mastery.
The legendarily difficult Dark Souls has even become its own genre, with imitators beginning to crop up in the triple-A scene.
There’s been a bit of a renaissance of games that harken back to the brutally-difficult bullet-hells and platforms of the glory days of the NES – see, for instance, the popularity of Spelunky! and Isaac-creator Edmund McMillen’s magnificent Super Meat Boy. Neither does “shoot the poop,” which is literally a thing you do in the game. How to talk about The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth? Its vital statistics – a reboot of a procedurally-generated dungeon adventure with heavy overtones of the original Zelda and a host of Freudian issues – don’t really tell the story.
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