I've been playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth over the last week or so. The game is fun and super challenging at the same time. The graphics are OK (given the indie nature of it) and the controls are comfortable. But there's a lot more to cover here, so let's dive deep into it.
First of all, the story of the game is quite impressive. It's somehow deep and dark (maybe a metaphor for a personal experience) and an allusion to the kind of life that an innocent child might experience in a dogmatic religious family! And that's what the gameplay is all about. As one of these children, the player has to go through such an experience. Imagine if you were a child and your mother wanted to sacrifice you! Of course, that's what you see at the beginning of the game, but that's only a metaphor! No mother would kill her own child, no matter how cruel and close-minded she could be!
What we see in the game (at the beginning and later in the gameplay) is what's happening in Isaac's unconscious mind. He's fighting all of his mother's monstrosity and then herself in his unaware thoughts in response to her dogmatic behavior, and of course, in order to survive. Because after all, isn't survival the main reason for most human actions?
The gameplay elements are in close relation to the narrative and support this whole idea very well. All the unknown and horrible items, enemies, bosses, and choices and trades with "good" and "evil" that we face during the game are bound up with what Isaac is experiencing in his life and with his mother. And all those are the kind of things that are established, especially in the unconscious mind.
Now let's talk more about the actual gameplay experience of the game.
The first thing that would probably catch the player's eye is the amount of content in the game. The number of items, secrets, achievements, endings, etc. in the game is crazy! I'm seeing new content even after playing for about 40 hours! That makes the game highly replayable. That's not the only thing that adds to the replay value of the game. Almost everything in the game, including items, levels, enemies, and bosses (except for mom, of course!), is randomly generated. That causes every round of the game to be a unique and exceptional experience.
But there's also a downside to that. After you play the game for a certain amount of time and tries, you could estimate how strong you need to become to be able to defeat Mom and finish the game (and we're not even considering the horrible optional level afterward!). What happens is that in the middle of the game, you could say to yourself: "Screw it, I'm not strong enough." and then you would restart the game! And that's because you haven't found enough powerful items to that point. It could be better if there was some system in place that would create some sort of balance in sense of item generation, according to the items the player has already acquired and how strong he already is. Of course, that's not an easy task, and requires a lot of careful calculations and designing not to destroy the elements of randomness and luck, that are essential to the roguelike genre.
PS: Btw, this was my most powerful and craziest character (EVER!) among the numerous times I finished the game on hard difficulty. (And I got all this stuff totally by chance in only ONE hidden room, and in the end, I killed Satan easily and quickly LOL!)
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