2024 is when I decide to really get into the game I've bounced off the most in my entire life, after two Steam refunds and multiple sneers at genre labels on the back of the box specifically tailored to kill me.

The search for the "roguelite I can tolerate the most by being as close to deterministic as possible" ends by embracing the one that is more often flaunted to be a pure RNG-fest, an exercise in putting coins into a jukebox set on "shuffle" and watching the funny lights that happen to pop out that run. Reality is, a top-down cardinal directions shooter with no iframes crutch option (shoutout to EtG) is simply a pretty strong foundation to build your game on top of, and the enemy roster more than enough supplements it with the varied slew of contact, projectile, AoE, delayed, hitscan, chasing etc. monsters threatening space as well as any good action game would.
Concessions have still been made, a noteworthy absent here is enemies anticipating and shooting towards the direction you are currently moving to, the game is clearly welcoming towards the casual gamer's proclivity towards circlestrafing while shooting inwards as the default approach (shoutout to Doom '16). By its randomly generated room nature, it can never properly contend with the handpicked enemy compositions you'd find in a regular action game. What's there is still solid at hell, and the default 1x1 rooms are small enough that their boundaries alone make good arenas to test your skill in weaving between threats, target prioritization, and all other conventional real time skills. The end result is a blazing fast sequence of densely packed encounters that rly make u think & execute before screen scroll is even over, and allow me to reiterate it's so funny this went down in history as The Luck Based One while stuff like Dead Cells me has me repeating 10 minutes of trite every time I want to see something that doesn't bore me. AND you get to put a coin in the funny jukebox too!

The gallery of inscrutably named items enriching the loot pool that make up its main form of progression are what make TBOI infamous, potentially turning your pathetic pea shooter into the most bullshit ms paint rain of death conceivable. I personally don't mind, for now (more on that later), the power gap between the run ending powerups and the purely utilitarian ones, I genuinely would enjoy the overall game much less if it allowed you to consistently become a walking AoE nuke devoid of the minutiae in spacing and fundamentals I've been rewarding with lavish praise until now - what I do enjoy is seeing how every run makes me recalibrate my mental stack on the spectrum between "positioning Isaac well to hit my enemies" and "positioning Isaac well to dodge shit", feeling like I'm really getting my money worth from apparently lame synergies that still allow me to remove either end from the equation. Some of my most successful runs aren't omg ludovico + azazel ggs we take those, but low damage regular-ass shaped projectiles Isaac having spectral, piercing, and homing, allowing me to keep my eyes glued to him and nothing else thereby maximizing evasion. I consider all of this very healthy for the skill ceiling of the game, and it turned what I initially expected to be a "low effort game for when you are sleepy" into a LOCKED IN kinda of mental effort that leaves me wanting for a cigarette, and maybe lying on the bed for a bit, after an hour and a half like the best of 'em.

... That's where my review of the game would've ended a couple of weeks or so ago, being an expanded version of my initial thoughts when I was still early in run progression, halfway through current objective of killing Mom's Heart 10 times (the second "end of run" final boss, arguably the end of the tutorial). I maybe would've added that the game needed some kind of RNG mitigation like a minimum damage floor the lower you go in floors because I want to turn every game into KH2 as it's the stat that most damages a run through sheer bad luck (the game is not beyond this kind of rigging, ie Hush's light pillars are tailored against your current Speed stat so that they are always avoidable). However, the more I progress and unlock final bosses, the more the effects of a bad/unlucky run are felt.

The question that takes up increasingly bigger space in my head is, how does the game incentivize not giving up on those bad runs?

One of the most exciting things about the game is the Devil/Angel Room system. tldr, by doing no damage runs on specific floors you get rewarded with the potentially best shit in the game, starting from the second one. That's another thing I, initially, unequivocally loved, another piece of the puzzle that turns even the lamest, earliest rooms in something requiring proper finesse as bad plays quickly compound into a more miserable time than it needs to be.
If I get hit and miss out on them, my bad, right? Well yes, but no, because only RED HEART damage counts against a no damage floor, and you can find BLUE HEARTS which act like armor above your regular hearts, and, just like regular hearts, each of them takes two hits to deplete. The no hit run turned into a doable 2-hit run. Maybe you are really lucky and drop multiple blue hearts, it's now a 4/6-hit run and now you are coasting so hard it's not even funny. Maybe you get neither and gotta play it straight, and get hit at the very last second of floor 2, and oh, actually there's a pity system and the earlier you get one to spawn the faster you snowball by making others spawn next and you just missed out on all of that, and oh, the rest of the run is also going like shit, and oh, you find yourself flouride staring at the time counter wondering why you shouldn't just spam R(estart) every time you want to play the game hoping the first floor's RNG dumps a bunch of blues on your lap.
How am I incentivized to keep going instead?

From what I gather, you eventually have to gauge how well a run is going by yourself and pick a proper boss to end it. "If it's going great, try for Delirium or the Repentance content, if not, stop at Mega Satan or even the Lamb, if it really sucks cut your losses and end at Sheol/Cathedral". Or something like that. That sounds palatable NOW that I have unlocks to work towards to against any of them, but once I only the very top echelon left, what the fuck do I personally get out of ending a potential run halfway through at Cathedral? I'm the guy who least needs extrinsic rewards such as unlocks/achievements to enjoy the act of play, but 30 minutes to beat a final boss I've already done dozens of times is still 30 minutes.
What incentive do I have to stay on a run that's gonna end early and on a technicality?

I'm not gonna write a proper conclusion because this is a review I'm specifically keeping open for the inevitable reevaluation as my worries are either assuaged or confirmed by what's waiting for me ahead.




Uncharacteristically of me, I'm gonna put up a list of my pain points while I spitball solutions, which ultimately show you just can't take the fight out of the RNG hater.
1) As mentioned, put some kind of damage floor, or implement a pity system for DMG UP items, or have DMG UP on more items, or whatever needed so I don't have to look at 3.50 Damage on floor 8 (afaik the truly busted damage shit comes from specific multiplier items, not from the humble +0.4s)
2) Introduce some kind of mild pity system for bombs and keys for the first three floors (skipping out on MULTIPLE treasure rooms because you get zero (0) keys for ten minutes is just mind numbing)
3) Remove Hard Mode's changes to shops, namely that they can spawn at a lower quality level than what you currently have them upgraded at (they can't even spawn after the halfway point of a run at all, they require resources to enter, sometimes they are not a shop at all but it's a miniboss, they are not guaranteed to have stuff you want in them, is the additional dice roll really needed?)
4) Change how blue hearts interact with Devil/Anger Room chances or change how they spawn on the first floor. My most immediate idea is "just make one and only one always spawn, but hide it behind multiple layers of rocks so the player needs to choose whether it's worth consuming like three bombs when they can soldier on and try their skill instead", but people would just start Restart spamming for plentiful enough bomb drops instead. Plus characters that fly wouldn't care.

Due to only needing a single item/achievement until dead god, I wanted to finally share some of my thoughts on my favorite game of all time.

I find it very hard to sum up Isaac, as it's packed to the brim with content and things to talk about, so I'm going to keep it simple. To me, this game serves an incredibly important purpose in my life, as I've been playing it on and off since 2015 (ikr lol). But at the start of this year due to my roommate guiding me along the new additions into repentance, I was legit addicted up until the very end. Never has a game captivated and enthralled me throughout my 675 hours of playtime like this one has. It's crafted with insane amounts of love, passion, detail and especially fun. For me, it's a gaming experience that I'll remember and treasure for the rest of my life. I think the design philosophy of not seeing the full game until the very end is absolutely genius and made for a great reason to push forward and conquer even the most insanely difficulty challenges. Sure, I don't even think its a perfect game tbh, as some characters are incredibly frustrating and some items/enemies are horrible, but those are still aspects that I appreciate when looking at the full experience. Almost everything in this game is fine-tuned to perfection, and I'm so glad I got to experience it all. I love this game so much, and all the emotions/memories it provided me along the way, thanks edmund <3

also, the community is great, with lots of love being shown through mods and extra content which can add even MORE hours of playtime to an already massive game. Mods in general really help to personalize the whole game to your liking, giving you almost endless ways to play and experiment. I highly recommend this game if you enjoy difficult but rewarding challenges, as there's so, so much cool stuff to see.

A great rouge-lite experience that serves as a great way to get into the genre, with tons of items and characters to make playthroughs feel unique.

The biggest hurdle this game faces is that it requires players to memorize the effects of each item, as you don't get a description of what you're picking up before it's already in your inventory. Thankfully there is a mod for that on PC, but if you're playing the console versions you're gonna need resources on hand to make knowing what to grab easier.

Aside from that, the game's great. Give it a play!

Damn I just lost a run on lost because of a chest double adversary run starts another run. God I hate delirium it's not even that fun of a boss starts another run. Greed mode is really fun but greedier mode takes it way too far and there didn't need to be the ultra greedier phase starts another run.

I don't know how this game can keep getting updates that add in content that pissed me off so bad I would close the game and then come back hours later for another run. It's really addictive and there are very little roguelikes that manage to accomplish the sheer amount of variety and replayability that TBoI had even back in the flash days when there were 5 characters and the ending goal was just Isaac in the cathedral. It's a game that will straight up screw you with RNG because you don't get any good items in a run to the point you'll just hold R on less powerful characters until you start next to an item room with a rarity 3 or higher and it still manages to be fun. I think the only thing keeping this from being full marks for me is I genuinely think bosses like Delirium and Ultra Greedier are way too much for how long runs take to even get to them.

"OVER 500 HOURS of new gameplay", threatens Isaac.

This expansion is essentially the point where I took my first real plunge into this game. I was interested in Isaac after years and years of hearing "no two runs are ever the same"-esque platitudes, but it's kind of just "you'll never see this specific concoction of a handful of +/-1 stat passives ever again" so far. I'm fully willing to accept that the game only really opens up dozens of hours in; seeing the item list with like 600 greyed out boxes is very enticing, but I'd also be lying if I said I'm having any fun with this early game.

Dull item pools bloated with effectless stat ups and active items, with next to no wriggle room for rng manipulation - It really doesn't feel like I'm playing Isaac as much as the seed is stringing me along to whatever predetermined end it has devised for me, until I'm cut down by a slew of terrible and untelegraphed zero-delay room-wide lasers or pounces. The options to manipulate your luck with characters and items that synergise like mad just don't feel present at all until apparently tens of hours in? I had a 15 loss streak broken by a run that was so ridiculous I saw Delirium for the first time and killed him with such ease I could spare the time to play with my cat. It kind of shredded apart my honeymoon period. Nobody likes a pity win - which is how it feels. The variance is peaks and valleys with no in between. My successes feel obvious and detracted because I'm given a loadout where it's almost impossible to fail, not even helped when one follows a string of runs where I feel underpowered to the point where failure appears inevitable.

Granted, I could just read a wiki or watch some streamer with thousands of episodes of playtime so I can get a grasp of how to play efficiently. I COULD. But I'd rather just hold R until the shop stocks Chaos. A man can only Lemon Party so hard.

Exceeds at being addicting as fucqe, though! This soundtrack is filled with hummable earworms, and it's easy to get lost in a cycle of "just one more go" in the hopes I'll find two items that go together like olive and feta. (I think I'm just gonna aim for all the endings, then I'll bounce.)

EDIT: Finished the Repentence content finally! Well, Final Ending - I don't care for anything else. I can honestly say without a hint of stockholm syndrome that the content of this DLC is genuinely fuckin incredible. These new floors look STUNNING, with rooms, encounters and bosses that are tough but completely fair. As a basic rule of thumb; if I like something, it was added in Repentence. Hilarious to think that this game took nearly ten years for there to be bosses that ACTUALLY TELEGRAPH their attacks with great animation quirks. Nice surprise to see it end on a deus ex machina sequence i was convinced was beyond the scope of the engine. would prob have hit harder if this game wasn't mostly just a boring trial by fire that bothered to ingratiate me with the setting but hey. They said "what this game needs is a Wonderful 101 finale" and they were right.

The item pool expands to fit passives and active items that greatly alter your approach to a given run - made better with outright upgraded crown rooms and item shops. What was once an absolute pittance of reward, ensuring that you had to follow the RNG's rigid script laid bare; you eventually become able to make risky decisions that let you feel more in control of your fate.

It absolutely fuckin should not have taken this long, my first tens of hours of playtime could mostly be chalked up to sheer spite playing, frantically trying to see the appeal - which thankfully rears its head up to a point. An honest to god easy improvement you could make would be to reduce all "Kill X boss Y times" unlock criteria to just one. Just dump items on you for beating a boss, who wants to fucking grind.

Game is hard and random items, with a lot of them doing jackshit on their own, means you're getting screwed more often than not. But, then you get that one run where the stars align and your brain blasts, you finally get a level 4 item on Basement 2, slaughter everything with zero issue riding that pure adrenaline dopamine wave just to crash into the brick wall of despair when Bloat arrives.

Each character has their own little gimmick that makes them either a breeze to play through or pure cock and ball torture. Some bosses and rooms are extreme levels of bullshit, but there is literally so much in this game that they become few and far between.

The replayability is off the charts because it really taps into your Gamer brain and makes you think, "If I had just one more item, or been a little more careful I think I could have got it done". Then you realize it's now 12:00 AM and your win streak went from -7 to 1, but at least it's 1.

I only have the worst characters in the game left to do things with and it's quite the struggle, but having access to all the items from the other characters makes it less like cutting my eyes with paper.

I recommend getting all of the DLCs, but I'd play them individually since Repentance alone adds a sheer amount of content that could be very overwhelming. Been playing since Afterbirth so the additional content being added later is how I played it anyways. That being said, the amount of content is massive for a DLC and that's fantastic.

Delirium can kick rocks though. I'm not inviting him to anything ever.

Edit: Used to be a 4.5 star rating, but I stopped doing halfsies.

The Binding of Isaac is a weird game for me to discuss and attempt to review, to be quite frank. It's almost the ultimate content dump with how much stuff is packaged in.
Completionist for the base game? 11 Characters with 6 (12 if you dont always do hard mode but ill stick with assuming hard mode throughout this review) completion marks. Around 250 hours.
Completionist for Afterbirth and Plus? 4 new characters and 4 new completion marks. About another 200 hours.
Completionist for Repentance not only adds 2 new characters to make 17 -it then doubles that cast with the addition of 'tainted' characters to 34, and adds two final completion marks. Unless you superbly plan out completionist runs for this game you'll probably be looking at 1000 hours of content (not to mention the challenges, extra achievements and certain characters being way more of a bitch to handle than others but ill get to that later).
By the point in which I'm writing this review I've still barely scratched the surface. I've at least beaten every boss once, gotten most of my newer runs done on hard mode, have at least 50% of achievements, but only a few tainted characters (Isaac, Cain and Samson). There's still a lot to discuss but I'll at least sum up my thoughts like this:
I can't recommend this game unless
A) You don't have any other games to look forward to
B) You're fine dealing with an immense amount of rng/ vague descriptions/ mechanics/etc.
C) You don't have the nagging feeling to try and 100% every game you play
And there's probably a lot of other warnings I could give, I've put in another solid +100 hours since getting this in September despite having a lot of other stuff on my plate and I could easily pull Isaac back up again and try a few runs but nah I need to put that stuff down. It's incredibly addictive. Even at its worse (and I will talk about its worse points), Isaac has this ingenious way of wrapping its economy/functionality into your brain in such a way that can't be easily described into calling certain items or runs 'good' or 'bad', its so much fun to test out where a run is going because it can just as easily take a sharp dip or a steep rise. There's so many factors at play and repentance has done a really good job and buffing certain 'run ruining' items that even shit like Holy Water is suddenly great. In fact there's so many factors that it's hard to even begin the talking points of Repentance, so I'll start with some of the downsides to the overall Isaac package at least.
1) The beginning levels can honestly be some of the rougher parts of a run, even after several hundreds of hours. I just hate cellar, man. Spider enemies are the absolute worst to deal with when having few to no upgrades. Add in some pretty annoying bosses and starting a run off can be annoying at times. It's less a matter of how difficult the enemies are, more so if i start a run and my first item is like, E. Coli, I'm not exactly holding my breath if my boss on first floor is Rag Man or I encounter a room with a bunch of those big, scared, spiders. Obviously I'm fine with the game trying to be challenging but the difference in difficulty between vanilla basement (or even Dross 1) and cellar is a bit steeper just by nature of how irritating the usual enemies are in the latter. (Also this really just becomes apparent for characters that aren't super strong at the start like Lazarus or unwhored? Eve)
2) Fuck Jacob & Esau. Okay not every character in Isaac is exactly amazing but for the most part the weakest characters are usually just extremely janky (Lilith), have fewer redeeming qualities to work with (like Lazarus or Blue Baby compared to a Samson), or are weak but have amazing side effects (The Lost taking free devil deals/theoretically free curse rooms/innate holy mantle). Jacob and Esau is legitimately hard to deal with and I can't overstate how unfun they are to play as. Having essentially double the hitbox is fucky enough with the bullet hell aspect of certain boss fights but then you have to contend with certain rooms being REALLY hard to evade with two characters since whichever twin is following behind can potentially get stuck behind a corner and get beaten by a chasing enemy. Having the ability to drop 2 bombs at once for the cost of 1, and being able to take two pedestal items is nice (like in the alt paths or certain angel room layouts) but controlling these two does not make them worth it other than unlocking items like Birthright, Rock Bottom and Genesis (admittedly really great items you should probably suffer through J&E to obtain). Lastly, why the hell does Genesis not work with J&E right? You need to beat ??? as them to get Genesis but when you actually use it as them, it deletes not just the user's items, but the other twin's as well. And then when you get sent to restock your characters with the rerolled items you can't even restock your twin's inventory by doing the alt path cheese, it's always gonna be a net negative.
3) There still is a lot of items in Isaac that just aren't great. A lot of 'weaker' items can still be used in niche situations but there's some stuff that still isn't useful- (or is detrimental like My Reflection) like did Dead Bird get any better? Nah. Are you really gonna need Remote Detonation all the way through a run and will you take it over Book of Revelations? Generally no. Are trail-related items good? Not really.
4) It's still Isaac so you'll want platinumgod up to see how some items work. Also have the wiki up if you want to know how certain items interact in case you really don't wanna lose a run and you're unsure if taking one item will synergize like shit and get you killed.
5) Fuck brimstone bosses (mostly just the bloat and the adversary).
6) A lot of challenges are just a pain. Mostly the pre-Repentance ones but even Seeing Double is rough (thanks J&E).
7) I do wish it were a bit easier to keep track of certain things as Tainted Cain. Like a potential upgrade that allowed you to know how much of a specific item was on a given floor. (this just makes it easier for me to tally what all i have for the online calculator because its annoying going back and forth tallying up each item room by room)
8) and lastly, maybe this is more a personal issue but there are points where I feel like there's way too much to handle in a given situation. Some of the newer enemies/ bosses have a lot more going on with harder to discern tells (I still can't really understand Reap Creep's timing for firing diagonal vs straight brimstone) or its harder to see where some attacks are coming from (falling tears or rocks, usually). This mostly occurs with some of the newer fights so maybe I still need to get used to some of it.
After all of that, there's some other stuff I could gripe about but also Isaac really is just one of those games where one run you encounter a continuing issue but the next you find a solution or a small niche that makes that issue just a little less apparent. For example, the issue of certain spacebar items being less useful than others and also the issue of J&E bringing down Repentance a bit. How do you contend with these two problems? Bethany. Bethany isn't an incredibly strong character but as the 2nd 'full' character (since Edmund considers the tainted a kinda 'half character') she makes up for them quite well. Her gimmick being that she can't take soul hearts but can use them to supplement item charges and summon a wisp that can block damage on top of other effects makes so many bad/iffy spacebar items way more useful. I can't call kidney bean a useless item since beating Mother with a full ring of wisps and barely taking much damage because I could never run out of them.
Also there's just so many other neat new characters and stuff I haven't seen since the first Afterbirth that made all the bullshit worth it.
-The concept of melee characters like the forgotten and (berserk) tainted samson is so cool and fun. The former almost immediately became my favorite.
-The lost sucks to play as but is honestly so much fun also? It's such a good example of isaac's risk/reward mentality. Suck godhead is such a pain to get but so many of my nuttier runs have been messing around with the lost.
-A lot of the newer items (AB+ and Repentance) are so cool. Big fan of some of the newer tear effects like Little Horn, Mucormycosis, Sinus Infection, Parasitoid, Jacob's Ladder (and similar). On top of other neat items like Genesis, Urn of Souls, Psy Fly, Alabaster Box, etc.
-The repentance challenges (what Ive played so far at least) have mostly been pretty good. I'd be lying if i didn't say I had a dumb smile on my face during the Isaac's Awakening challenge not realizing until starting it that it was just classic Zelda in Isaac. Cantripped was also a super neat take on an already super weird addition to the roster (T!Cain).
I've spent a bunch of time talking about this game, and there's a lot to bitch about. There's a lot to praise about. There's just too much that could ever be condensed into a review that attempts to cover specific details and aspects when there's so many details and aspects in the game. It really is a hard sell because there's just an insane amount of time that one would need to put into it to get everything, but if there's one game that more than pays for itself in time spent in completion, its isaac. It's bullshit but its an absolute drug.