Scourgebringer approaches game design with a scrupulous, or maybe an agnostic puritanism, distaste for elements that are non-combinatronic or against stream in their play matching. The entirety of the skill tree, navigated in the 20 second intervals taken between the game’s 10 minute runs, consists of quilting together elements, which already had interaction across several matrices, further and further into tighter and tighter knit. By the time Scourgebringer runs extend consistently into the final area, extending the initial dives of 2 minutes dashes to 15 minute sprints, every action, every element of the playspace, will engage the player with a mechanical statement that has another verb parenthetically communicated within it: your double jump keeps you off the ground, extending your ‘don’t touch the floor’ damage bonus for the room, which resets your dash, which has within it a smash reflection, which kills an enemy, increasing a different ‘enemies killed within getting hit’ damage bonus, which resets smash, jump, and dash in one button press. It is airtight; it is suffocating; it becomes very boring.
I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.
The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.
Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.
That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.
This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.
Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.
I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.
The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.
Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.
That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.
This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.
Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.