STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR GAMES AS GIMMICK FIRST! GAMES ARE SYSTEMS, NOT PARTY TRICKS. THEY HAVE TO WORK WITH CONCERTED FORCE.

I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.

If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.

I have long compared The Binding of Isaac to a slot machine, which maybe isn't quite fair. Unlike a slot machine, there is a decent amount of skill involved - understanding the mechanics, learning how to get deals with the devil, figuring out what synergizes with what. But at the end of the day, those flashy synergies are really the only draw of the game, and the only reason why I have a little over 150 hours in it. There's only so many times I can completely annihilate everything with screen-spanning laser beams before it starts becoming a chore. Isaac fails at what I'd consider the most important part of a roguelike - being challenging but fair. In Isaac, there is rarely a moment in which you feel like you are having a fun challenge. You are either insanely overpowered and nuking all of the bosses in less than 10 seconds, or you are the weakest baby alive, spending each encounter strafing around the arena for several minutes while doing a piddling amount of damage. It doesn't feel satisfying to attack and kill enemies until you've gotten enough items that the game starts to play itself. And on top of it all, most of the soundtrack is made up of boring atmospheric tracks, which is not what I want to be listening to when playing an action roguelike. At least some of the boss themes like "Infanticide" are good.

Sorry, baby. I just don't love you the way I used to.

It's not you. It's me. You haven't changed, even though you really should have. You're still as much of a buggy mess as you were on release, with all of your crashes and non-functional mechanics, but those never bothered me. A couple community patches — you always did have a tendency to rely on others to make you work properly — and you're about as stable as you could have been. So why is it that I'm coming back to you over a decade later, with all of my fond memories, and I find that whatever spark we once had is now gone?

It's because you're boring, baby. That's the awful truth.

I really did think I was above such a petty complaint. I mean, your writing is excellent. You've got some incredibly strong characters and storylines, and you allow for a way more freeform approach to your narrative than most of your contemporaries could ever dream of. You've got a tone about you. Nobody could ever look at you and mistake you for anyone other than yourself.

But your moment-to-moment experience is just so boring. So repetitive. All I'm doing is walking. Walking and walking and walking from flat plain of dirt to flat plain of dirt, and then fast traveling between flat plains of dirt, while one of about five licensed songs play on loop. You've got the shortest playlist in the world. You've got spurs that jingle-jangle, you were always a fool for your Johnny, yippee-yay, I know it all. I could always turn off your radio and listen to the ambience of the areas around me, but your environmental sound design just isn't up to par. I don't blame you. You didn't even have a year to get ready. It's not your fault.

You take way too long to get going, and by the time we get there, I've seen everything you've had to offer me a hundred times over. I'm sure some people would say that I'm not treating you the way that I ought to, and I'm just being unfair because I've played too much of you. Maybe. But I've visited old favorites that I've been with a lot longer than you, baby, and none of them bored me the way that you do now. I can't keep feeling like the burden is on me to make you more fun; like I need to be the one going out of my way to get all of these mods and patches for you when keeping me entertained is your job.

I know nobody ever came to you for the gameplay, but you keep insisting on putting it front and center. I can't get away from it. If there was about 50% less "game" in this game, it would still be too much for what it currently is. It's borderline vestigial. I know that you care a lot more about your story, and so do I. I wish that you could have just focused on what you were good at. Your environments aren't pretty enough to get lost in, and they're not enough of a traversal challenge to be engaging; all I'm doing is walking forward and popping the occasional enemy, and it's just not enough.

What more can I say? I've fallen out of love. A classic needs to hold up to be a classic, and the twelve years since your release have left me unsure if you ever even qualified. You were novel once, and now you're not. You could have been more, but neither your publishers nor your developers were keen on that idea. You were rushed, and it'll always show.

I got carded trying to buy this at a Gamestop in 2011 and was refused because I didn't have my ID on me.

1) Buy me
2) Juice me
3) Squeeze me
4) Freeze me
5) Roll me
6) Sell me
7) Pill me
8) YOU PIECE
9) Pay out the believers