The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

support system： Windows XP Windows 8 / 7 / Vista / XP

Despite its reputation, Binding of Isaac was not especially entertaining for me. Partially due to the fact, that it's one of those games where your multiple losses are not caused by your mistakes, but rather due to "bad luck" in generated rooms for your current run. I'm missing there some kind of general rules, which would make every run more or less "passable", despite the randomly generated maps/rooms. And I know - this is a thing quite common for roguelike/rogue-lite games, but even in this aspect there are many differences between them - some games from this "genre" can balance between randomness and fair challenge, some of them not. The second thing is the fact that the game's aesthetics is basically repulsive. It's pretending to be "dark", maybe even "iconoclastic", but in practice, it's just mashed-up dirt, faeces and religious/satanic motives. Plus there is no coherence whatsoever - we're expecting that in the game's world there is no God and the voice heard by Isaac's mother is just the result of her mental condition - but why then we have here so many (both Christian and satanic) "artefacts", which are working? And why those things are functioning together? Their influence should negate each other. The references (such as the general reference to biblical Isaac) are shallow and superficial. The positive thing is that the game is encouraging to finish it more than once, with additional characters/bosses/endings etc. That's good, but looking at the fact, how many frustrating runs you will have on this road... I can't recommend this game.

Let me get the review of the gameplay out of the way first, because I've read good arguments made in favor of video games being art, so, I wish to review it as such. The gameplay: take away the random "seeding" and you're left with a mediocre, repetitious top-down shooter that is based more on luck than skill. Play Nuclear Throne instead. Now, as art... The Binding of Isaac is single-handedly the most unpleasant, unnecessary gaming experience I've had in an industry that isn't lonely for company. Like Cpt. Willard, I survived the insanity, made it to the end of the line, and finished what I had set out to do. But once I got over the 'game' aspect and had time to reflect upon what McMillen was trying to convey, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What was the point? What did I suffer these demonic images and sounds for? What is the ultimate purpose to all this madness?" Then I remembered a message written in the booklet of a band's CD I used to listen to: "Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism." The best impression I'm left with is the creator's anti-authority, anti-theist stance that does nothing to be insightful or meaningful. Instead (inadvertently?), the game reveals his own id and revels in an orgy with his own personally curated legion of demons. Everything that McMillen could think of that is gross, shocking, disturbing, disgusting, blasphemous, horrendous, you name it... all of it is thrown against the coding wall as hard as possible here. And not in ways that would exorcise said personal demons like the therapist's couch or confessional box, but rather to shamefully flex them and rub our faces in his figurative feces while boldly charging money for the privilege. Like Coppola's ego trip, The Binding of Isaac is an overbloated, overrated, self-indulgent mess that (more than anything) bespeaks its creator's nihilism, and its Reddit-level echo-chamber pretensions are full of it in more ways than one. Get thee behind me, Satan.