So I’m late to the party with this game. It’s free right now on psplus and I’ve been playing it on my vita. A lot.
At first I didn’t see what the big deal was or why it was so popular or at least highly reviewed. Then after a few dozen runs I was hooked. I think it’s the seemingly endless number of power ups and enemies. It’s never the same game twice. I love how all of the power ups stack and stack in bizarre ways like they should. The story is really bizarre and for some reason my wife likes to lay by me on the bed and watch me play as she goes to sleep. Constantly asking me what’s that and whys he look like that? What are those things? This is a lady who couldn’t care less about games.
I finally beat Mom but died right when she did so it didn’t count. Grr…
Is anyone else playing this? If you’ve got a Vita you want this game. It’s perfect for that handheld.
Yeah, I bought it for the PC back when it was fairly new and I picked it up when it was free for my PS4 last month.
It’s a phenomenal game for all the reasons you state. It does a great job of skirting the line between challenging and frustrating so that you always feel like “one more run” will get you through to the end. And of course, I don’t think it’s spoiling much to say that there’s more to the game than just beating Mom.
Last night I had a run where I got the triple shot and then the tear shield, so my shots made a spread in front of me that could block projectiles. Very powerful. Still died. Urrgh.
I have no idea how the functionality works on Vita, but two-player Isaac is also a lot of fun. P2 controls a floating baby that shares Isaac’s health and powerups, making for even more potential wackiness with the combinations.
I didn’t play the original but the reviews I’ve read say this is a pretty significant upgrade to the original.
I got a pretty powerful combo of powerups last night. Got that shot that you have to charge before each shot, plus big bloody tears and penetration and a few dmg upgrades. Took a while to get used to the long charge time for the spit in tight quarters but once I did I was destroying everything in one shot BUT…
I picked up the cat thing that gives you 9 lives. Sounds great at first but then I realized it’s pretty crappy against bosses because you only get one heart and when you respawn it’s outside the room you died in and you have to redo it again. This is what sunk me on Mom. I kept getting her really low on health and getting hit and killed. I dropped a bomb when she was near death, got hit and died, then the bomb blew up and killed her, but I respawned outside the room and had to fight her again. ARGH!!!
I hate the wizard shot powerup and the one that shoots in a wave pattern.
Can anyone tell me WTF the batteries are for? I have never been able to even pick them up in around 60 runs. Also, is there a way to tell what walls you can bomb? And I’ve yet to find anything worthwhile in the shops so I’ve stopped unlocking brown doors and save my keys for golden doors. Any reason to go inthe shops?
ETA: Oh, also, every once in a while I get pop-ups that say “such and such has shown up in the basement!”. No idea what they actually do. Also I picked up a GOLDEN KEY last night and heard a door open but couldn’t find it anywhere. Any idea what that is?
I realize I can probably go to a wiki or something but figured Id ask here for discussions sake.
The battery fills up the bar if you have an item that has charges. Very useful, especially for survival-based items like the heart.
The dead cat (9 lives guy) is freaking terrible, and worth avoiding at all costs. Even if you find health upgrades afterwards, they go away if you die and respawn. I recently had one of the best runs of my life (max damage, nearly max shot speed) and picked the stupid cat up. Couldn’t beat Mom despite my rad powerups.
The golden key unlocks (I think) all the doors on the floor you’re on.
There’s a whole involved strategy for locating secret rooms, but generally speaking you want to look for horseshoes in the floor. If you see an empty spot surrounded by rooms on three sides, that’s probably a secret room. There’s also a “super secret room” that doesn’t follow those rules.
The basement message means that particular item has been added to the game’s item pool, and can now be found in the appropriate circumstances (regular chests, red chest, gold chests, gold rooms, boss pickups, etc). Different items go into different pools.
I guess this isn’t technically true. If you come across the cat and you’re for whatever reason only AT one max heart (from deals with the devil or whatever else), then you may as well go for it.
You can also pick it up if you already have two other cat items, as you’ll get something special for it.
tl;dr version: If you liked the original I can’t image not liking the new version. it’s bigger and better in pretty much every aspect.
I put many many hours into the original, and probably more into the new version. I can say that the new version is a definite upgrade. First, it’s no longer Adobe Flash based, and runs at 60 FPS, so it’s smoother. It now has customizable keys, and supports controllers natively (I use a PS4 controller via Bluetooth, and an Xbox 360 controller, both worked without issue).
There are tons of new items, as well as pretty much all the items from the original, which generally work the same as you’ll remember. And things like flies that spawn from being Guppy (the cat form you get from get after picking up 3 Guppy items) are now unlimited. So you can amass an army of them, walk in to a boss, and they’ll straight up kill it in one go.
You can now also drop any trinkets and consumables (except The tick) that you have by holding Tab or right trigger. So no more getting stuck with a shitty trinket and having to keep it until you find something to swap it out with. This is extremely necessary since there are at least 2 trinkets that will teleport you out of a room under certain circumstances while still in a fight.
The mom fight is essentially the same as the original. But all the big bosses after mom are majorly improved. They’re much less bullet hell nightmares and more about skill and dodging. There’s also a hard to get final boss fight that I won’t say much about here to avoid spoilers, but it’s pretty cool. Oh, and if you kill mom within 20 minutes there’s a boss challenge room where pretty much every boss and horseman spawn in 2 at a time. you end up getting 2 items out of it, so if you have the power it’s worth it.
The biggest gripe I have is that they went with a pixelated look in this version. At first I was really annoyed. I loved the clean, hand drawn look of the original. But in the options you can turn on (or off, I forget which) Filtering, which reduces most of the pixelation. So it’s not a big deal.
I’m really hooked on the game. I’ve finished everything but the boss challenge and the hard to get final boss on almost each character. And tonight I’ll be back at it to complete everything with my remaining characters.
My gripe too, not just with this game. Retro-pixel was charming in games once or twice, but now all it says to me is masking lazy development. It’s the hipster Pabst Blue Ribbon of game development. Oooohhhh…8-bit aesthetic…I’m so retro-edgy-old-skool…slap. That said…
I’ve played Isaac (on PS4) for maybe 30-40 runs so far. I’m getting to the point where it seems more like I’m fighting the random-number-generator than relying on any real skill or self-sufficient tactic. Not sure if I’m missing the point, or if this is one of those rogue-like meta-game things that I’m not sussing out yet.
It’s just about learning the various monsters and getting good at staying alive. I’m at the point where I can usually get through the first three floors without losing any net health. But yeah, one of the hallmarks of the Roguelike genre is getting lucky. Sometimes you just get crappy items and sometimes you get really hard rooms.
I have a semi-irrational dislike of the game for making misuse of the term “roguelike” widespread. It’s now become a meaningless buzzword.
I thought the actual gameplay was pretty frustrating. Its lack of actual controller support despite essentially being a twin-stick shooter was pretty unforgivable. That he included “use joy2key” in the game’s option window was a pretty good sign that he knew he should include it but just couldn’t be bothered.
“Rebirth” supports controllers by default, thankfully. I still find that I use the ABXY buttons to shoot rather than the joystick – you can’t fire non pi/2 angles, anyway.
I finally beat Mom last night for the first time. Clearly that’s not the end of the game.
I picked up one of the most annoying powerups yet. The telekinetic tear. It seems good at first because you can hide behind stuff and just drive it around killing things, until the things start moving faster than your tear and there’s nowhere to hide. Picked up a floating Meat Cube that does something, not sure what it does.
I’m about to give up on pills. The majority are bad for you. Do the colors stay the same from game to game or do they change which pills are which color?
Bah. I haven’t found any good enough yet to justify the risk of hurting myself.
Also, I found a handful of speed powerups and discovered that, at least for me, it’s possible to get TOO fast, to where it’s tough to control Issac in tight spaces. I had the tar power up and very high speed in the catacombs, which is a black background. This combination made it tough to accurately control him around spikes and other things you don’t want to run into.
There are more good/neutral ones than bad ones. I find that they’re generally worth it. Generally you want to go ahead and use an unknown pill in an empty room, just in case you get something like paralysis or hematemises.
If you manage to find a few pills on a run and then identify them by eating them, it makes items that spawn more pills much more valuable.
I finished getting all the end bosses on each character last night on normal difficulty. Now I need to get the boss rushes on all but 2, which is hard for me. I’m too much of a completionist to let even a single poop stand, so i’m usually at 25 minutes or more before I even find Mom.
I played at least 4 runs last night and I became Guppy on 3, so that’s much easier to achieve than in the original. Adding Guppy’s Collar and making Guppy’s Hairball official Guppy items helped. As did adding in a lot more red chests.
Binding of Isaac is one of my favorite games of the last several years. When Rebirth came out I played the crap out of it. I got 100% in 112 hours, according to Steam. I think the original had better music in general, but everything else in Rebirth is an improvement. It’s a perfect mix of skill and luck and there’s a ridiculous amount of little tricks you can learn along the way (or read about now I guess). You can beat it in a single setting but death is final so it makes you much more involved than most games where there’s a save point every 10 seconds, yet it’s built around this fact so it’s not frustrating like games where save points aren’t common because the designers are lazy or spiteful.
The cute/grotesque art design and the religious/child abuse themes give it an odd appeal too.
There’s a super secret character that dies in one shot. To get 100% you have to beat all the different end bosses with him on hard mode. That made everything else look like easy mode. Really frustrating, but oh so satisfying to beat. If you want 100% I might advise you to unlock him right away before you unlock so many crap items that pollute your item pool.
One thing that did annoy me is how compared to the original it seems secret rooms are kinda crappy. Rarely is there an item pedestal. Usually just junk. Most useful when there’s a bunch of money. Or maybe I’m just annoyed I memorized all these arcane rules about where they can spawn but it feels like the payout isn’t there a lot of the time.
I decided to give Azazel a run. He starts with three black hearts (no regulars), flight, and a miniature brimstone beam instead of tears that you have to charge to shoot. Around the second floor, I picked up Quad Tears, which increased the charge time considerably but jacked the damage to ridiculous levels. I ended up beating Mom in under 20 minutes, wiped the boss rush with ridiculous ease, and by the time everything was said and done I had jacked up my damage so much that I one-shotted Mom’s Heart. I ended with five regular hearts, several soul hearts, and even one of the original black ones. Stupid, stupid good run.
I also had the infestation shot, where stuff you kill spawns blue spiders. I imagine that the mitigating factor for this powerful ability is that the spiders will suicide before you clear rooms, but my damage output was so good that they usually didn’t get the chance. By the end I easily had 40+ spiders following me around.
Ok, I’m figuring this game out now. I made it to the heart level but died before getting to the end of it. I picked up a power-up that seemed pretty cool, Rainbow Tears I think it was called. Basically every time I went into a new room it switched to a different type of tears. I had something else that made my tears glow bright green and a dmg upgrade too so I was cruising. Not sure how I died as I was pretty powerful and had a fair number of hearts. Guess there was just too many bullets on screen.
I HATE the skeletons that throw bones at you. They move fast and don’t throw bones until they are right next to you and the bones also move fast and are impossible to avoid in a single screen room. Those are my most hated enemy.
I also picked up a green brain that flies across the screen and explodes to kill everything around it. This seemed pretty cool until it kept blowing up on enemies nearby and hurting me in the process.
Is there any way to drop a power-up once you pick it up?
I just had a bullshit run where I qenr through 4 floors and not a single bomb or key dropped. Every room was empty except for a couple hearts. I couldn’t do any upgrading beyond the first level golden door. I almost wrote down the seed so you guys could experience the bullshit too.