RNG Gods, Please! (An Overview of The Binding of Isaac)
The Binding of Isaac is a short, independent game created by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. It features a young boy names Isaac who must escape his mother’s wrath by disappearing into the basement and fighting various monsters and creatures with his tears.
The game is fairly straightforward. W, A, S, D to move, the arrow keys to shoot your tears in the direction the player wants them to go, E or Shift key for bombs and Q for pills or cards usage. Pick up items from items rooms, shops, or even secret rooms to make your character better and stronger.
(The Binding of Isaac Steam screenshot.)
This game has countless hours of play (some players have gotten more than 5,000!) simply because there’s always something new to unlock, and even when it isn’t, you will never play the same game twice.
The levels are randomly generated, as are the rooms and the items that you have to choose from. This gives the game so much variety. Not to mention the fact that after you unlock a few things during your first few “runs” (or games) you can unlock new characters which have different base stats than Isaac! This gives the play through a different feel and forces the player to adapt to another style. (Some might be slower, but have more damage, others might have more health but less attack power.)
A first glance, the game seems very RNG (Random Number Generator) heavy. That wouldn’t be wrong to say that at all. However, there are many strategies that players learn throughout their hours of playing Isaac. Some items are better than others and some characters are better than others as well.
The community can agree that Isaac is the best character to use because of his item The Dice. This allows him to “roll” (or randomly change) an item to something different. This won’t be true for newcomers, however, because Isaac does not start with The Dice. That item, along with many others, needs to be unlocked after fulfilling certain requirements.
My personal favourite character after Isaac is Cain. He has a lower health, but is much faster and has a higher attack than Isaac. He also starts with a Lucky Foot which will allow the player to take random pills without having any negative effect. (Oh, did I mention some items and seemingly harmless “décor” can and will kill you?)
Well, once you get over the lack of saving, (almost) always on a single life, and the general craziness of trying to figure out what items do what, the game mechanics are actually pretty simple and it’s fairly easy to figure out what items to keep and what items should be thrown out with each character.
(The Binding of Isaac Steam screenshot.)
Every character has their own base stats. These stats are health, damage, fire rate, fire speed, speed and range. Luck is also a hidden stat. Each item your character picks up could potentially change these stats for better or worse. For example, the Small Rock lowers a character’s speed, but increases fire rate and damage. It wouldn’t be very good with a slow character like Maggie, but with Cain it’s extremely helpful! (Funny how my favourite character always seems to be linked with good items, eh?)
Each item will do something differently and it's very hard to know just what that item will do without looking directly at the coding. It is interesting to speculate which items will work with what, and what won't. For example, Brimstone (one of the best items in the game damage wise) will not add its damage to Mom's Knife (another very strong damage item.) However, Small Rock will work with Brimstone-and very well, actually. Simply by looking into the coding, or looking through posts on the internet, one can learn that small rock will give a permanent +2 damage increase with Brimstone, as opposed to a +0.6 for every second the shot is on the screen.
With this general knowledge it does make choices a lot easier. However, it’s hard to choose items when you have no idea what they do. You could easily take every time you can put your hands on and just test it out to see how it affects your run (because the descriptions of what the items do to your stats aren’t always correct!), you could look at the coding itself and see exactly what each item does and what percentage it will affect your stats by, you could look up the wiki page every time you want to know about an item, or you could be like me and watch enough videos and streams of the people mentioning what items do to have it drilled into your head.
(The Binding of Isaac Steam screenshot.)
Whatever way you choose, your game is supposed to be fun. So even if you just want to randomly go blind and pick up every item you see, or have a helpful tab (or ten) open to remind you what you should or should not take, everybody is on equal playing field because of the general randomness of this amazing game.
In the end, Binding of Isaac all comes down to skill. Practice, practice, and more practice. Know the enemies’ movements and signs when it’s safe to attack and when you should dodge is absolutely crucial. Though sometimes there’s no way to avoid the onslaught of an attack when you’re at your last half of red heart (or blue, if you’re playing as ???) and you end up dying. It’s frustrating and confusing when you know you dodged that attack from that stupid spider, right? Well, restart your timer and forfeit that race because you’re starting right from the beginning again with a whole new world and set of items waiting for you to discover.
Check out the website HERE
and purchase this game (or preorder Rebirth) HERE (Where the screenshots are from) and HERE
(The Binding of Isaac Steam screenshot.)
