The Binding of Isaac is an indie game rougelike made by Edmund Mcmillen. In The Binding of Isaac you play as a baby called Isaac who is forced down into a trapdoor that leads to the basement due to their mother’s horrible acts of violence towards Isaac. When starting a new game Isaac is forced to defend himself using his own tears against monsters that live in the basement and luckily for the player Isaac doesn’t need to always use his tears as in each floor there’s a treasure room that holds items to benefit Isaac in many ways. Within each and every new game of The Binding of Isaac it comes with its unique seed making every game different from the last by a long shot which is why I think The Binding of Isaac is one of the most replayable games to ever exist. This is the very reason why I love The Binding of Isaac so much as the game will never be like others in its genre.

The Binding of Isaac will start with the player holding an item already (depending on which character your playing as or how much progress you’ve made in that save file). Most of the time the starting item isn’t that useful but some characters have over powered starting items like Isaac; however, the starting item on a character isn’t the only thing you depend on, each character has their own starting stats which can also make characters really good but most of the time the stats are last the thing you would think of as the items from the treasure rooms are what really matter to the player. Also something to keep in mind is the item quality (the item qualities is a mod for the game and not in the base game) as each item will be ranked 0 – 4, zero being worst four being best. It should be obvious that always taking quality fours can be seen as an instant win as you’re getting the best of best but that’s until you realize that quality fours are rare and you’ll probably have very little by the end of each game, but just because you didn’t get anything good doesn’t mean your doomed as most items have synergies which can lead to very broken combos.

As you make more progress through the game unlocking more items, characters, and endings you’ll probably wonder if another game mode exists besides hard mode because there is another game mode which is greed mode. Greed mode is a wave based mode were the player earns money by pressing on a button in the middle of the room which will spawn a group of enemies. Pressing the button again during a wave will cause you to take damage but stops any more waves from spawning, and by the end of greed mode run you have to defeat a boss which is when defeated spawns in a unique donation machine where putting any money in earns the player some goods when reaching some milestones. By time the you’ve maxed your greed mode donation machine you would’ve unlocked greedier mode which isn’t any special as it’s just a harder version of greed mode; however, playing greedier could reward the player into putting more money in the greed donation machine but besides that it’s not really worth playing unless you’re getting marks for the characters.

As for marks these are for when you beat the game and get one of the many endings which adds a symbol on a piece of paper when you beat the game, the marks don’t transfer to each character as beating the game with any character will give you a new item or challenge and the mark depending on which ending you got. Challenges are something unlockable and something you can go straight into, challenges are rules that the game gives you, its mostly items you start with but your goal is to beat the challenge. Although the challenges aren’t difficult most of them remove treasure rooms and have Isaac blindfolded making him unable to shoot out any tears. Most of the challenges are alright or horrible to play, however beating a challenge rewards the player with new items or starting items.

There’s a lot of content in The Binding of Isaac as basically everything has a reason to be there, some examples being shops, boss rooms, normal rooms, treasure rooms, active items, passive items, characters, etc., and only having around 200 hours (as seen on the featured image) on the game barely scratches the surface of what the this game has to offer.