The Binding of Isaac

About

The Binding of Isaac is an indie RNG-based adventure video game series created by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. The game, where players control a naked crying child named Isaac, has been notorious for its use of gruesome and religious content, being often described as “potentially blasphemous content”.

Premise

All of The Binding of Isaac games revolve around the same basic plot: The main character, Isaac, lives alone with his mother. However, his mother receives what she believes is a message from God, who tells her to murder her son because he has “become corrupted by sin”. When she goes to do the deed, Isaac discovers a trap door in his bedroom, and escapes his mother to the caverns underneath his house. The game is inspired in the biblical story of the same name, in which God asks Abraham to offer his son Isaac as sacrifice.^[13]

Gameplay

With a similar playing style to the orignal Legend of Zelda games, each level in the game consists of a floor, with monsters that Isaac must kill by using his projectile tears, being also able to pick up items that either change his stats or give him special abilities. These levels, which are random generated, get exponentially harder, and the players must restart the entire game if they die.

History

The Binding of Isaac was first hinted at when developer Edmund McMillen, previously known for games like Super Meat Boy and Gish, released a post concerning it on his blog.^[5] McMillen and Florian Himsl worked on the game during the following months and released it on Steam on September 28th, 2011 as a Flash game.^[1] Half a year after the original game release, the expansion Wrath of The Lamb was relased for Steam, notable for its added content and more complex gameplay.^[2]

Rebirth

At some point of 2014, McMillen announced the developement of a remake, named The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. The game’s main feature was the remake of the sprites in GBA-styled pixel art, also adding more content respect its percursors.^[17] The game, developed and published by the company Nicalis, became available to the public on November 4th, 2014.^[3] On April 1st, 2015, a new expansion for Rebirth called Afterbirth was announced by McMillen on his Tumblr blog.^[8] The expansion, which adds new items, enemies, characters and game mods it’s setted for release on October 30th, 2015.^[4]

Reception

The games received multiple awards, including the PlayStation 2014 Best PS Vita Game of the Year Gold Award, which was awarded to Rebirth.^[11] The game has also been well recieved by players, The Binding of Isaac has with 96% of the user reviews on Steam being positive for The Binding of Isaac and 97% for The Binding of Isaac:Rebirth as of October 9th, 2015.

Controversy

The game has some gruesome elements, and was rejected by Nintendo because of “questionable religious content”.^[9] However, in 2015, the game became accepted onto the Nintendo 3ds, WiiU, and Xbox One consoles, albeit with some edits, anounced by McMillen on May 2015, like using a fig leaf to cover Isaac’s nudity or replacing “God” by “Dog” (shown bellow).^[10]

However, on April 1st, Tyrone Rodriguez, founder of Nicalis, posted various videos of 3DS version gameplays, finally announcing the next day that the game would be uncensored (shown bellow).

Online Relevance

On October 2nd, 2011, a dedicated subreddit was created, gaining over 61,000 subscribers in the next four years.^[7] On June 12th, 2013, a wiki about the game was created.^[6] On the image macros creation page QuickMeme, a template named “First-World Problem Isaac” was created on October 22nd, 2011, with captions usually describing problems that players have experienced while playing the game. As September, 2015, there’s over 350 instances of this advice animal on Quickmeme.^[12]

The game has also inspired several animations. On July 7th, 2012, animator KawaiiPiranha uploaded an animated parody of the game, gaining over 850,000 in the following years. On July 25th, 2012, animator MyFuckinMess uploaded an animation titled “Eyesaac”, gaining over 440,000 views in the following years. The game has been also played by several Let’s Play channels, with some of them being dedicated to it, being Northernlion one of the most notable ones.

Since its release, the series has gained a sizeable following. As October 9th, 2015 the artist community DeviantART leads to over 9,000 results under the keyword “the binding of isaac".^[14] Fandom presence can also be found on other communities like 4chan^[16] or Tumblr.^[15]

Search Interest

External References