This is a difficult game for me to review.

This was probably my favorite indie game back during the initial indie boom. The lack of handholding was refreshing and exciting. The consistent discovery of new power ups, enemies and mysteries absolutely sunk its claws into me.

Just as important was the tone. There are some who view the presentation as sophomoric and puerile, the videogame equivalent of the obligatory fart joke in a DreamWorks movie. I think they're kind of missing the point.

This will undoubtedly sound silly at first, but the game is an autobiographical work of art about the trauma of fundamentalist religious abuse. When someone is taught to view all their natural bodily functions and desires as unclean and sinful, childish jokes about poop and tampons become a cathartic act of rebellion. I don't think the point of these jokes is even to be particularly funny, aside from the absurd black humor of seeing my monstrosity of a character stacked with 10+ body deforming upgrades shambling across the room. Rather, it adds to the game's tone of revulsion and hopelessness, that McMillen intentionally undercuts through cutesy, self-effacing absurdist humor. Think Invader Zim, or Adventure Time.

The problem with reviewing The Binding of Isaac nowadays, though, is that I'm no longer a hopeless, miserable teenager. While I can respect this game as the work of art that it is, playing it puts me back into a sort of desensitized, numb emotional state that I don't have much use for these days. I'm glad McMillen was able to make money off his trauma, but I don't need to subject myself to it anymore.

As an aside, it's funny to think that The Binding of Isaac is my first top down Zelda. Internalizing its rules about bomb-able walls, stored away in the deep recesses of my mind, likely helped my initial playthrough of Zelda 1 a decade later. References become first exposure.

I heard a friend offhandedly mentioning that they were revisiting this game and, hot off of getting Death Certificate in Repentance for a third time, decided I should revisit this too.

The last time I had played Flash Isaac, I made the ill-advised decision to try killing two birds with one stone by getting chest clear unlocks in Hard Mode, which comes with its own set of achievements for each character. This was very frustrating and made me give up, so I decided on this revisit that I would not touch it until I had unlocked every item.

Right off the bat, I found that the movement was very stiff. As Isaac is a game where aiming your shots depends on your movement and positioning, this makes it harder to not only dodge attacks but to aim properly as well. The main reason dodging and aiming is harder is because of how quickly Isaac accelerates, making it much harder to nudge shots into a slight angle or nudge your character between a tight spread of bullets. It was very frustrating for a while to miss a lot of shots and get hit by attacks I've dodged a million times in Rebirth, and while I've adapted the movement still certainly feels kinda clunky. It's like trying to perform normal tasks while sick or very tired - your input feels the same but your performance is just worse.

Another thing I noticed is that rooms feel on average more claustrophobic - this is both a good and bad thing, in my opinion. I think a lot of Rebirth's big rooms are way too easy because of how spread out enemies usually are, but some of the rooms in WoTL are just nasty - the egregious ones are usually on the floors added in this DLC. You'll get enemies that shoot explosive AoE shots right next to the door, enemies that charge at you and move fast right next to the door, enemies with a lot of area denial in a cramped layout with 1 tile wide walkways. Some enemies also feel too fast, like keeper heads, buttlickers, and ESPECIALLY the Mask enemy that is paired with a heart.

Some other frustrations:
- The blast radius of bombs feels inconsistent
- Only about a third of the active items feel worth touching
- Secret room generation feels weird, and it's frustrating that you can waste bombs on a valid secret room and not have it open because of the room you're in
- Mom's Heart / It Lives spends too much time being invulnerable! It drags on the fight for too long, and most of what it spawns is stuff I already know I can kill! Rebirth balanced it well by giving it its own attacks before having low HP
- Depths II will let Devil/Angel rooms spawn despite being inaccessible. Womb II Devil/Angel rooms not having items when Sheol/Cathedral is unlocked sucks too
- Speaking of, Angel rooms are really hard to get and are usually a disappointment. I never saw Sacred Heart once on this file despite having nearly 70 hours in it (you can get 100% achievements if your collection is short by one item)
- The Challenge runs were mostly uninteresting, though to be fair the majority of Challenges in Rebirth-AB+ were also boring. It seems the dev teams really didn't figure out how to make challenges interesting until Repentance, with a couple exceptions

Onto things I liked... secret rooms locking you out is kind of cool, it was straight up not intentional as confirmed by Florian but it adds a small layer of resource management and thinking ahead to bombing into one. On a similar note, it feels like you get pickups way less often in this version of the game, making you think more carefully how to spend them - in Rebirth I usually get enough keys to open every item room and shop, and most golden chests I find in a run. This resource starvation makes items like Skeleton Key and Pyro a lot more interesting. Devil Prices not adjusting when you buy items kind of sucks but it does de-emphasize the soul heart meta pretty well which I like. There is also a funny mechanic where taking a deal which you can't afford but will survive taking kills you on the spot for cheating the devil - made me laugh despite killing a good run!

Notably, the bosses Isaac and ??? are much harder than their Rebirth counterparts, which is awesome! The barrage of tears is a lot faster but also its intensity depends on how much you are hitting the boss, encouraging you to have some restraint rather than just dumping your DPS on the boss at once and overwhelming yourself (though slow-fire, heavy-hitter builds counter this). Blue Baby's homing shots are no joke, you have to be paying good attention so you can move away when they show up.

One last detail before I talk about Eternal Edition, shot speed feels like a more valuable stat in this game, probably just because I had more trouble aiming but also because your tears move kind of slow and enemies move kind of fast. Range also feels kind of worthless unless you're Cain due to the consistently small size of rooms.

Ok, so... Eternal Edition.

To be honest, Eternal Edition's hard mode feels like a bit of a crapshoot. Sure, there were runs where I struggled a lot and died due to eternal enemies chipping away my HP faster, even as late as the Cathedral or Chest (this is usually where it happened, actually, since eternal bosses are a lot more troublesome). But, even more often, I found myself getting showered in eternal hearts and getting more devil deals as a result. I also was getting some pretty good angel room items from the rare but always-open eternal challenge rooms which let you take an angel room item and some red/soul hearts at the cost of fighting 3 waves of eternal enemies/bosses... which can also lead to you getting EVEN MORE eternal hearts!!! On most of my winning runs I had too much health to die as long as I was playing reasonably well, and the removal of the HP cap didn't help with that at all! The worst that happened on Hard Mode runs was that one of the aforementioned annoying room layouts would be exacerbated by the eternal enemies, sometimes causing me to die or lose a lot of HP. I do think that a lot of the eternal enemies are a pretty fun challenge, as well as the bosses, but it feels less like a hard mode and more like a mode where both you and the enemies are stronger, though I do think it makes runs a bit nuttier and more interesting.

OH, and on top of that.... you know how I praised Isaac and ??? for being "harder than their Rebirth counterparts"? Well their eternal versions, bafflingly, are EASIER!!!! They both teleport around the room, adding a bit of unpredictability but -- much more importantly -- taking them out of the center of the room, where they were at their most dangerous!!! Eternal Isaac has basically no differences aside from this, and Eternal ??? has only one of his attacks buffed in a noticeably harder way, but you still have so much breathing room to dodge it. On a similar note, Eternal It Lives -- despite chasing you and spawning harder eternal enemies -- is also easier because it stays down the entire time you can just leave one of the spawns alive so they don't cause much trouble as you strafe around and hit the boss... which for some reason doesn't have any attacks of its own until low HP, which it did already.

Eternal Edition also makes some miscellaneous changes; in Hard Mode, a few really strong items have lower weight (about 1/3rd), the D6 has a chance for 'critical failure' (emptying the pedestal instead of re-rolling what's on it), bomb pickups occasionally become troll bombs, and... Demon Baby does a lot more damage, literally just because he's Florian's favorite familiar. Not complaining though, he actually soft carried a few of my runs. Outside of hard mode Eternal Edition also improved performance and made a couple buffs to weaker items, such as Magic 8 Ball revealing the boss room and Lemon Mishap increasing Isaac's speed.

All in all, I'm not really sure what to think about this version of my favorite game. It's still Isaac so I enjoyed most of my time playing it and enjoyed some of the differences, but there were definitely some very frustrating moments where I walked into a bad room and felt like I was just doomed to tank some hits from it. I may check this game out again a few years from now, but I'm not exactly dying to. I'm mostly just surprised that Eternal Edition didn't turn out as brutal as I expected it - though it would be cool to see something similar added to Repentance officially, as the existing mod for that game is pretty cool.

Eu peguei o Binding of Isaac original por 5 reais e depois a dlc sem saber da existência do remake, o Rebirth.
Joguei bem pouco, acho que precisaria jogar mais pra dar uma opinião mais sólida. Mas pelo pouco que joguei, o jogo é bem viciante, as runs não são tão longas (talvez isso não seja sempre o caso, tem muita coisa nesse jogo que eu não vi ainda), e por mais que a maioria do conteúdo do jogo esteja bloqueado de início, ele ainda apresenta uma boa variedade de itens, inimigos e bosses logo de cara, que funcionam bem diferente uns dos outros. Cada run é realmente bem diferente da outra, e as possibilidades de uma god run caótica são várias, mas o jogo ainda depende muito de skill, acredito que o jogo tenha um bom balanceamento entre sorte e habilidade... na maior parte do tempo. Muitas vezes ele é só injusto e bem irritante mesmo. Tem muitas variações de sala que te colocam num espaço extremamente confinado com inimigos que te enxergam E te atacam pela parede, algo que tu não consegue fazer, então você fica se debatendo contra as paredes enquanto 10 bixo atiram lasers e minhocas na tua cabeça ao mesmo tempo sem tu poder fazer nada conforme teu hp vai sendo drenado pelo spam de ataques na tela (MALDITOS BIXINHOS QUE ABREM A BARRIGA), isso sem falar dos controles deslizantes e da performance que o jogo tem, resultado de ter sido feito no flash.

É inegável a influência que esse jogo teve no gênero roguelike/roguelite e em jogos em geral, e não é por nada, é realmente um jogo bem bom, e é provável que muitos dos meus problemas sejam só uma questão de eu aprender a jogar o jogo melhor, mas eu não vejo muito motivo pra isso agora que tenho o Rebirth (apesar de que aparentemente o Rebirth em si, sem as dlcs, é consideravelmente mais fácil em alguns aspectos, o que nem sempre é algo bom, mas ainda tô pra ver o quão melhor o Rebirth faz as coisas)