The Binding of Isaac...

...has got to be the creepiest, sickest game I've ever seen/played.

And I don't mean in a Human Centipede gore-kinda way.

[Ew.]

The opening scenes are in scribble form, which kinda looks cool. It tells of a little boy, whose religious mother suddenly starts hearing a voice from above tell her that her son is in fact, corrupted and therefore, needs to be sacrificed. The little boy, who at that point was locked up in his room by his mother to "remove all evil from his life", realises that his mother is about to kill him and manages to find a trapdoor to escape into.

To give you an idea on what it all looks (and feels) like, here's a video showing the opening:



That's when the game proper starts.

You play Isaac, the little boy in the prologue, as he wanders around his mother's basement, fighting twisted deformities and mutant suchlikes, and gathering power-ups/life-hearts, etc. Each level is quite short, but deviously difficult, and since there is no 'save' point whatsoever, if you die (which I did, very easily), you need to start over.

Despite the cutesy artwork, the look of the game is plain demented, as evidenced by the monsters and bosses that you have to defeat to get to the next level. The mechanics are very simple (just shoot whatever that moves, and whatever that doesn't, for goodies), but it's fiendishly difficult as the levels are randomly generated every time you play, plus you don't get too many soul-hearts to spare and half the items I collected I don't know what they're for, so they pretty much went to waste when I died.

[And I died a lot! I played this for two hours last night, and I did not get past Level 2 at all.]

I'm intrigued, and yet I'm freaked. I'm rather repulsed, and yet I want to keep playing because the game itself is very well-made. It's atmospheric (music always helps), and there's just so much symbolism and dual meanings and imagery to the entire premise, so much so that The Binding of Isaac Wikia has theories on the meanings of the endings, and also that the monsters may actually be Mom's miscarriages/abortions, dumped in the basement and subsequently mutated into monsters that spew blood and flies and flop around.

[Yes, it is that disgusting!!]

If you're like me (as in, you don't really think it's the journey that counts), YouTube has videos with all endings combined. Since there are 12 endings altogether, this means that you must play and sit through the entire game WITHOUT PAUSE for twelve times.

[But you can pause after you end each game. Just to be clear.]

I'm the type of person that is actually patient enough to go through a game 12 times just to discover anything and unlock everything. I can actually stand the blood and the mutant creatures and the slight gore and creepy imagery.

It's just the endings themselves I can't stomach.

I'm a happy-endings kind of person. You can put a person (in this case, a perpetually-crying naked little boy) through a ton of literal crap and flies and monsters, but if he makes it through the end, it kinda balances things out with what he's faced. Kinda like a "I survived" type of thing.

As I'm typing this, I've already spoiled myself so far that I would only be playing the game just for the challenge, and not because I want to see how things turn out. Even though majority of the endings show Isaac finding a locked item or character (that can be used or played next time around), the more-proper endings range from bleak to depressing. There's one that's particularly horrific, but that's not the point.

The reason I'm blogging this is because I've to get it out of my system. That such a unique game comes my way, and I can't go on any further because I can't handle realism. I mean, there's only so much you can take watching the poor little boy run around and lob his tears at monsters and poop. If you get the Stigmata power-up, you'll be lobbing blood instead, which apparently is more potent than water.

Sigh. After I played this last night, I went to bed and had some nightmares. I know, I'm a wimp.

Anyway, here's something more upbeat and adowabul, though no less twisted. From the same guy that created The Binding of Isaac, jump to 1:04 and 2:40 to skip gameplay.



[Just ignore the voices, the player was Skype-ing his friend, apparently.]