How The Binding of Isaac solves the problem

The Binding of ISAAC was developed in 2011, Edmund Macmyllen. Having mixed in the dungeons from Zelda his branded monsters, he created a truly unique game. Definitely, it was after it that everyone began to talk about the pants. The problem is that all the “Aisek killers” who appeared over these 10 years, did not do the like. Enter The Gungeon, Nuclear Throne, Dead Cells and so on, these are cool projects, but if you ask someone to recommend a roar, you will most likely hear a biblical name.

The game community loves everything new, so that, for example, Mario retained the title of king of platformers, each generation has to be improved. Isaac only had Rebirth And this is rather a remake than the development of the ideas of the game (and it was 6 years ago). So, what am I getting? What to determine to determine what Isaac did, it is worth returning to the origins of the genre. You should start with Rogue 1980 on Commodore 64. True, I don’t know anything about her (and the game looks scary)

Therefore, let’s talk about Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda 1986 sample, RPG action, with an open world, a large number of weapons and many dungeons. The latter may interest us, cleaning the rooms from enemies, we move to the boss, after which we get a fragment of the trifors and then run around the world to look for the following dungeons.

Picture with sound

We meet such simple mechanics in Lucky-pays.co.uk video games to this day. And then the young Edmund decided to add an element of random generation of the dungeons to it, a more sharp increase in their complexity and the loss of all progress after death. It would seem that we got a new Zelda, in which you can play an infinite number of times, or an absolutely gub gameplay, which are the crogys.

Remember your last adventures in any representative of the genre. On the ground floor of the dungeon (or something else) you start good, but reaching more complex floors, you will most likely die. Charged with confidence, you try again. Only from the very beginning. You see, we learn to play any game when we experience ourselves, but we will not improve the skill, fighting again and again with the very initial monsters (not even to mention how boring it is). Not everyone has the determination to reach the final floors, and not because they are weakly, but because not everyone is ready to spend from 20 minutes, until the game becomes interesting.

It does not sound very optimistic whether it is possible to somehow solve this problem? Well, there is no unequivocal answer, this problem is in the root of the genre of pants, although some are trying to get around it.
For example in Slay The Spire We can choose what to do by ourselves, passing if you want a battle. But you have to do this when you save life, and so skips you lose the treasures, and you may not have enough strength to win over the boss.

The key to victory is to think through steps in advance

The problem is also solved in the backbone Rogue-Lite, where between the races we can pump the character and sometimes even skip the initial locations. For example, it is used in MoonLighter. True, canonical pants, these games cannot be called.

No matter what the choice of the level is cool, it does not fit into the Rogue-Like frames

Far from me carried away. In any case, an attentive reader will notice that in Isake There is this problem. And he will be right, only partly, TBOI solves the problem full of ignoring it.
What is in it, which is not in other sorstes? Isaac Each race does not try to present as your long adventure, they rarely last more than 50 minutes (at the latest stages). The most interesting thing is that little depends on Skill, everything that is needed for victory is the blessing of a pharmacy. Well, a little excitement with an understanding of how objects work. At the time of writing the blog in the game 552 of the subject, the list will soon replenish the list DLC. And this is not to mention mods that can multiply this indicator a couple of times. Objects have unique properties, and their combinations add countless passage ways, with different gameplay.

Combo where: laser shot + ricochet from walls + shots in all directions

Good objects can create bad combo, and bad good. Of course, not everything that we find in the dungeons changes the gameplay, but those objects that do this are never an ultimatum imboe or a drain of race. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages, two objects can exclude the shortcomings of each other, or summarize them (and vice versa).

I have not seen a single game where this system was implemented at least close to the same level. For example in Enter The Gungeon There are a lot of weapons, but they are used separately from each other, without creating a full -fledged combo. And it turns out that when I finish the race in ETG, I’m already tired of the game. But after the race in Isake, I want to make another attempt. I would like to return to this game after 500 hours, you can always find something new in it.

Such an effect Isaac Partly gives his simple visual style. Authors with a larger budget, add graphonia, katsen, dialogs with voice acting and so on. This is really striking for the first passage, but you start to wait for a greater variety in the gameplay to the hundredth race.

It turns out that the pants rolls into another singlePleler game, where you wait until the developers release DLC with new content. And when you look at the trailer for a new graphone horned, you think: “Wow, as many as 4 game characters, it will definitely cost it”.