Unbound: The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is thematic as all hell and a solid game, and I don't want to play it. If forced to squeeze it into a genre, I'd call it an unforgiving Rogue-like shooter, which I didn't really know was a thing before playing this game. It's right up my alley, and I still don't want to play it. The opening story is that of a child who has been abused by his mother because she is suffering delusions of commands from God. The game begins as she hears a final command to kill her son and goes to do so, and only the discovery of a trapdoor to the basement in his room allows the son to escape. The entire thing feels like the self-protective hallucination of a boy about to die, and it's rather depressing. Not to mention the elements that fill the hallucination-slash-gameplay that suggest just how terrible the boy's life has been.

Gameplay is good. The difficulty curve is moderate but surmountable. The knowledge curve is far steeper, with a broad range of powerups that often aren't clear about what they do for you. Part of this is the legacy of the Rogue-like, items that you have to test and experiment with to figure out what they do. Part of it is just obfuscation.

I might be able to ascend this knowledge curve with another handful of hours of play, but I don't want to. The game just doesn't suck me in enough to make that time commitment worthwhile.

The Binding of Isaac is available for $4.99 on Steam, or at the Humble Bundle storefront for $7.99 (bundled with an expansion).

History Lesson

"...Planters invented peanuts, and Exxon-Mobil discovered oil." "Very good, Jeremy," said Mr. Alword, "you may sit down." He turned to the rest of the class. "Now, if you will all turn to page," his laser pointer struck the day's assignment on the whiteboard, "three hundred twenty-three in your history texts, we can resume yesterday's lesson."

Kim often had questions during their history lessons, but she usually kept them to herself. This time, she raised her hand. Mr. Alword gestured for her to speak. "If inventing or discovering something means you get the profit from it, why does Don get full marks for copying my homework? He didn't write it." The other students murmured, and she could feel Don staring at her.

Mr. Alword didn't smile. "Do you have any proof that Don is copying your work?"

She shook her head. "Then perhaps you should spend more time deciphering a way to increase your profit from your own work, rather than what someone else may or may not be doing with it. In exchange for that interruption, why don't you begin our reading. Second paragraph, please."

Kim sighed and looked at her book. "When George Washington first discovered the American continent..."

Principal Winter

She wore a narrow-cut dark suit, a thin slash of white shirt showing in the front. Her face was as sharp. She leaned forward as though she might strike either person sitting across from her: two children. The nameplate on her desk read "Principal Winter." "You," she pointed at the left child. "Speak."

"Well," it said, and Winter wondered how people discerned larval males and females. "Some of us were playing pirates, and Sammy said he was pirate king, and we had to give him our pirate loot or he'd take it."

"No," said Sammy, "I—"

"Silence," said Winter. "Proceed," she said to the first child.

"Um, I said no, and he pushed me. I pushed back, and Mr. Beecham grabbed us for fighting."

"Fine," said Winter. She looked at Sammy.

"We were just playing, and I didn't hurt Jenny, and that's how pirates work."

"Enough." The children stopped. "You," she pointed at Sammy, "have an overabundance of spirit. I am confiscating your soul for the rest of the school week." She plucked something from just over his head. Sammy's eyes dulled and his posture slumped. "You," she pointed at the other. "Continue defending yourself. Dismissed."

Sammy walked out, unprotesting.

Euclid Who?: HyperRogue

You are lost in a non-Euclidean space, constructed of tessellating patterns of shapes that recede into the distance in a way that simply doesn't make any sense. There are treasures here, from ice diamonds to rubies to spice, scattered through a double-handful of impossibly-constructed worlds. There are also monsters who can kill you with a touch, if you don't get them first. The more treasure you collect, the more monsters seek you out, but you need lots of treasure to find an Orb of Yendor before the monsters overwhelm you. Good luck. HyperRogue is a brilliant, dead-simple game that is not quite a Rogue-like and not quite anything else. Please keep in mind, when I say dead-simple, I mean that the art is cheap and the music... well, the music is quite nice, if not complex. In contrast, modeling a non-Euclidean space on my computer... I have no idea how simple that is.

You move through up to ten different worlds (plus one crossroads between them) that procedurally generate as you go, each with unique properties: In the ice world, your body heat will melt the walls; in the living cavern, walls move; in the running world, the ground falls away behind you. Enemies have unique properties as well. Though many have an AI that only charges you, the desert's indestructible sandworm moves once every two turns, and the jungle's murderous vines grow outward from a root one vine at a time, rotating around the center.

That's not all. Because one attack kills anything (with some exceptions), including you, the game plays on a checkmate principle: you can't make move anywhere a monster would kill you, and if you are being threatened, you must eliminate or escape that threat. And if there's no way out, you're dead. Checkmate.

A friend suggested that makes it a puzzle game, but it doesn't feel like a puzzle, it feels like you're running around a bizarre world trying not to die.

There's a lot of creativity in the variation of rules for the different worlds and and different monsters. That creativity is what takes a simple game with a non-Euclidean gimmick and makes it a smart game that's kept me playing for almost two hours, trying to find the key to unlock one of the Orbs of Yendor that I can find in Hell.

If you manage it, please tell me what's inside.

HyperRogue is available for $0.99 on Steam, or to play for free on the web.

For a Good Cause

"Please, I need them back." I had her right where I wanted her, and to highlight that I dangled one of the pouches in front of her. Her face went chalk white and her eyes nearly bugged out of her face. She knew the pouches were sealed and in no danger of opening, but she wasn't used to playing this close to the edge.

I tossed it to her, and she nearly passed out right there. "That one's free. You know my price for the rest."

"Please! This isn't just my professional reputation, this is, is... it could release a global plague!"

"Then it should be an easy decision," I said. I held out a pen. "Need my back to sign on?"

She glared, but she signed the papers. When she smacked them into my hand, she said, "Are you happy?" in a voice that could scrape paint.

"Almost." I gestured for her to open her car, then I pulled out a carrier. "Hey there, buddy," I said. Li'l Ben's meow gave me my first smile in days. It almost brought me to tears.

So I thanked her for the divorce and told her where to find the other pouches.

So She Doesn't Forget

She's asleep. That's why everything is dark. Light comes on suddenly, a door opening above her. People move and murmur just outside her vision. She calls out, but finds she can't move. Every part of her is asleep, numb, paralyzed, and she realizes she's dead. The mortician discusses football while sewing her lips shut. No, she tries to scream, I'm alive, I'm fine, but her lips remain still. She screams, and no one hears her.

Her viewing begins. Jake comes, face frozen with grief, with their young son. The boy uncaps a black marker and leans in close, but Jake stops him and squats. "What are you doing?" he whispers.

"I'm writing that I love her so she doesn't forget." Fighting back tears, Jake doesn't stop him. The priest finishes the reading, and the rest passes quickly, and she's being lowered into the ground. She screams unheeded as dirt rains down on her.

She wakes up gasping for breath, pulse racing and Jake asleep beside her. In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face and flips on the light to reassure herself of what is real.

Someone has written, "I love you, mommy," in black marker on her arm.

Game Review: bit Dungeon II

I'm not sure what to make of bit Dungeon II. It's an action RPG that reminds me of the Secret of Mana more than anything else, with freedom to walk all over the world and use a variety of quick and charged attacks that vary by weapon. But it's not clear-cut in the way the old console games were. It helps when enemies react to attacks, such as in the Zelda games that bit Dungeon II claims as one of its inspirations. Here, monsters make no reactions except for the status effects you occasionally place on them, so they crowd you and make the fracas a confused jumble. You can pound the action key or hold it down to charge, and each has an advantage at different times, if you can figure out what that is.

What little story there is—deliberately thin in the common Rogue-like style—seems to be that you are a ghost, returned from who-knows-what and who-knows-where, out to gain strength and defeat the grand evil, unlocking the portal to face it by first destroying several boss monsters.

The art style reminds me of Zelda in its level design and a mix between Giger and Miyazaki in its monster design. Sometimes you fight skeletons or yetis, but more often you'll encounter floating, bloated snowmen or emaciated, canted bipeds firing lasers at you if you don't cut them down fast enough. Whatever its faults, I love looking at it.

 

Gameplay seems to spike between non-threatening and immediately deadly, all while fighting monsters of various stripes. It just doesn't provide me enough feedback to know whether there's something about the situation I'm in, or I'm messing up my combat timing, and if so, what I did wrong.

The game seems to be most dangerous when you re-enter a screen you've already cleared. It repopulates the enemies, usually with a collection of smaller, weaker enemies, but those mobs are what take me down half the time. Or those tough knights. They have lots of hit points.

In contrast, bosses seem to stand around for the half the fight soaking up damage before they unleash something that usually misses. I just can't feel the game's rhythm, and I can't start learning the game's patterns when I can't sense them.

bit Dungeon II is available for $4.99 on Steam, and apparently also for mobile devices. That makes a lot of sense, actually; the play feels like it was designed with touchscreens in mind.