Maybe The Binding of Isaac is not the best – known works Edmund McMullen , but surely it is the most personal and twisted all who posted throughout his career.
Three years ago, Team Meat – creators of the well-known SuperMeat Boy – launched on the market a product only recommended for those over 18 years old that started from a singular religious premise: on any given day, Isaac’s mother has an epiphany in which she is entrusted the task of ” purging all evils ” to his only
offspring, for which he is sent directly to the gates of Hell. Plunged into darkness, the little baby suffers a thousand and one evils to survive the eight floors he has to overcome to erase his progenitor from the map, guilty of all his ills, using in his favor the few tools he has in his possession, to each more coarse.
Although the context is quite explicit, it would be McMullen himself who recognized that his main sources of inspiration for setting this work were “The Divine Comedy”
by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri and, of course, the so-called “Sacrifice of Abraham” , in which it is told that God tests his ” most loyal subject“asking him to sacrifice his firstborn as a sign of his faith.”
The references are crucial to not misinterpret the humorous tone that is used in most of this peculiar adventure, an essential part to understand the message that McMullen intends to convey through Isaac and his pilgrimage to the depths of misery.
In the hands of experts
Rebirth appears in the market several years after the launch of the original – a Flashversion so applauded and criticized for certain performance failures – with an eye on solving the mistakes of its namesake. The task has been carried out by a group with extensive experience in the field of remakes, Nicalis , who is known mainly for the work done with Cave Story , LaMulana or VVVVVV ,
all of them independent cutting games that mostly appeared in formats little showy and that later were optimized to see the light in alternative platforms to PC, this is: Nintendo 3DS ,PSVita , etcetera. The case of The Binding of Isaac is particularly curious
given that, despite the efforts of McMullen , Nintendo did not give its authorization for publication of the title in 3DS due to the policy it holds with any type
of content related to religion. Therefore, Rebirth now appears on Steam , PS4 and PSVita with a good handful of news about the original title that we will know next.
A greater Hell
Isaac’s goal , we said, is to kill his mother. Rebirth keeps intact the concept and the basis of mechanics so that the baby can achieve its goal, which leads us to participate in a succession of putrid dungeons created randomly in which we should only worry about surviving , either eliminating or dodging enemies that face us The game system combines elements drawn from different genres and
always has dungeons and enemies in different ways, so it is impossible to know what awaits us in the next room that we will discover. Far from focusing on puzzles or logic puzzles as other works have proposed, RebirthHe urges the player to participate in fierce battles in which we have to survive as we can.
