Gamers are still enjoying Edmund McMillen’s indie smash hit The Binding Of Isaac years after the game was released, and as of September 28, it’s been an entire decade since the hugely popular dungeon crawler first had them battling hideous demons using only a child’s tears. However, despite celebrating its tenth birthday, The Binding Of Isaac’s story remains ambiguous, with the game rewarding determined players with hints and clues as they complete multiple playthroughs and challenges.
As a result of the title’s intentionally vague story and evergreen popularity – with the recent release of mega-expansion The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance indicating that the McMillen’s classic will be haunting and harrowing players for years to come – various fan theories exist to explain the game’s dark setting, disturbing content, and depraved menagerie of monsters and bosses.
The Binding Of Isaac’s Dark and Disturbing History
The Binding Of Isaac is a roguelike video game designed by Edmund McMillen – also the co-creator of infamously difficult and highly acclaimed twitch platformer Super Meat Boy – and Florian Himsl, which was first unleashed on PC back in 2011. The Binding Of Isaac received widespread praise for its addictive gameplay, its accessible interpretation of the roguelike genre, and its grotesque and original art style.
The game has been hugely successful and continues to entertain a dedicated fan base, spawning multiple expanded re-releases. Prior to The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance, the most significant of these were The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth, which was released on Steam in 2014 and subsequently ported to iOS as well as all major consoles, and 2017’s The Binding Of Isaac: Afterbirth+, again ported to consoles soon after its initial PC release.
These expansions greatly enhanced The Binding Of Isaac with additional bosses, enemies, secrets, items, and power-ups added to the game’s already enormous gallery. This extended the title’s formidable longevity and ensured massive variety in every playthrough. Such unpredictability makes the game perfect for Twitch streamers and YouTube videos, with the game regularly featured in this type of online content.
McMillen’s magnum opus is not for everyone, however. The Binding Of Isaac’s challenging difficulty and permadeath mechanics have proved to be off-putting to some fans, as have McMillen’s trademark themes and art style. Newcomers should brace themselves to expect twisted dark humor, gore, drugs, bodily functions, potentially offensive portrayals of religion, and a disturbing storyline about an abusive mother. Indeed, Apple at one point banned the game from iOS because of its depiction of violence towards children, although the game is now once again available on the App Store.
The Binding Of Isaac Gets Darker the More You Play
The game’s introduction sequence, shown below, depicts Isaac’s terrible mom descending into religious mania as she pursues him with a butcher knife, eager to carry out the infanticide she believes is her deity’s will. Isaac flees through a trapdoor in his room to hide in the basement, where the game’s bizarre mix of roguelike dungeon crawling and tear-stained, bullet hell shooter gameplay commences.
However, from there the game’s plot becomes open to interpretation. The story is clearly loosely based on the Bible tale of the same name, where a parent’s devotion to God is cruelly tested. Many biblical figures appear in the game, usually as mini-boss or boss battles, including the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seven Deadly Sins, and even Satan himself. But to judge the game solely as a modern retelling of a Bible story, or even as a scathing attack on religion, leaves a lot of its content unexplored.
Another option is to take the Binding of Isaac's gruesome content at face value, and accept that Isaac’s basement really is populated by repulsive monsters that he needs to eradicate in order to survive. The game’s initial final boss is his mother herself, and this also makes some sense when viewed through this lens: having battled his way out of the caverns beneath the house, Isaac has become strong enough to physically stand up to his parent and end the cycle of abuse.
However, the surreal and disturbing new levels that are subsequently unlocked suggest that Binding of Isaac is much darker than anyone realized, and it is via these additional stages that fans believe the true nature of Isaac’s predicament can be ascertained. They claim that the levels entitled “the Chest” and “the Dark Place” imply that Isaac has in fact not hidden from his mother’s cruelty in a haunted basement, but has instead climbed into his toy chest to conceal himself. There, starved of oxygen, he has hallucinated the game’s entire content until his tragic suffocation. This heartbreaking and extremely dark interpretation is further hinted at by the presence of unlockable characters like "???", who appears to be a dead version of Isaac, as well as by other images displayed during the game’s many end sequences.
A final and even more poignant interpretation is that the game is in fact semi-autobiographical in nature. Edmund McMillen has been praised for speaking frankly in the past about his own experiences with abuse, and also with medical trauma, which have undoubtedly influenced the game’s dark content. Many of his other games incorporate these themes, and he has even carried them into board game releases like Tapeworm.
Whatever the truth, The Binding Of Isaac remains a hugely popular and successful title. Despite announcing his intention to finally step away from the game after the release of the Repentance expansion, it remains to be seen whether McMillen will be able to do so, or whether his greatest creation will lure him back into its macabre depths for one more blood-spattered run.
The Binding Of Isaac: Repentance is available now on PC, and will release on PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X later in 2021.
