3 hours of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The Basics: Roguelike top-down shooter

Previous Time Spent: 1-3 hours

Expectation of learning Curve: medium 

Why I bought this: Positive reviews, word of mouth

First Impressions: My first impressions of this game go back years. I remember finding it very unforgiving, challenging, and grotesque. From the get-go, I liked the simplicity and odd art-direction, and disliked the actual twitch shooting mechanic. I'm not great at that kind of old-school video-game control, and every previous foray led to me quitting out of frustration

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My 3 hours: I spent 3 hours going through a number of runs of the game. Each time you begin, a map is generated, including a number of rooms. These rooms seem to be fairly static, but the game randomly strings a bunch of rooms together to form a level. The random element is fun, and can be unforgiving, but sometimes really powerful. The meat of the game seems to be dealing with these individual rooms, each of which is filled with enemies that seem to behave in predictable, but varied manners. Fighting is accomplished by moving around and shooting tears out of your eyes to harm enemies, unless altered by a powerup. Every level ends with some kind of boss fight. From my experience, it seemed like the levels increased in difficulty, but the bossfights didn't necessarily follow suit. 

In my 3 hours, the furthest I ended up getting was to level 3 out of 6. Having some rogue-like elements, death leads to restarting from the very beginning in an entirely new world. I ran into a number of pretty cool enemies, and got the hang of the shooting elements a bit. I also learned a bit about what risks were acceptable to take, and started to figure out which powerups were worth taking, etc. All of the powerups seemed flavorful and odd. In the screenshot abover, the main character's face has been warped into a sort of death's masque, allowing him to fire "spectral tears," which pass through solid cover. 

Ultimately, I never got enough of the hang of the game to progress too far, but I could see digging in and really learning these systems. Playing any kind of roguelike, there is an initial learning curve and acceptance phase, and I think I got past that. 

My highlight: My real highlight was the first time I got a really decent powerup, and actually cared about my success. That was my first succesful foray into the lower levels of the game, and I came to appreciate the challenging enemies far more when I had more power to defeat them. 

My verdict: This is a challenging and odd roguelike. It's very good at what it does, and I think that's a measure of success.