Isaac and his mother lived alone in a small house on a hill. Isaac kept to himself, drawing pictures and playing with his toys as his mom watched Christian broadcasts on the television. Life was simple, and they were both happy. That was, until the day Isaac’s mom heard a voice from above. “Your son has become corrupted by sin. He needs to be saved.” “I will do my best to save him, my Lord,” Isaac’s mother replied, rushing into Isaac’s room, removing all that was evil from his life.

… (rising devotion) …

Isaac, watching through a crack in his door, trembled in fear. Scrambling around his room to find a hiding place, he noticed a trap door to the basement hidden under his rug. Without hesitation, he flung open the hatch, just as his mother burst through his door, and threw himself down into the unknown depths below.

The Binding of Isaac was a game released in 2011, followed by a much-acclaimed remake produced in 2014 that has since been continuously updated. The game is the active work of creator, Edmund McMillan, who manifested it as an homage to the original “Legend of Zelda”, with the addition of “rogue-like” elements — those including the resetting of progress (permadeath), randomization of runs, and the usage of that randomization for overcoming a series of obstacles1.

The game’s narrative sets the stage as an escape turned towards death as Isaac, the protagonist and partial stand-in for McMillan2, contends with strong religious experiences, reflecting critically on the “drawbacks” and “dogmas” of born-again Christianity, whilst — though understated — exploring the religious path of transcendence in the absence of authority. Much of the Story is inspired by McMillan’s life wherein his family was riddled with the extremities of alcohol, drugs, and faith that turned towards the traumatic; In this sense, the narrative is therapeutic for McMillan.

However, for what it may have meant for McMillan, the game was released into a broader culture at a particular time. Isaac’s ‘Binding’, of writing this, is 14 years removed, putting it into a separate decade and arguably different Era. The game exists at the tail-end of a religious backlash that has led into cultish reintegration, leading any prescience regarding religious criticism to feel outdated, yet nonetheless timely3. In being at the tail-end, “The Binding of Isaac” received a great deal of praise as art for its overcoming of religious themes from an aesthetically subversive vantage, surrounding representations of sacred elements of Christianity with defiling images made from refuse and excrement. This has made the game a symbol of anti-religiosity, particularly anti-Christianity, which prevents those of love of either to merit it, despite any love the game may have for those very same things4.

The Binding of Isaac as a game embodies the spirit of post-modernity, being mechanically and narratively driven by ‘revision’. Each run of the rogue-like exists as a revision upon the subject of the ‘Legend of Zelda’, its’ romantic center, mired in a continuous dissatisfaction over Isaac’s grand narrative. Isaac, our main character, desires to escape his great, dreadful, terrible mother who has been taken in by the dogmas of modern fatherless religion, so much so that a mere sky-voice drives her from being at once overprotective — much like her biblical counterpart, Sarah — to brandishing a knife at her son in ritual sacrifice. Yet unlike the traditional Abrahamic story which centers around the fatherly covenant, Isaac’s mother bears no promise except the liberation from what remains of those fatherly emanations5.

Isaac, like his mother — and against his mother — seeks to escape the travesty of his house on top of a hill, but finds himself cornered. Thus, he can only escape ever downward and downward from the closet, into the basement, and through the womb to Sheol itself. While he is granted many alternative paths, each leads him closer and closer to the only remaining center: confrontation. Isaac is narratively trapped to confront his mother, his birth, evil, himself, sacrifice, his decaying corpse, his imagination, his suffocation, delirium, dogma, the act of resisting his mother, etc… Isaac is granted many options over what he can confront, however, he must confront. And in this, his narrative is fractured — There is no romantic ‘Ganon’ to his heroic ‘Link’ to save his princess ‘Zelda’; There is no central singular narrative of heroism for Isaac: only the inevitability of confrontation as he goes further down.

Yet what Isaac wants is the exact opposite of confrontation — It is clear that no child runs to the basement or hides in a toy chest to confront their situation. This act in the face of the inevitable confrontation produces in Isaac, a fracturing, as he engages in the continuous revision of his own life to avoid his fate. Isaac constantly re-imagines who and how he could be such that he may better escape his circumstances; What if he embodied the curse of Cain? Could a betrayer like Judas set him a-free? What if instead of being the son of his Father, he was a daughter of his Mother? What of Samson’s Rage and Azazel’s Atonement? Could he be like Lazarus and be reborn? Etc… Etc…

At every point, Isaac wishes to engage in the revising of his own story to escape from what exists across all possible stories: the confrontation with the fact that his father is gone from his life — dead. He who acted as the guiding light of rationality to Isaac, stole away his family’s money, got drunk, and ran off into the night leaving Isaac alone to the whims of his mother who sees the sins of father within the son. The very authority that would protect Isaac from this irrational narrative existence of running from one death to another fades away, closing off escape. Even if Isaac did escape from his mother, he would find himself tainted by the very experience, wandering the earth without any light only to find himself stuck in the basement descending once more. Isaac is stuck in the post-modern condition, fighting up against an infinite amount of grand narratives built of variation, dissatisfied by each, slowly becoming nostalgic for better, more romantic play.

In this nostalgia, the experience of ‘Isaac’ looms, as players re-simulate their first “run”, the aesthetic successor to the romantic, over and over again, gaining new items and possibilities that exist for simulating again and again and again. Whilst Isaac, the character, desires escape, the player counters in desiring escapism, enchanted by the thrill of seeking escape, but not coming to a true overcoming of mother. The player’s wishes and Isaac’s are in conflict; The player wishes to retreat into the action of playing Isaac to escape being Isaac, creating an unending cycle of meta-recursion that extends Isaac’s trauma, whilst granting the player a simulacra of suffering and trauma as an end in and of itself.

No one wants to be Isaac, but everyone wants to play Isaac.

But if the player were to be Isaac, what would be desired more than to revise the story towards the return of the father, whose reason could tame the earth, shelter the child from worry, and lead them into the stars? But that father is gone, having been exhausted in drunkenness and dying into the night; The player by generating a run must feel responsible; The player is responsible; His images and spirit are the very reflections of that same father. Isaac needs his father, though the father has admitted more harm than good.

It is apparent that the game, ‘The Binding of Isaac’ details the undergoing religious crisis taking place in the wake of the schism between the motherly and fatherly aspects of Western canon, leading into the Nietzschean “Death of God” wherein the fatherly essence fled from the world by the hands of childish man. But unlike the Übermensch, McMillan experientially finds himself unable to hold values into the motherly earth, recognizing that great and terrible truth: the earth — the mother — is dogmatic, whilst the value-creating child is all too human and all too easily bruised.

Innocence may be the child, and forgetfulness may be a new beginning, but within the game of ‘Isaac’, the self-rolling wheel of revision, a first movement, it is not a holy Yea, but the shirking away into simulation of values. The same drunkenness of the father is reflected in the son itself and as such the post-modern condition is born in absence. And in this absence, there goes the trans-valuation of Good and Evil.

Throughout the game, Isaac is granted moral agency determining between ‘Angel’ and ‘Devil’, even as he transcends them both through continuous revision of the story. This choice, however, is severely ironic in its inversion of values with ‘Angel’ offering Isaac cost-less power, while ‘Devil’ demanding the price of life. On an aesthetic level, this may so seem appropriate, but ‘sacrifice’ conceptually has been granted over to the Mephistopheles against his traditional role as the final collector of the wayward soul. The Devil is always end-loaded, existing within drugs, alcohol, and details, wherein strength is granted first whilst existence is slowly withdrawn. The Righteous, in contrast, is front-loaded, promising goodness for faith and thus sacrifices.

The traditional roles have been reversed, whilst still maintaining the aesthetic. ‘Angel’ leads away from sacrifice, offering power to the player for shirking the devilish, weakening them in holy symbols. All the while, the Devil has become front-loaded, offering things of black and corrupting look for a sacrifice of vitality, but whose great powers make possible surviving the confrontation.

The post-modern connection to irony is not tenuous, but deliberate as what is the trans-valuation of values whilst maintaining aesthetics but irony? Isaac is Ironic; Isaac transcends downwards in power and his over-going forces confrontation and thus weakening; Isaac uses his bombs for keys and his keys for bombs; Isaac gambles with death when he does not gamble with resources, but his death is an opportunity to gamble in a new run.

The long-time player cannot help but recognize the continuous and immense ironies that exist in the play itself as the literal action is disassociated from its implications. Things keep a semblance to their aesthetics, but how the player is meant to evaluate them is twisted. Pills are potential power-ups, not staving salves. Tarot readings bring instantaneous fate, rather than predictions. Books are reusable sources of physical empowerment, rather than accumulation. Etc... Etc… Etc…

All of it is twisted as the child is trapped into being Faustian within a cascading set of intertwining simulacra. Absent of fatherly compass, the elements of childishness become more and more ironic as traumatic response. It is inevitable that the child as a value-creator is not so creative except for engaging in partial negation. He cannot escape, nor accept, his own fate of destitution, of raging against a world-machine that bears his name and being stuck with demons of angels and angels of demons.

And what would Isaac want but to draw in color, to play with beasts, and imagine of the stars? Isaac would want for the romantic story of brandishing sword to slay dragon. But his overbearing mother knows where these leads: to the very same sin of the father. And so the caretaker in fatherly absence becomes his very slayer. Killed of vitality by overbearing mother.

It is all too unreasonable! Where is the reason? Reason negated reason in the bottle and the center thus did not hold… is there not anything remaining for Isaac to escape towards that isn’t traumatic? Is there nothing? Is Isaac fated to be a sacrifice with no one to save him from his Mother’s knife?

Isaac's Father: Are you sure this is how you want this story to end, Isaac? You're the one writing it, it doesn't have to end this way. Here, how about we tell it a different way - maybe a happy ending?

Isaac: Okay, Daddy.

Isaac's Father: Good. Are you getting sleepy yet?

Isaac: Yeah.

Isaac's Father: Okay, so… *Ahem*

Isaac's Father: Isaac and his parents lived in a small house, on the top of a hill...

What “The Binding of Isaac” wants, what men stuck within the post-modern condition want, is not more negation, more irony, more unreason, but a return and an end to the great nightmare of gods’ passing that the joint ‘player-a-character’ has mangled.

However, modernity has stripped away all of the means to do so, all except for ‘revision’. And so, another run begins, all in hopes of transcendence in hopes of rediscovering that authority needed for a happy ending.

Final Score: 9.6/10

Share