Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ (Steam):
The last secret is in my collection. I am at peace.
My second Isaac fever was finally subdued when 500+ hours after i started the game, i beat the last remaining challenge of Afterbirth+.
I took a break after religiously playing and
completing old version , but i knew i can't hold out for long. I was waiting for a sale and was watching youtube let's plays of the game on the side to prepare myself. Mainly northernlion and bisnap but also later started watching russian streamer neonomi who did Afterbirth 1001% in 40+ hours last summer.
Coinciding with me starting Rebirth+Afterbirth save file, these months there was also an explosion of sort of Isaac-related content, with both Antibirth and Afterbirth+ and it's mods coming out. It was very exciting times to both play and watch Isaac.
I jumped into Afterbirth after Flash version so all the incremental changes that grew over 2 years since Rebirth dropped on me all at once: new 60fps engine, full proper controller support, fundamental changes to core gameplay, Afterbirth's tanky level 1 bosses, tricky enemies like blue leeches that catch you on your muscle memory of dodging to the side and may other things.
The biggest change from flash version to BoI: Rebirth and onwards is that health is now capped to 10. Now you can't hoard 30+ HP like in Eternal Edition and just mindlessly go ham on similarly overpowered tanky enemies not even bothering paying attention to damage you're taking: no matter the kind of hearts you have their total number can't exceed 10. This caps a limit on grinding you can do and makes the game more skill based.
Abundance of new items added over Flash version tips balance towards the player -- it's so much easier to become overpowered and outright "breaking the game" (any kinda combination to pry any number of items and resources from the game) is easier than ever. See "
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth – Death of the Middle Class" article for a good explanation why Rebirth and all it's followup are kinda "broken" in comparison to original game.
Ditching flash in favour of new engine and proper analog movement support also help making the game less random. Low framerate and wonky gameplay made achievements like "beat level such and such without taking any damage" kinda of wash because it was largely a random happenstance rather than a display of your skill.
Rebirth made gameplay a lot tighter allowing for finer movement and dodging. To capitalize on that new precision they added a new character -- Lost that has no HP whatsoever and can't take damage period.
It was a bad idea. Binding of Isaac even if made less random is still not the kind of game that can sustain a character that dies in single hit. There are a LOT of teleporting/jumping enemies, enemies can spawn in right on top of you, suicide bomber enemies that spawn in and charge right away, enemies that can fire lasers from the other side of a screen or from OFF-SCREEN if you are in a big room -- hundreds of reasons how Lost can get hit and each of them ends the run.
Before starting playing Lost i never actually felt the need to restart my runs but with Lost you HAVE to do it to guarantee at least some semblance of survivability -- whether by finding or rerolling into powerful items that can stack on top of each other, boosting damage and then hoping you can kill enemies before they can hurt you. Or luck into getting three items out of 500+ random ones that allow to take SOME hits.
After reading the horror stories of Lost i decided on somewhat unorthodox playthrough to maybe make future Lost struggle easier.
Game gets harder after 4 Mom kills -- "Everything is terrible 1" event activates new enemies, bosses and room layouts. I decided to postpone it as late as possible. In a more natural progression "Everything is terrible 1" happens around hour 10. I managed to avoid it for 75 hours using a number of methods to skip Mom's heart boss and skip directly into Cathedral/Sheol. I even managed to unlock Lost during that time and beat Satan with him.
What finally forced me to finally break that barrier is that by random occurrence i turned into Blue Baby -- a character that otherwise unlocks way later (11 Mom kills while i still had just 3) and just couldn't pass on that chance to do some progress on that character way earlier than i am supposed to.
Funnily after activating "harder game" mode i barely noticed any difference so maybe it was all a waste of time...
But at least playing as Lost forced me play with a controller for finer analog movement after hundreds of hours of playing Binding of Isaac on a keyboard.
Other new characters are Lilith -- she can't shoot herself, but can command other familiar to shoot for her:
Afterbirth had a funny glitch/feature -- if you set game language to Korean, Lilith recharges her active item (which increases number of her familiars) much faster than she is supposed to which kinda breaks the game because you can create huge crowds -- firing squads that annihilate everything that way.
Trying to complete the game as fast as possible will require some planning ahead, especially with my roundabout way of avoiding Mom Heart kills. You should do the most useful challenges and characters unlocks first and that will raise the probability of these items appearing because item pools are still small-ish and not filled out with other, less useful unlocks.
On the other hand useless or outright detrimental unlocks should be done as laste as possible. That's why the very last challenge i did was Suicide King which unlocks a card that kills me (it has it's own uses but is actively bad in most cases for obvious reasons). You don't want this card or other "bad" unlocks to take space in your possible random drop selection and "pollute" it.
Most of the in-game challenges are relatively easy and are just showcases for game's specific item combination gimmicks. However several challenges are extremely hard, like "Speed" challenge where entire game is sped up and you have to beat Mom in less than 15 minutes. It was brutal -- i remember having several close calls where i was literally 2 meters away from reaching the trophy and died because time ran out.
"Ultra Hard" is even harder and arguably the hardest challenge in the game where game doesn't drop hearts ever, you have all curses applied to you, all enemies are champions, and you have to reach the final final final boss of the game.
Greed and Greedier mode with some characters can also be very hard. After some getting used to and figuring out how to abuse room mechanics (Eve's Whore of Babylon, Judas' Book of Belial and Lilith's familiars so on) it becomes much easier. Characters that don't have room effect gimmick are harder. Keeper who is otherwise obnoxious to play as is suprisingly easy in Greed-ier modes but Cain, Blue Baby and especially Lost are brutal.
I had to resort to breaking the game to beat Greedier mode as Lost and Blue Baby. I was starting as Eve because she is the strongest from the start and was breaking the game and upgrading myself until i roll Missing Poster trinket which turns me into Lost.
Finding the last two items i was missing from my collection required breaking too -- i took 2 Steam Sales which reduced the prices of all items in shops to 0 and then just kept buying stuff until i stumbled into Mega Blast and Eden's Soul -- last Devil and Angel items i need to check on my collection page.
Afterbirth+ introduces new feature: Victory Runs and they help immensely with hard characters like Lost and especially Keeper. After completing the game game naturally you can restart it from the beginning with your end-game build and tear everything apart on early levels. You are overpowered from the start and will be fast enough to reach both Boss Rush and Hush in time quite easily. With some luck you can complete character's entire progression (both Angel and Devil line + The Void) in one go.
Whew, what a ride. I have Switch Binding of Isaac cartridge pre-ordered, but i am not sure if i will have the power to do this all over again. But it will be cool to have a physical version with physical manual either way.
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