The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is a 2014 roguelike action-adventure game designed by Edmund McMillen and developed and published by Nicalis. Rebirth was released for Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in November 2014, for Xbox One, New Nintendo 3DS and Wii U in July 2015, for iOS in January 2017 and for Nintendo Switch in March 2017. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions were released in November 2021.
Rebirth is a remake of The Binding of Isaac, which was developed by McMillen and Florian Himsl and released in 2011 as an Adobe Flash application. This platform had limitations and led McMillen to work with Nicalis to produce Rebirth with a more advanced game engine, which in turn enabled the substantial addition of content and gameplay features. Since release, Rebirth has had four expansions: Afterbirth, Afterbirth+, Repentance and Repentance+ with more game content and gameplay modes. Afterbirth+ also added support for user-created content.
Similar to the original The Binding of Isaac, the plot is based on the biblical story of the same name and was inspired by McMillen's religious upbringing. The player controls Isaac, a young boy whose mother, convinced that she is doing God's work, strips him of everything and locks him in his room. When Isaac's mother is about to kill him, he escapes to the basement and fights through random, roguelike dungeons. The player defeats monsters, using Isaac's tears as projectiles, and collects items which modify his appearance, attributes, and abilities, potentially creating powerful combinations. Unlike the game's predecessor, Rebirth has a limited multiplayer mode, allowing an additional player in Rebirth, later increased to three additional players in Afterbirth and Afterbirth+. Full local co-op support was added to Repentance, where up to four players are able to play as any of the playable characters. Online co-op support was added in November 2024 with Repentance+.
Rebirth released to critical acclaim. Reviewers praised its gameplay and improvements compared to the original The Binding of Isaac, but criticized its graphic imagery. Afterbirth, Afterbirth+ and Repentance also had a generally favorable reception, with reviewers criticizing their difficulty but praising their added content. By July 2015, Rebirth and The Binding of Isaac had sold over five million copies combined. The game is regarded as one of the best roguelike games of all time.
Gameplay
Like the original, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is a top-down 2D game in which the player controls the boy Isaac, amongst thirty three other unlockable characters, as he traverses the basement and beyond, fighting off monsters and collecting items. The gameplay is presented in a roguelike style; the levels are procedurally generated through a random seed into a number of self-contained rooms, including at least one boss battle. A run is completed by beating one of a number of different final bosses. Like most roguelike games, it has permadeath: when the player character dies, the game is over. Rebirth allows a play-through to be saved at any point. Map seeds can be shared, allowing for multiple people to try the same dungeon layout. However, seeded runs do not earn a player achievements, preventing players from using seeds which make getting these achievements easier.The game is controlled similarly to a multidirectional shooter: the player moves the character with one set of controls, while 'shooting' tears with the other; the tears are bullets which defeat enemies. The player-character's health is represented by a number of hearts. The character can find items which replenish hearts; other items give the character additional hearts, increasing their number. Throughout the dungeons, the player can find bombs to damage foes and destroy obstacles; keys to open doors and treasure chests; and coins to buy items. Many items impact the character's attributes and other gameplay effects, including a character who floats behind the player-character and aids in combat. Items are either passive, granting permanent effects on pickup, or active, which can be used at any point and are either consumed on use or recharged by clearing rooms. The player can collect any number of passive items, whose effects build on each other with the potential to create powerful combinations. The player can only carry one active item at a time. The player can also carry one consumable, mostly tarot cards or pills with various effects, and one trinket, which act similarly to passive items except that they can be swapped out. Each floor contains a number of special rooms, such as treasure rooms, shops, mini-boss fights, dice pip rooms, arcades, vaults, and curse rooms.
In addition to expanding The Binding of Isaac number of items, monsters, and room types, Rebirth provides integrated controller support and allows a second local player to join in with a drop-in-drop-out mechanic. The second player controls a follower of the first player-character with the same attributes and abilities of that character, costing the first player-character one heart. The second character cannot plant bombs or carry items. The Repentance expansion adds support for a 4-player co-op, where the extra players control fully functional characters.
Plot
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth plot loosely follows the biblical story of the same name, similar to the original game. The game's story is primarily told through ending cutscenes obtained from defeating bosses, which are either still images with narration or animations.Isaac, a small child, and his deeply religious mother live in a small house on a hill. Isaac's mother hears what she believes is the voice of God, stating her son is corrupted with sin, and needs to be saved. She removes all his possessions, including toys and clothing, believing they are corrupting agents, and later locks him in his room to protect him from the evil outside. When she receives instructions to sacrifice her son to prove her devotion, Isaac flees through a trap door in his room.
After venturing through various floors, Isaac battles his mother. After defeating her, the game cuts back to Isaac in his room, where his mother is about to kill him with a knife. A Bible falls off a shelf and strikes Isaac's mother in the head, apparently killing her. Isaac celebrates, but his mother appears behind him, alive and still wielding the knife, revealing the entire sequence to be imagined.
Defeating other bosses unlocks a variety of other endings. These endings generally imply that Isaac, due to overwhelming religious guilt, locked himself in a toy chest and asphyxiated, with the events of the game being a hallucination.
Expansions
The game's expansions add several more endings. These expand on Isaac's background: his father abandoned the family and his mother has been abusing him since. In the final ending, Isaac ascends to Heaven as his life flashes before his eyes, before the narrator interjects, revealing himself to be Isaac's father. The narrator asks if Isaac wants to change the story, and Isaac agrees. The narrator begins to tell a new story, featuring Isaac and both of his parents.Development
The Binding of Isaac was developed by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl in 2011 during a game jam after the completion of Super Meat Boy, McMillen's previous game. Since Super Meat Boy was successful, McMillen was not concerned about making a popular game; he wanted to craft a game which melded The Legend of Zelda's top-down dungeon approach with the roguelike genre, wrapping it in religious allegory inspired by his upbringing. They used Adobe Flash, since it enabled them to develop the game quickly. McMillen quietly released the game to Steam for PC, where it unexpectedly became very popular. Wanting to expand the game, McMillen and Himsl discovered limitations in Flash which made an expansion difficult. Although they could incorporate more content with the Wrath of the Lamb expansion, McMillen had to abandon a second expansion due to the limitations.After The Binding of Isaac release, McMillen was approached by Tyrone Rodriguez of Nicalis. Rodriguez offered Nicalis' services to help port The Binding of Isaac to consoles. McMillen was interested, but required they recreate the game outside Flash to incorporate the additional content he had to forego and fix additional bugs found since release. He also asked to be left out of the business side of the game's release, and Rodriguez agreed. Rebirth was announced in November 2012 as a console version of The Binding of Isaac, with plans to improve its graphics to 16-bit colors and incorporate the new content and material originally planned for the second expansion. Local cooperative play would also be added to the game, but McMillen said that they could not add online cooperative play because it would drastically lengthen development time.
McMillen wanted to overhaul the entire game, particularly its graphics. After polling players about which art style to use for the remake, McMillen and Nicalis brought in artists to improve the original assets in the new style and began working on the new content. McMillen commissioned a new soundtrack for the remake from Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans.
Release
McMillen and Rodriguez initially wanted to develop The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth for the Nintendo 3DS as a tribute to its roots in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series. Nintendo, however, did not authorize the game's release for the 3DS in 2012 for content reasons. Although they had spent some time creating the 3DS version, McMillen and Rodriguez decided to focus on PC and PlayStation versions instead; those platforms allowed them to increase the game's capabilities. In addition to the PlayStation 3 and Vita consoles, Nicalis was in discussions with Microsoft for a release on the Xbox systems and McMillen had also considered a future iOS release. McMillen and Nicalis opted to move development from the PlayStation 3 to the new PlayStation 4 in August 2013, announcing its release at Sony's Gamescom presentation. The PlayStation 4 and Vita versions were released with the PC versions on November 5, 2014.During development, three senior Nintendo employees—Steve Singer, vice president of licensing; Mark Griffin, a senior manager in licensing, and indie development head Dan Adelman—championed the game within the company. They continued to work within Nintendo, and secured approval of Rebirth release for the 3DS and Wii U in 2014. McMillen and Nicalis, after tailoring the game to run on more powerful systems, worked to keep it intact for the 3DS port. They spent about a year on the conversion and, although they got the game to work on the original 3DS, its performance was sub-optimal. They were one of the first developers to obtain a development kit for the New Nintendo 3DS, which had more powerful hardware and memory to run the game at a speed matching that of the other platforms. The announcement of the New 3DS and Wii U versions was made with plans for an Xbox One version, and the game was released for all three systems on July 23, 2015.
In January 2016, Nicalis reported that it was working on an iOS port of the game. The company reported the following month that Apple rejected its application to Apple's app, citing "violence towards children" violating content policies. Nicalis has worked with Apple to obtain preapproval and will release a universal iOS version of Rebirth with improvements for that platform, including the use of iCloud for ease of play on multiple devices. Although Nicalis wants to add this to the Vita port, the company said it was a low priority due to the Vita's limited ability to handle many weapon combos. The initial iOS version of the core game, without expansions, was released on January 11, 2017.
After hinting at a release on the upcoming Nintendo Switch console, Nicalis confirmed in January 2017 that Rebirth would be released for the Switch in March 2017 as retail and digital titles. Scheduled for release on March 3 as a launch title, last-minute adjustments required the company to delay it until March 17. Because of the existing relationship with Nintendo for the Wii U and New Nintendo 3DS versions, Rodriguez said that they could obtain developer-prototype hardware for the Switch to port the game to that system. McMillen said that they could get Rebirth working on the Switch easily due to their approach to developing the game and the ease of the Switch's development platform. The game was released for Switch on March 17, 2017. The version allows up to four players in a drop-in/drop-out cooperative mode, with the other three players using Joy-Con to control one of Isaac's "buddies". The physical version of the Switch game includes a manual similar to the manual which shipped with The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
In October 2025, Amazon featured a listing of a Nintendo Switch 2 version. Nicalis later revealed that the port will be released on Q1 2026.