Sunday, February 22, 2015

Isaac Rebirth: Stupid Builds

I've started playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth again recently. I'd finally gotten around to figuring out where the saved files were stored so I could salvage my old save file from my dead hard drive... And then I actually loaded the game and found out Steam seems to store the saves online too since my old game was just sitting there before I moved any files around. Hurray!

The first thing I did was complete the last challenge that I'd not done, purist. This challenge starts you with no items and doesn't spawn any treasure rooms the whole game. My solution was to restart until I got a curse room with a reasonable start (I think I kept a guppy piece and some soul hearts) and then I got super lucky with devil deals. I ended up with one of my most stupidly powerful builds despite the limited access to items. I had a knife, brimstone, guppy, dark bum, and mapping. It was glorious. And now that challenge is finally done!

Just now I finished a run with the stupidest build I've ever used. I don't mean stupid in the same way I did above, where I just combined a bunch of absurdly powerful items and murdered everything. I mean stupid in the sense that it shouldn't be possible and no one in their right mind should ever try to do it. It took me barely under 2 hours to clear the dark room with Maggy (giving me two more unlocks) and I was both unkillable and unable to take actions for the vast majority of the run. I combined an item that makes you invincible if you didn't move with two items that do passive damage. (A giant fly bomb that moves around the room, detonates on contact with an enemy, and respawns 10 seconds later and a leech that aggroes things that get near you and then does miniscule amounts of damage to them.) Then I would walk into a room, put the controller down, and watch a League of Legends stream. Or an episode of Heroes. Or Sceadeau playing a Hearthstone draft. Eventually everything in the room would be dead and I could repeat.

There was no way I could have won without cheesing it on this particular run. I had pretty much no damage items drop for me the entire time, and I'm simply not good enough at dodging to beat things with low damage. So maybe it's good for the game that I had an alternate win condition available? I feel like I would have had more fun if I'd just died and started over though.

I do like abusing game mechanics though, so I guess being able to do it once was fairly sweet. But I have no intention on doing it again! (Except maybe if I ever unlock The Lost...)

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