Recent reviews by horsemedic

The down-voters are correct that you don't interact with the environment.

What they fail to appreciate is that the environment interacts with you. Not your character, but you: the scorched brain behind the keyboard that after a few hours will be looking for solutions to those little maze panels in shafts of light and cracks between rocks and the notebook in your lap filled with symbols seen and imagined.

It's the best puzzle game I've ever played, and the best game that ever played me.

It's sad to see all the down votes from people who haven't learned how to play.

Yes, if you pour all your dice rolls every turn into preventing hull damage, you'll run low on die, stress your crew, get terrible side ops and inevitably be overwhelmed by events. The game will seem ridiculously hard and you'll write a pissy review, wondering why there's a hard mode when normal mode is already impossible.

Except it's not. I've won two of my last three games after 6 hours of play, and I'll be ready for hard mode soon.

This game requires you to consider ALL your options each turn—not just the flashing red rooms, but those nifty machines in the undamaged rooms that reliably give you die, or health, or assists or sanity and generally keep your crew healthy enough to consistently deal with the damage.

Just keeping stress down has a huge effect, as you'll start to get GOOD side ops that make the next turn easier instead of harder. And don't be afraid to just let some rooms burn, especially in the late game when there's less ROI on fixing them. The mechanic alone can pretty easily add 2 or 3 hull points per turn if you send him to the engine room, while also building up research points.

It's a brilliant little game with many paths to success, provided you have the patience to learn.

Maybe I gave up right before the part where the stream of obnoxious dialog, tedious combat and time-wasting puzzles turned suddenly brilliant.

I'm sure, having since watched let's plays and looked up spoilers [...warning, by the way...] that I'm missing out on all the alternate variations of obnoxious dialog, tedious combat and time-wasting puzzles I could experience by finishing and restarting the game.

But, I'm sorry, the first 3.5 hours of this game put me to sleep, and I'm not going to play for another 4 so I can play for another 8 so I can play for another 8 and maybe have a feeling at very end.

Great art, story and atmosphere don't make up for squishy shooting and a lack of meaningful decisions.

Squishy shooting: It's quite common to see your tears intersect with the enemy/poop/whatever with no effect. This isn't so bad it breaks the game, but it's enough to make the shooting feel tedious and disconnected. And since basically all you do in this game is shoot stuff, that's pretty bad.

Decisions: On your first couple dozen play throughs, before you've exhausted most of the (many many) random items and upgrades in the game, The Binding of Isaac seems full of possibility. What does a goat's head do? What does ecoli do? There's a lot of item exploration to keep you occupied for hours.

But then, once you're familiar with most of the items, you realize that you almost never get to make any interesting decisions about how or when to use them.

Compare to a well-designed rogue-lite like FTL, where a decision between buying an ion beam or repairing your hull will agonize you in the moment and potentially haunt you for the rest of your play through, rippling out into other interesting decisions. In Isaac, you almost always just pick up whatever upgrade you run across. A few upgrades are terrible, and you'll learn to pass them up. But there aren't many of them.

Equipable items are more specialized and require a little more consideration to use effectively. But you can swap them out at any time, they don't force any hard decisions either. Almost all the variety in an Isaac run through comes from whatever items the RNG puts in your path—not from the decisions you make. The RNG will either make you an overpowered god or a struggling freak, and the rest of the game comes down to how good/patient you are the floaty, unsatisfying shooting.

I probably got my $15 worth out of this game—mostly due to the stellar presentation and generous amount of content. But in the end, once all the bells and whistles wear off, it's just not a fun game.

The story's the best part of this game, but not worth the AAA asking price unless you really like video game narratives.

The puzzles are tedious, uninspired and seemingly endless. The problem isn't that you only have half a dozen tools to work with (prisms, cubes, fans, etc.). And it's not that most of those elements are copied from other puzzle games (Portal, etc.). The problem is that you're rarely asked to use your scant few tools in new or interesting ways. There are almost no Aha! moments in this game—just a long slog of applying principles you learned hours earlier in increasingly complex patterns.

Half an hour into the game, you learn that a prism can redirect a laser beam around a corner to a open door. 20 hours into the game, you're redirecting half a dozen laser beams with half a dozen prisms to open half a dozen doors. It's more confusing, but no more challenging or interesting that it was in the beginning of the game.

There are something like 100 puzzles in the game, and I'd guess about 25 are worthwhile. Many others are unbelievably lazy. Even in the final stages of the game, the solution to some secret bonus puzzles are as simple as using a cube to jump over a wall. The only real difficulty comes from guessing which walls the game designer has arbitrarily flagged as jumpable (95% are impassable.)