It’ll be a blinding game

PREVIEW: The Blinding Of Isaac (Xbox, PC, PS3)

This is NOT the next game from Team Meat, the creators of Super Meat Boy.

This game is NOT available on those silly consoles which require the developer to jump through rings and hoops in order to get the game out on digital shelves.

This is an independent videogame built in several months from Edmund McMillan (one half of Team Meat) and a few of his developer friends.

I am of course talking about The Blinding of Isaac, a game which has been touted as “Smash TV-esque Rogue-like with Zelda style dungeons”.

If that sentence has left you scratching your head then let me explain to you what those terminologies mean.

1) Smash TV – A retro videogame which sees you shooting and killing your way through a TV show from a bird’s eye perspective to win prizes and money.

2) Rogue-like – A genre of videogame which focuses on the idea of permanent death.

You must make you way through a series of dungeons, caves and other locations without dying.

While this sounds boring and repetitive the design structure ensures you’ll never see the same dungeon twice every time you start over again.

3) Zelda dungeons – The original Legend of Zelda had a similar camera perspective as Smash TV which is viewed from above looking down.

Each room in the dungeon is connected to one another via doorways and broken walls which usually has items to improve your experience which has a boss encounter at the end.

The story is somewhat of an oddity. Isaac’s mother has started to hear the words of God who is demanding a sacrifice in order to prove her faithfulness to the religion.

Isaac, worried and afraid, flees to the uncharted lands of the basement which houses all sorts of family secrets such as lost brothers and deranged enemies.

If that floats your boat and you’re after a unique videogame experience then check this game out. It’s currently planned for a PC release very shortly and I for one am very excited. Amongst all the Gears of War, Skyrim and Zelda it’s nice to know that there’s something out there which is genuinely taking games into a brave, weird and scary direction. It’ll be available on Steam soon for a tiny price of approximately £6.

>> Darren Gargette is a games enthusiast from Leighton Buzzard