There are many scenarios in this game when you might want to move between far-placed rooms. Your active items restore their charge on completing rooms. An arcade might be your source of cash that you then want to spend in a shop on the other end of the map. You want to get to the boss challenge room but the only blood donation machine is in a secret room rather far from here.
There’s even a small group of the game’s fans who delight in doing as much min-maxxing as possible, trying to squeeze out the last drop of every floor.
Surely, a game like this must have a set of solid quality of life features to not waste players’ time.
…right?
Welllll, let’s see:
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You can’t manipulate your movement speed beyond what your item drop allow. Got a speed down pill early on and had not a single speed-increasing item? Enjoy walking like that for the next hour and hope that you won’t end up scouring every deadend!
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While many (most?) puzzle rooms deactivate once you solve them, not every room has such decency. Thankfully, they aren’t as frequent nowadays as they used to before Repentance but if even one of them generate in an important spot, get ready for pain.
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There’s another type of “fuck-you” rooms: ones that punish you for pressing forward after entering them. Usually they have spikes in your way, although sometimes it’s bonfires. Most punished are those with high speed and flight since developers often lampshade the problem by closing off the spikes with some rocks - which your character will fly over. Fuck rocks with spikes btw :)
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Arcade machines and beggars love to waste your time. Taking one resource at a time when you can have up to 99 of this resource, while forcing you to keep attention the entire time because they can always spawn a troll bomb right in your face - doesn’t it sound beautiful? But that’s not even the worst! SHELL GAMES. A 1 second animation for every coin you give it, a high chance to get an aggressive fly in your face, all for stupid rewards! You gotta love these guys.
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Sometimes you want to move a card or a trinket to another room. You pick it up, move to this room and hold down a button. And then wait. Like for at least 3 seconds. Now imagine doing that multiple times each run. It’s soooo annoying…
Anyway that’s my rumble for a game that ate hundred of hours of my life, inspired by a stream I just saw where someone managed to break the game with D7 and Jumper Cables.
Ah minmaxing, for players that want to suck the fun out of a game.
Does Isaac really encourage it? I know some people feel the need to do it but in my hundred or so hours I never saw the appeal. Runs don’t last very long (on average) and the massive item variety means there’s new builds to play with all the time.
While I think most of the points are fine in the base game, I’d be surprised if there weren’t mods to fix most of them!
Among the roguelites I have experience with I’d say TBoI is the most minmax-friendly and, from watching other people play, I think most players do fall into some basic minmaxxing.
Though, admittedly, my definition of min-maxxing is rather broad. I include returning to a treasure room every time your D6 charge up as min-maxxing, for instance.
I don’t know what D6 is, but I agree that most players do find smaller ways to minmax! I think it’s unavoidable and would put the behavior more into general strategic planning. I’ve definitely got a more narrow definition 😆
A cubic/“normal” die with six sides. In Isaac it’s an item that, when activated, replaces the random items in a room with other random items. If the new items are good you pick them up, if they’re bad you reroll the D6, but to recharge it you need to complete other rooms. So you keep revisiting the same room, over and over.
Oh god that sounds tedious