The Binding of Isaac continued to sell extrely well.
This wasn’t sothing that could truly be ignored just because Takayuki had said not to worry about it.
At the very least, the staff in charge of the indie ga crowdfunding section had been quite excited lately.
Over the past couple of days, more and more gas had appeared on the crowdfunding pages.
Quite a few of them sounded very interesting just from their concepts alone.
If there were a chance to actually play them, they would probably be pretty good.
Previously, many high-concept gas had remained stuck at the idea stage. Developers with such ideas either lacked sufficient developnt skills or were constrained by funding and other practical issues.
But now that a dedicated indie ga crowdfunding page had gone live, they had finally found an outlet.
A mber of a studio under a well-known ga developer was preparing to go solo, because an indie ga developnt plan he had posted on the crowdfunding page just a few days earlier had gone viral.
His concept was a ball-rolling ga that sounded deceptively simple.
This ball-rolling ga would make use of the gyroscope-enabled controllers that were now built into modern consoles.
In his design, players would barely need to press any buttons at all—just control the ga entirely through the controller’s gyroscope.
It sounded like a very strange ga. If he had pitched this idea to his boss or superiors, the response would probably have been nothing but ridicule and disdain.
But on the crowdfunding page, while mockery and skepticism certainly increased, so too did the number of people who were genuinely interested in the ga.
This was the effect of a massive player base.
Out of ten thousand people, perhaps 9,999 wouldn’t like your ga—but as long as even one person did, you hadn’t failed.
And now, according to official statistics, the global video ga player population was approaching one billion.
Even one ten-thousandth of a billion ant a potential audience of one hundred thousand people who might like your ga.
For an indie ga, selling one hundred thousand copies was already a huge success.
Indie gas didn’t need to answer to so-called shareholders.
Their scale was small, nimble, and flexible. Even if they failed, it was just a minor mistake—one that an ordinary person could afford to bear.
After accepting that failure, you could wipe the sweat from your brow and start again, developing a new ga with a fresh outlook.
Of course, the platform also had reminder and warning chanisms.
Creators who developed gas that were too poorly made would be warned, and in severe cases could even be completely banned from publishing crowdfunding projects on the platform.
Darry realized that he had recently begun to like the atmosphere surrounding indie gas.
The Binding of Isaac had left a very deep impression on him.
Whether in terms of gaplay or narrative, the ga was incredibly compelling.
He had never imagined that such a rough-looking indie ga could be so fascinating.
Especially the story—he was almost completely imrsed in it, feeling everything as if it were happening to himself.
The protagonist of The Binding of Isaac was soone who couldn’t really be labeled as good or evil.
At first, people tended to think that Isaac was simply suffering unilaterally, bearing pressure from all sides.
But as the ga progressed, it beca clear that things weren’t that simple.
At least, not as simple as they seed.
When the ga reached the third playthrough, players had to choose whether to enter Hell or Heaven. Different worlds ant Isaac would face different enemies.
When Darry reached this part, he felt genuinely confused.
Were the hardships Isaac had suffered really that unbearable?
He also began to recall his own past.
As a child, his experiences had been very similar to Isaac’s.
Fortunately, he hadn’t been quite as unlucky as Isaac—he at least had a family that loved him, a safe harbor to retreat to.
But in the ga, Isaac didn’t have such a refuge.
Or perhaps he did—his own mind.
Isaac confined himself within a ntal frawork, letting his imagination run wild, imagining how to fight against the injustices he had suffered.
At the sa ti, Isaac had another refuge: his toy chest. After his mother had taken away all his toys and entertainnt, it was the only thing he had left.
In the ga’s story, Isaac ultimately chose to enter the chest in search of peace, creating an imagined world inside it—an adventurous world that fought against injustice.
However, as Darry continued playing, he realized that what he was fighting against was no longer just past injustices, but Isaac himself.
In the ga, Isaac had to confront his own inner darkness, the unpleasant side of himself—represented by the Hell route that players could choose.
At this point, the boss beca a small blue figure.
At first, Darry didn’t understand what the blue figure represented.
But it didn’t take long for him to rember that when a person is suffocating, their skin gradually turns bluish-purple.
He had originally learned this from an item description in the ga.
He hadn’t expected it to connect so seamlessly here.
That blue figure was likely Isaac himself, suffocating—the Isaac in the real world who was about to suffocate inside the chest.
The player had to choose: either adjust Isaac’s mindset, help him escape that hellish fantasy world and embrace rebirth, or let him sink completely into the fantasy forever.
From an adventure-ga perspective, this was extrely counterintuitive.
Players wanted the adventure to continue, but continuing ant that the protagonist might truly die within the story.
In the end, Darry chose to let Isaac reform himself, leave the chest that served as his refuge, and pull himself together.
That choice also ant the end of Isaac’s story.
After clearing the ga with that ending, Darry felt a sense of emptiness, as though sothing was missing.
The story didn’t feel finished.
But if he chose the other path, wouldn’t Isaac die completely? If Isaac died in reality, how could the story continue even if the player kept playing?
Driven by this curiosity, Darry couldn’t resist returning to the ga and starting a new run.
This ti, he was far more skilled than before.
After more than a hundred hours of continuous play, he had a deep understanding of the ga’s chanics.
After a grueling series of battles, he once again reached the point of the previous ending.
This ti, he chose to let Isaac completely imrse himself in the fantasy world, becoming nothing more than a withered corpse in reality.
In the cutscene, Isaac’s mother searched for him for a long ti but couldn’t find him. Eventually, she discovered a foul-slling chest in Isaac’s room.
When she opened it, she found Isaac’s body, long since decayed.
Yet the story didn’t end there.
The adventure continued. In the ga, Isaac kept exploring this fantasy world, and what followed beca even more surreal.
During this phase of play, what Darry felt most was sheer exhilaration.
Gradually, his deaths beca fewer and fewer, and he finally seed to understand where the true fun of the ga lay.
That was in dying over and over again—until rebirth.
Now he himself was in a reborn state. He no longer ga-overed easily like a novice.
He could now clear each Binding of Isaac run with ease, then enter a new adventure and start again from scratch.
At this point, Darry had begun to truly enjoy the ga. From initial disdain, to stubborn determination to clear it again and again, to his current effortless mastery.
The story continued—and now it reached a critical turning point.
What seed to be the ga’s final boss.
By then, Darry had logged around two hundred hours in the ga.
He could hardly believe he had spent over two hundred hours on a single-player ga.
The longest single-player ga he had played before was Cyberpunk 2077. He spent a little over a hundred hours on it before losing interest.
He admitted Cyberpunk 2077 was a good ga, but not one he loved to an extre degree.
But The Binding of Isaac—
No matter how much he tried to deny it, deep down he had already acknowledged the ga’s appeal.
When facing the final boss, Isaac returned to the place where he had once lived—the starting point of everything.
It was the tutorial room at the very beginning of the ga, the first room on Basent Level 1.
A room every Binding of Isaac player inevitably entered.
Then Isaac continued upward, arriving at the room he had once lived in.
That room was filled with Isaac’s mories.
The familiar bed, the toy chest that served as his refuge, and various familiar items scattered around.
Darry stared intently, unwilling to miss a single fra. He wanted to etch every image of the ga into his mind.
As the story reached its final mont, everything returned to its origin.
At last, he guided Isaac to the place where the dream began.
The TV room that appeared in the ga’s opening story.
At the center of the room stood a television flickering with static.
Then, accompanied by a trembling sound, a blurry, snowflake-like figure appeared on the screen.
This figure was nad: Dogma.
Just looking at this boss made Darry’s scalp tingle.
Despite having played The Binding of Isaac many tis before, he had never felt like this.
He recalled reading a discussion article earlier.
So people had seriously analyzed The Binding of Isaac.
Many players who claid to have experienced injustice themselves said they deeply identified with the protagonist, just like Darry.
The most discussed topic was: who was the villain of the ga?
So said it was obviously the mother.
After all, everything started going wrong with her.
These players usually had only played the opening part of the story.
Others argued that the ga had only one villain—Isaac himself.
They believed Isaac imagined the injustices he had suffered, and instead of resisting them in reality, he chose to endure them while only rebelling in fantasy, which was aningless.
Such players were usually midway through the ga, just beginning to understand it.
So people went even further, carefully dissecting the entire story in detail, and ultimately concluded that the ga had no villain—only Isaac’s painful journey through countless injustices.
Those were players who had nearly reached the latter half of the ga.
Darry had once shared that sa mindset, believing the ga had no villain.
But now, he finally understood.
If the ga truly had a villain—
There was one, and only one.
Not the mother.
In the story, Isaac’s mother had her own suffering.
She was abandoned by her husband, raised Isaac alone, and bore the burden of caring for him.
Her pain was no less than Isaac’s.
And later in the story, she wasn’t truly trying to kill Isaac as it first seed. Rather, it was a pathological manifestation of love, imagined by Isaac as his mother preparing to sacrifice him.
Isaac himself wasn’t the villain either, because the injustices he suffered were central to the entire ga and couldn’t be ignored.
That left only one villain.
The voice—like a divine revelation—that had brainwashed Isaac’s mother from the very beginning.
It represented religious background and the brainwashing influence of religious belief.
Religion was terrifyingly powerful—it could turn a normal person into a monster.
This was Darry’s most genuine feeling upon reaching Dogma.
Without the religious brainwashing from the television, none of this would have begun.
The story wouldn’t have started.
Perhaps Isaac would still have suffered so injustices, but within the family, his mother would have loved him and given him the best possible upbringing, instead of turning both herself and her child into monsters under the influence of indoctrination.
Ending the story with this boss was truly a masterstroke.
Darry tried many tis but couldn’t defeat it.
This final boss truly lived up to its na.
Its difficulty was enough to plunge players into despair, making it feel completely unbeatable.
If such a boss had appeared at the very start of the ga, Darry would have quit imdiately.
But now, with the ending so close, he had a premonition—if only to see the final conclusion, he had to clear it.
No matter the thod.
So what was there to hesitate about? Pull himself together—he was going to smash this final boss to pieces.
Once didn’t work? Then twice. Three tis. Four tis.
He would crush the ga’s one and only villain completely—only then would the dissatisfaction in his heart truly fade.
In the end, Darry succeeded. He defeated Dogma, the final boss.
There was another boss afterward, the Three-Eyed Demon, but its difficulty was much lower—clearly just a final wrap-up.
For new players, the Three-Eyed Demon was still tough, but for Darry, who had endured countless battles, it posed no challenge at all.
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