Last time I talked about the characters that start with different strengths, but ultimately still get through the game in the same way, merely taking different angles to do so.

This time I will talk about… not that. I will begin with a few examples.

The Lost is a character that cannot receive health upgrades and gets only one free hit per room before dying. You can use their ability to fly over gaps and shoot tears through solid obstacles to avoid danger, unless there aren’t any of these, in which case you must resort to your dodging skills. Your active item can be used to reroll useless items, such as any health-related ones, but it also has a chance to make them disappear. Also, since you have no health to be able to spend on devil deals, you instead get to pick one of them for free, with the other options disappearing.

Got all that? Cool. Here’s another.

The Forgotten is a skeleton who does not attack with tears, but rather with a bone club. This club has a melee attack and can be charged to throw like a boomerang. It has unique synergies with many of the game’s shot-type items. You can also press the ctrl key to take control of a ghost that pops out of the skeleton. It fires normal tears, and can fly and shoot through walls like The Lost, but is tethered to the skeleton and cannot stray too far from it. The ghost can only have soul/black hearts, while the skeleton can only have bone hearts (and gains bone hearts from health upgrades). They each have their own half-capacity healthbar, and you die if either of them dies. The skeleton is invincible but unmoving while you control the ghost.

Wow that one was kinda crazy anyways next up there’s

Tainted Keeper uses coins for health and can only have up to 2 max health. Every enemy has a fairly high chance to drop a rapidly-disappearing coin upon death, so if you’re quick you can use your slow-but-powerful quad shot attack to get a ton of money… which you’ll need, because Tainted Keeper can only obtain items by buying them. Furthermore, every shop on every floor will be loaded with items, including not just those from the shop pool, but from other pools as well. The whole game becomes a fast-paced capitalist fever dream, in which you quickly become a being of godlike power and die just as quickly, your health unable to go beyond a mere two hits (except when it can, like… sometimes… this game is complicated).

You doing alright? Still keeping up? No? Me neither.

Next we have TAINTED MMMMOTHERFUCKING CAIN. Tainted Cain can’t pick up items! Instead he puts resources in his magic bag and once he gets enough he can craft the items for himself! Certain resources generally produce certain kinds of items, and rarer resources generate stronger items, but most of the recipes are randomized every run, with a few hardcoded exceptions. Learning what resources produce what, generally, more or less, is super important! If your bag is all full on resources but you don’t want the item you’d be crafting you can swap out a resource for another, which destroys the first. You can end up with a lot of really insane item builds as Tainted Cain since you can choose whether or not you want an item and reroll it very easily.

Okay… okay… so that’s four out of like…

… 34 characters. Fucking hell.

So yeah, this is basically the opposite of the IWDI approach. Not all of these characters are specifically from the Repentance DLC but Repentance dialed it up to 11 to the extent that I’m calling it the Repentance approach to playable characters. In other words, “Different characters should have wild gimmicks that completely change the game. Multiple games in one game!!”

It works really fucking well for keeping the game fresh. It’s probably hard as hell to design for, with all the hardcoding and whatnot. It basically guarantees that everyone will have at least one character they hate. There are a lot of Tainted Cain haters and I don’t understand he’s so fucking cool guys what the fuck he’s sick as hell

Repentance is good. If you have the ability, be like Repentance. Or don’t. This isn’t the “right” model. It’s just potentially a very very cool one.

In The Binding of Isaac (I’ve only played AB and up in terms of versions, but for now I am talking about some of the older characters), many of the characters have very small differences. There’s a group of characters I like to call the “IWDI” (Isaac With Different Items) characters that… well, they have slightly different starting stats, different starting items that any character could theoretically find, and different starting resources.

You might start with different strengths, like Cain’s higher damage, or Judas’ higher damage, or Samson’s higher… higher… hmm. Their items are all really interesting, too, like Eve with her Dead Bird, a familiar that does kinda okay damage after you get hit in a room and then it goes away and Eve’s damage is already really bad… um… maybe not the best example.

But these characters aren’t just Isaac with different items! They have a few unique gimmicks too! For example, Cain only has one eye, so items that affect only the shots from one of your eyes will affect all of Cain’s shots. This matters for about 5 items… it’s still kinda cool but nowhere near as significant as his starting items, I guess.

Many of the IWDI characters have these unlisted mechanics. One of Eve’s starting items, Whore of Babylon, activates when you’re on half a red heart… for other characters, anyways. For Eve, it can also activate at a full red heart! This is. Really unique and. And so. Um. No, okay, sorry, I should stop using Eve as an example, Eve fucking sucks, sorry Eve enjoyers, she’s just, ugh.

Anyways, as I’m sure you can tell by now, the IWDI model is… well…

I love it!

… What?

Okay okay fine, I’ve mostly talked shit about it. And there’s a lot of shit to talk, too. But I do actually think this system has a lot of potential, even if its execution has a few stinkers. I like that it highlights the importance of individual game elements by making sure you’re interacting with them at a time when you have nothing else, at the start of a run. Maggy shows you what it’s like to get by on good health and healing, Judas flips that around and gives you low health but high bursts of damage via your active item, Cain is just amazing and is my favorite character in the game and I won’t be accepting further questions…

I actually like this system so much that I made an IWDI character mod! He’s called Timothy, and he’s focused on trinkets. Tainted Timothy, on the other hand, is focused on secret rooms. He’s my least popular mod (of three), which makes me kinda sad, because I think he’s really fun. You can give it a look here!

Anyways that’s enough advertising out of me. Uuuhh conclusion, conclusion… the IWDI model seems kinda underwhelming, but I think it’s quite cool, and great for pointing out how runs can have different strengths and weaknesses, and be “good” or “bad” in different ways. More mods that add characters like this could be cool, but instead they’re all ultra-gimmicky and flashy… and many of them are, well, incredibly cool, so fair enough, I guess.

EDIT: Oh, something I completely forgot to talk about is how such characters are designed! The main thing about this is that they’re relatively easy to design, and to design around. Making one isn’t terribly hard, and it enables you to make crazy stuff that works for all of them like Isaac’s wildly varied shot types and synergies. Very little needs to be hardcoded, like with Risk of Rain.