The Binding of Isaac: Unknown Depths
I can barely believe the things I witnessed in that game. the images still haunt me to this day. Whoever- no, whatever put those things in such an innocent looking game, I'll never know. I suppose I should let you know what I'm talking about. It all started when a person on my friends list named MLGSCOOT777 gifted me the game "The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" as well as its' expansions, oddly named "Afterbirth" and "Afterbirth+" respectively. There was no message attached to it, but I figured since I got them for free, I might as well try them out. I said my thanks and began downloading them on the laptop a different friend sold me for a few dollars since he was moving to a desktop. The Download took surprisingly little time to actually finish, and I loaded it up. I regret this decision every day of my life now.
The Title screen for the game booted up, and I was given a very odd intro sequence, which looks like it was drawn by a child, which explains via narrator that the titular character, Isaac used to live happily with his mother, before god strangely tells her to remove everything from his life. "Okay" so I thought, "This is going to be a "get the stuff back from mother without her noticing" game, right?" but, it had suddenly taken a darker turn with Isaac's mom being commanded to KILL Isaac, who manages to find out and escape through a trap door into, as the game put it "the unknown depths below". As I would end up plunging into the unknown depths of this game's twisted world.
After the intro ended, the title screen showed up, with Isaac having a sad face with a light from above shining upon him, drawn again in that strange crayon-like style. I pressed enter and there were 3 save files, all with this same exact image. It creeped me out a bit, but I pressed onward and selected file one. Since I never played this before I selected "new run" which led me to the strangest of character selection screens. Most of the characters were locked and look like they were bound by someone or sealed in some container, each having a strange requirement to unlock, like "don't take damage for 2 floors" and "get 55 pennies". Except for Judas and Eden, who just said "LOCKED". The only 2 characters available to me were Isaac himself, and a character called "Apollyon". I decided to pick Isaac, and the music went quiet.
The game faded in to a brown-looking room with some controls on the floor. a bit crude, but it gets the point across, I guess. I walked into the room to the left, and found something called the Pinking Shears. I thought at the time, this would be my weapon to fight enemies with. I walked into the southern doorway to find some strange flies which shot tears of blood which hurt me. I walked up to them, ready to use the pinking shears on them to fight back, and screamed at what I saw. Isaac didn't use them to attack, but cut off his head with them. Only, Isaac didn't die, he was still able to move around and apparently fire tears, which for some reason hurt the fly. His body, leaking blood where his neck used to be, charged at the nearest enemy, as if it was attacking it by itself. When the enemies died, they did so in a small explosion of blood.
Fortunately, after leaving the room, Isaac returned to his normal self, which made me think that it was a glitch, and the shears weren't supposed to work that way, though I was afraid of using it again. I walked up to see more flies, which I used my newfound tears to stop. I then found 2 new enemies in the next room, a version of Isaac that appeared somewhat fatter than him, and a shaking head of Isaac with no eyes and blood coming out of its' pupils. Neither of the enemies were hard, but the latter was just so twisted and unnerving that it continues to remain in my mind. After another room with some spider enemies I found a key, which I used to open a locked door in a earlier room that I couldn't have before. It looked to be a shop of sorts, with 2 items on the floor for marked prices, but the shopkeeper appeared to be dead. His body looked similar to Isaac's and was sitting, with the same waterfall of tears that Isaac always has. "Why does everything in this game look like Isaac? What kind of basement is this?", I asked myself, feeling incredibly creeped out at the disturbing images so far. I walked into the next room, which was much bigger than the ones before it, and found a few pleasantly silly enemies made out of poop, and I was shocked. Was this even the same game? I cleared it of enemies, and found a bigger door, and the next room icon had a skull on it. I believed this to be the boss door and I was correct in that assumption. The boss was also rather silly, his name was Monstro, and he jumped around, occasionally firing a volley of shots from his mouth. He was also accompanied by some strange enemies that looked like Isaac's body, only without the leaking blood form the neck. I thought nothing of it and beat them and Monstro, which dropped an item, called "Squeezy". When picked up, it had a phrase under it: "Tears up", and it dropped 2 blue hearts which acted like heart containers, but the worst part was that it changed Isaac's appearance to have his eyes squeezed out like the game sprite. And unlike the shears, this never went away. I was beginning to think that this was some sort of incomplete mod to a more family-friendly game built to have such terrifying and disturbing content in it. I wanted to continue, see if I could get some reasoning as to why someone would make such a disgusting thing as this.
I went down the hatch that opened up, and suddenly I was in the basement again, only the layout had changed and the floor's name read "Basement II". the first room I entered featured enemies with sagging faces that walked slowly towards Isaac, leaving a trail of what appears to be blood behind them. I was so terrified I ran around in a panic, which caused me to take damage twice, which removed one of the blue hearts from earlier. There were 2 pills in the room, both behind rocks, which I broke with a bomb to see what they did. I used it and the screen flashed "BALLS OF STEEL" and I was given 2 more blue hearts. I guess these pills give you more health. I went through the rest of the floor , with more strange creatures such as tunneling worm-like things, and the same eyeless enemies, only they had bodies and chased me similar to the sagging face enemy, only running almost as fast as I do. I went back to the golden room, which now needed a key as the "shop" room did, where I found a strange Poke Ball-like item on the pedestal, named the "Friendly Ball". I swapped it out for the shears, and went to the boss room.
The boss was a worm with blood on its underbelly which moved around randomly with no set attack patters. Another item spawned (a screw, if you were wondering, it was put in Isaac's chest, but it wasn't gruesome in any way) but then a black door appeared, and led to a room that was also completely black with 2 ghosts, each having the heart container symbol underneath it: one that was green and had half its head missing and a white one with a horrible expression of despair or fear on its face. I walked up to the white one and suddenly a heart container was gone and the stat whose symbol was a cross decreased form 50% to 0%. I had enough of this game and alt F4d out of it.
I tried to look up MLGSCOOT777, but there was nobody on my steam list with that name. In fact the only one on my list was MLGSNYPER777. This caused me to be more afraid of the game. It is at this time I found a .ZIP file that said "for Isaac". I had vowed to never play the game again, but maybe this was the real game they based it off. It came with instructions on where/how to install it, so I did and I booted it up again, hoping for the game it was based off. everything loaded like the first time, only the save slot I had didn't have the crying isaac image, but a different one. One of a muscular looking Isaac, with the words "Platinum god" over it. It seems like something a younger person would draw, so maybe it did fix it after all. I began another run, hoping that it would be fixed but it was still the same enemies and items. After searching in the menus, I found the endings for the game, which some sort of internal curiosity forced me to watch. These are the most horrifying, as most of them feature Isaac in a fleshy womb getting various gifts out of a chest, which has often horrifying results like watching Isaac hang himself, a heart with some features of a human baby mixed into the standard heart design showing up, seeing his own corpse, and his mother grabbing him and pulling him inside. I closed the game again and uninstalled everything associated with it. To this day, I still have never been in contact with whatever demonic force was named MLGSCOOT777. I was going to ask MLGHOOVY777 if he knew, but I don't want to drag him into this. I don't know if that was a creation of satanic origin, or if someone simply modded it, but those images will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my days.
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