The Binding of Isaac (2011) 7/10
Following Super Meat Boy's commercial success in 2010, Edmund McMillen took the opportunity of financial stability to shield against the risky release Binding of Isaac, which wed the top-down gameplay of Miyamoto's Legend of Zelda with procedurally-generated dungeons to tell a religiously-charged tale of unnerving horror and cheeky black comedy. He would team up with fellow programmer Florian Himl and co-developer of Meat Boy Tommy Refenes to make the final product, with old friend Danny Baranowsky back as composer for the game's original music.
The result was even better than their last game: Binding of Isaac is a functional and highly-replayable; it may be brief but its radical difficulty should elongate the number of times you'll pick it up again.
The game's multifaceted tone is perhaps its main spice and what keeps it alive after multiple playthroughs: both the audio and visual detail are contrived to make things feel serious and dark as well as goofy and cartoony. On the level floors you'll see dainty mounds of poop along with the blood.
Meanwhile the story is actually kind of creepy: you play a very young boy named Isaac whose schizophrenic mother tries to sacrifice him to God after already stripping him of clothes and locking him in the cellar. (The cellar in which mutants, bugs, corpses, and other children lied, complete with the demons symbolic of the Seven Deadly Sins.) Even between levels Isaac curls up and weeps in remembrance of past traumas of psychological abuse. It may be comically over-the-top, but I still find it disarming after all this time to realize that your character kills enemy with the downpour of his tears. (I know I'd be bawling in the face of this much shit at the age I'm at now let alone 5 or 6 or however old Isaac is. Goddamn.)
But my favorite detail implemented is the fact that the developers went through the effort to make Isaac piss himself each time you enter a room with the minimal amount of health left. That made me and the game finally click, because that's when I realized that McMillen and his team were aiming to make you feel aggressively vulnerable. And with the harsh difficulty of the gameplay this wasn't mere aesthetic: Binding of Isaac has depth as an action game built around the horror genre's tension of feeling helpless against your enemies, and putting that insecurity in the spotlight.
As for the comedic tone, some of the humor can fall flat (the cringeworthy "Shoop da whoop" meme reference comes to mind) but a lot of jokes work as more fluff of sad crap (no matter how ridiculous) that happen or happened to Isaac to sustain those relatable feelings of hurt, fear, and depression.
In a sense, Binding of Isaac is a representation of what ambitious arcadey games should be like: aesthetic and gameplay work together to set an engaging tone and keep it that way till the end.
Other notes:
The expansion pack Wrath of the Lamb would release in 2012, adding approximately 70% more content.
A remake of the game subtitled Rebirth would be created in 2012 as an app then released as a full game in 2014. It would feature a variety of upgrades on things McMillen disliked in the original game -- adjusting the function of certain items, room sizes, and the difficulty curve; graphics rendered anew in the SNES style's 16-bit pixels.
An expansion pack for Rebirth, Afterbirth (and Afterbirth+) was released in 2015.