By Isaac Smith
When I picked up The Binding of Isaac, the first expansion, The Wrath of the Lamb, had just come out. I was vaguely aware of the game’s completionist achievement, “Real Platinum God”, but had no idea what it entailed or how to get it. I was a noob, and I died a lot. Isaac is an unforgiving game, and I wasn’t sure I liked it a lot.
The constant management of movement and attacking felt more like an FPS than a top-down 2-D Zelda lookalike. The enemies were brutally difficult, and the extreme randomness of everything meant that you rarely got all the items you’d need to make a complete run of the game a sure success. A full run took about an hour, but I almost never got that far.
Even more of a turnoff was the environment. There are 4 poop-themed bosses and 5 poop-themed enemies in The Binding of Isaac. There are also 7 different kinds of poop that appear in the environment. What isn’t scatological is often grotesque, with bosses representing different organs or tumors, horrific zombified reanimations of earlier bosses, and a host of masochistic item choices that gradually disfigure your player to the point where he’s barely recognizable.
I know some folks enjoy that kind of stuff, but if I had to choose between this environment and the pastel hues of games like Ori and the Blind Forest or FEZ, I’d take those any day. If the game hadn’t been Edmund McMillen’s magnum opus of gameplay, I never would’ve gotten into it at all.
More than 7 years later, Isaac had been given a facelift and was rereleased under the title Rebirth, with two expansions, Afterbirth and Afterbirth+, along with a smattering of “Booster Packs” which added functionality and items from the mod community. All in all, there were 547 items, 72 bosses, 15 characters, and 10 different paths to the end of the game.
When Rebirth came out, “Real Platinum God” was still the crown jewel of completionism, but when the expansion packs added more items, the final elusive goal became known as “1001%”. Once I was sure that no more expansions were in development and that Team Nicalis and McMillen wouldn’t move the goalposts once again, I started in earnest.
To unlock 1001%, the player must do these things:
- Unlock every secret the game has to offer (more on this later).
- Unlock all of the endings of the game.
- Collect every item in the game at least once (all 547).
It’s a short list, even if the tasks seem pretty challenging. What the list fails to make clear is how interconnected all of these achievements are. Secrets can often only be unlocked by using an item in an interesting way, but this item itself has to be unlocked by some other task. For instance, the item “Ipecac” only is unlockable after you’ve beaten the (first) final boss, Mom’s Heart, 6 times. Ipecac turns your bullets into explosions.
To unlock a familiar named “Lil’ Spewer” (a callback to one of McMillen’s first flash games, Spewer), you have to accidentally die from an explosion caused by Ipecac. This means you have to beat Mom’s Heart 6 times, then continue to play the game until you find Ipecac, and then purposefully end a promising run. This is an example of a short chain, but there are longer ones that take four or five unlocks to get to the final item. Often, one step in these chains is arduously difficult, like beating two entire levels without taking any damage.
Each character has 20 items that can only be unlocked by beating the game in the 10 different ways I mentioned above: one item for beating it on normal difficulty, one for beating it on the hard difficulty. That means that to get 1001%, I had to beat every boss with every character on the hardest difficulty.
30 items are unlocked via challenges, special runs where the basic rules of the game are changed. Sometimes you can’t fire bullets at all, but may only use orbital damage and familiars to kill the bosses. Sometimes you can only use bombs. Sometimes you fire only one gigantic bullet every 10 seconds. One particularly mean challenge starts you off with Ipecac, but your bullets reverse course halfway through, meaning if you fire while standing still, you hurt yourself with every shot. Completing these took ages (and many ragequits).
The Lost and Keeper (two characters) are infamous for the difficulty of their runs. Both can take a maximum of two hits before they die, and with less than a second of invincibility between hits, a poorly planned room or difficult boss can lead to death in an instant. Keeper is the worse one of the two, as his health can only be regenerated by finding coins, and he can trade one of his two health for a powerful item if given the chance.
The temptation often proved too great, and I died shortly thereafter. Pitted against the most challenging bosses on the hardest difficulty, the game resembled a nightmarish round of Touhou more than anything else. Even with the absolute best equipment, highest damage, and most powerful defenses, I lost a few rounds just before the finish line. These were the tasks that took me the longest, and almost convinced me to put down the game.
There is one item, “Gnawed Leaf”, that makes the character invincible so long as they don’t shoot or move (a reference to the Tanuki statue form given to Mario by a leaf in SMB3). If one has an orbital or familiar that deals damage, the player can just sit in the middle of the room and hope that the boss accidentally runs into one of the few damage-dealing allies. For the final (actually final) boss, Delirium, I had Keeper equipped with Gnawed Leaf and a few choice damage-dealing helpers. I sat him down in the middle of the room and left for half an hour, coming back to a sweet victory many weeks in the making!
This is just one example of unintended game mechanics working to the player’s advantage. To get 1001%, I had to use as many of them as I could find. One particular mechanic called “breaking the game” was incredibly advantageous. Basically, it revolves around an item called the D20, which turns collectible items and treasure chests into other collectible items or treasure chests. It takes 6 rooms of fighting to charge up normally, but there are other items that can charge it: for instance, an item called The Habit charges 1 room’s worth of power for every hit taken. 6 hits means a new use of the D20.
An item called Sharp Plug does a full charge for 2 hearts (or 4 hits), more efficient than The Habit. Some items increase the drop rate of batteries (which give a full charge). One glorious item called the “Jera” rune doubles the number of collectibles in a room. To break the game, you acquire the D20 and one charging item, get into a room with a good number of collectibles, and roll.
If you get any chests, you can open them to increase the number of collectibles/chests in the room, roll again, open chests, roll again, open chests, etc. Eventually it becomes self-sufficient and you can generate an infinite number of collectibles and chests, some of which will contain the all-important items you need for completion. It also drops enough health and damage increases that the run is almost impossible to lose (unless you’re Keeper or the Lost).
Unlocking all the items and completing all the challenges was a beast. However, the 1001% achievement’s true challenge has nothing to do with unlocking the items. I also had to obtain them in game. The more items I unlocked, the harder it became for me to find the random one I needed. When there are 547 items, and each one has a chance of spawning randomly in different locations in-game, the chances of getting the last item you need are minute.
The final item I unlocked was the Blanket. To unlock it, the player has to (over the course of all their games) sleep in 10 beds. Beds only appear in bedrooms, shockingly enough. The problem is, bedrooms are exceedingly rare. I tried to get my 10 beds by just playing through the game regularly, but over and over I would complete every level and go into every room, only to find that all 10 floors had zero bedrooms.
What eventually saved me was another unintended mechanic. In a specific, arena-style mode of the game called “Greed Mode”, the map layout is exactly the same every game, and in a room adjacent to the starting area, there is a 1% chance for a bed to spawn. After an hour of continuous resetting to get my remaining beds, I had unlocked it.
After all that terrible luck, all I needed to do was find a blanket in-game. I’d beaten every challenge, every boss on the highest difficulty with every character, gotten myself into (and out of) some incredibly tight spots, and the final hurdle I had to overcome was to get a blanket. One last time, I resolved to break the game. I got my D20, walked into a shop to see if I could find an item that would charge it up for me, and beheld a beautiful sight: a blanket, for only 15 coins. In an anticlimactic (yet very welcome) final moment, my journey was complete.
Steam says I’ve put 633 hours into this game. I believe it.
What’s next? Now that my journey’s completed, you might think that I’d never want to play it again. After a much-needed break, I’ve already started back. There’s an option to see how many winning runs you can get in a row, lovingly dubbed “streaking”. With all 547 items unlocked, I have to try to pull a winning run out of every setup, no matter how terrible the items I get are. It might just be that the real challenge of the game lies here, and I’m just beginning to actually get good at it.
Here’s to the next 633 hours, and the completionist in all of us.