In a world crowded with games spawned from Super Mario Bros. how wonderful it is to see the progeny of the Nintendo Entertainment System's The Legend of Zelda. That is The Binding of Isaac, a bloody dungeon adventure displayed from an overhead view.
The game descends from Zelda, heart health icons and all, but its themes are a bit older than the NES. This game is as violent as the Old Testament, from which it takes its story of a boy threatened with death by his parent at the behest of the Almighty.
I'd like to show you this game and let it speak mostly for itself. So settle in for 11-minutes of footage, mostly of me reaching my first death in this game. You'll see the kind of top-down dungeon crawling that was so much fun in the original Zelda, with fewer puzzles and more blood. (My video will show you how the game plays and what's so Zelda and warped about it; if you want to see how insane the action gets, check out the trailer.)
I cannot lie, and I smut must give credit to Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen and the rest of the Isaac crew that have created a game that will probably look and sound great on your computer and played wonderfully on my Mac. Get it on Steam for Mac or Windows. It's just $5.
You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.