Look on Reddit and you'll see that /r/BindingOfIsaac has nearly 15,000 subscribers, and /r/Spelunky is approaching 3,500. On top of that, there are many popular personalities on YouTube and Twitch.tv that post gameplay videos every day, a good chunk being Binding of Isaac runs and Spelunky daily challenges. Northernlion's channel alone has nearly 300,000 subscribers, with nearly 700 Binding of Isaac playthroughs and at least 100 or so Spelunky videos uploaded to this date. With each video being an hour to half an hour each, there's a lot of time for him to talk to his viewers about gameplay, strategy, and really anything. Northernlion isn't the only Isaac player out their either. Bisnap has about 60,000 subscribers on his channel as well, and there are many more like them.
One of many Let's Play videos by Northernlion .
If you're unfamiliar to games like The Binding of Isaac, it's likely that overhearing a conversation about it will confuse and concern you:
"Yeah, I swapped the razor blade for the Bible so I could kill mom in one hit."
"Ah, I just used a combination of cancer and the mutant spider to maximize the rate of tears I could do damage with. I killed Satan in, like, two seconds."
"Man, I've beaten this game so many times. I should start playing as the dead baby to give myself a challenge."
"It's kind of difficult, but once you get scapular and the cursed skull, you really can't kill the dead baby at all."
I promise this sounds normal to Isaac players. Likewise, Spelunky has its own language, as does Rogue Legacy and Dwarf Fortress, and the list goes on. This vocabulary is what helps players understand each of these worlds. Since roguelikes are randomly generated every time the player dies, strategies are formed from experimentation and discovery. With nonspecific item descriptions, players are left to figure most things out by themselves. Once again using Isaac as an example: What happens when you pick up the giant eyeball after you pick up the cup of chocolate milk? Or mom's knife? Unless you've watched hours of Isaac let's plays, the effect will probably be a surprise. This is what makes Reddit and YouTube fun.
One example of a game-ending glitch in Isaac. Source: /u/DT45 (Reddit)
Even after 100 hours of play, it's likely you won't see a majority of the possible combinations of levels, items, and random events that can happen in a roguelike. Yet, on /r/BindingOfIsaac, /r/Spelunky, and YouTube, people share all sorts of weird combinations. Glitches, extraordinarily bad luck, overpowered endgame combinations, and even really lucky/skilled boss fights are the norm online, and sometimes it's more fun to just spend an hour or two online looking at other people's experiences with the game and sharing some of your own.
One of the coolest tools for a player who's sunk many hours into Isaac is Spidermod. Spidermod allows players to edit items into the game, generate playthroughs with specific seeds, and all sorts of stuff. It's actually become so popular that the creator of the mod is now working on the remake of Isaac. Yes, it can be used to cheat, but there are two awesome things that have come out of it: mirrored runs, and challenge runs. In challenge runs, a player will start with a specific item or set of items which will often make it harder to play the game, and then try to beat it. In mirrored runs, two players start with the same seed, and play side by side, making different choices along the way. Though it's partially a race, the real fun of it comes with seeing the branching changes between the two players. Small items like hearts and money are randomly generated when they are found, so one player might end up with an excess of money and bombs, while the other is finding hearts and keys. As the game progresses, more forks in the path show up, and often both players will find themselves in completely different places even though they started on the exact same map.
Northernlion vs Bisnap in an Isaac Mirror Match
There's actually a similar thing happening in the Spelunky community, and this one is actually built into the game. Every day, a new seed is generated for Spelunky players, and if they play the daily challenge, they will be playing the same seed that every single player doing the daily challenge is playing. There's a little bit of a competitive element to it with leaderboards, but the really fun part isn't the end score. The fun part is watching multiple people upload their daily runs every day, and watching how they handle bouts of bad luck or play the levels differently. Conrad Zimmerman, writer for Destructoid, actually just finished his series of daily challenges, where he would do a run every day until he finally beat the game. You can watch his final run below.
Conrad Zimmerman plays Spelunky.
You'd think that playing roguelikes would be a grueling experience. These games are often extremely challenging, and death means losing all of your progress and starting over. Yet, they're very good at roping you back in every time. Just like playing your favorite arcade game until you run out of quarters, the fun in these games comes from just how far you can get. You may not have retained any items from previous lives, but you have retained some of your skills. The next time you play, you'll be watching out for some of the enemies that killed you in the past, or hunting down a useful item if you can get it. At the end of the day, when you go online, your experiences will be different from every other player out there. You'll have some war stories to share, and so will everyone else.
If you've never played a roguelike before, you can actually pick up six of them in this week's Humble Weekly Bundle! The Binding of Isaac is on there, and I definitely recommend picking it up!
