Review: THE BINDING OF ISAAC: FOUR SOULS Is Bound By Luck
While board games and video games have a lot of similarities, jumping between the two with a franchise can be difficult to get right. The Binding Of Isaac is a much beloved game that requires lots of skill, includes lots of horrifying imagery, and is brutal overall. The board game adaptation, The Binding Of Issac: Four Souls, captures a lot of the feelings and themes from the video game, but the moment-to-moment gameplay relies too much on luck to provide a lot of substance and replayability.
Visually speaking, I don’t think that they could’ve created a more perfect interpretation of the game. Each card is very detailed and frankly disgusting. But that’s what you’d expect from The Binding Of Isaac, so it’s good to have each card be mortifying. I do wish that there were more obvious markings on the cards to distinguish the types of items or enemies they are, but it doesn’t impede gameplay very much.
As for the actual gameplay, it feels very similar to the Munchkin games but relies a lot more on rolling dice to win battles than slowly gaining equipment and power. The Binding Of Issac video game sets players in arenas where their skill is used to beat enemies, but because that twin-stick combat is lost when it translates to a card game, players rely on the roll of the dice to beat enemies. It works fine, and it doesn’t take too long to collect the four souls to win. However, the death penalties are pretty harsh and turns can become very uneventful once players just start trying to accumulate items in order to have a chance of any enemies beating enemies. Also, as many bad guys as there are, they all ended up being virtually the same because a player would just roll the dice a couple of times and win or lose, and then gain rewards. It felt like too many of the monsters were too strong, and players couldn’t build their power naturally by beating lower-level enemies. To sum it up, the combat and goal of the game ended up relying on luck far more than any for of strategy, betrayal, or planning.
Overall, The Binding Of Isaac: Four Souls is a visually accurate translation of the video game to the physical world. But because players have to rely so much on rolling dice and drawing cards, it loses The Binding Of Isaac‘s inherent tests of skill and replaces it with random luck.
