It draws from the same source material as Kierkegaard’s existentialist classic Fear and Trembling: the Genesis 22 story in which God tells Abraham to offer his son as a blood sacrifice. The Binding of Isaac is a rogue-style RPG shooter about poop, blood, and piss-basically imagine The Legend of Zelda’s bad trip on bath salts. That, my friends, is the repugnant glory of the monstrous in The Binding of Isaac ( Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, 2011), a game that makes the disgusting, the distasteful, and the Satanic something you can play with. The whole point of “Satanic panic” is that it allows the fear of the Other to be psychically transferred onto the readymade tabula obscura of Satan and his “followers.” But if it turns out that The Worst Thing is actually something you can make art about, something that rolls over rather than biting you when you poke at it-if, Lucifer preserve us, The Worst Thing is merely a phantasm-all that rage and panic would be misplaced and meaningless. This is why he keeps coming up in right-wing conspiracies like QAnon. All those trappings of Goth-horror campiness are the wrapper around a kernel of profound observation: Satan has a really important job.

Binding of isaac d infinity