Deckbuilding Isaac spin-off The Legend Of Bum-bo plops out November 12th

Hurray! It’s nearly time to dive back into the mind of Edmund McMillen, The Binding Of Isaac developer renown for letting us throw the tears of a neglected child at gross manifestations of maternal cruelty. The Legend Of Bum-bo is a prequel to Isaac, billed as a “puzzle based deckbuilding roguelike” built from cardboard. According to this release trailer, it’s coming out on the 12th of November.

This time round, we’re helping a homeless person retrieve their one and only coin from some goon that bungled it off to a sewer.

Yep, that’s the world we know and love. And worry about treading in when it’s dark.

McMillen has teamed up with fellow dev James Id, the bloke behind Isaac’s live-action terror trailers. I’m quite excited they’re building a deckbuilder. It’s clearly not your ordinary card-shuffler, with most of the action taking place on a tile-matching board of unspeakable things. Each grizzly tile-type equates to a card, it seems, and you acquire more weird and less-than-wonderful powers during each run. I’ve no doubt those powers will combo together until you’re a veritable sewer god, smiting flies and sentient plops with a maggot-infested bin bag.

The devs have been blogging for years, talking about enemy design and the childhood inspirations behind all that cardboard. I’m struggling to get a complete sense of how everything works, but the complexities of both the board and the enemies make it easy to see why they’ve dubbed it a puzzle game first and foremost.

If you’d rather stick to slinging unspeakables in real time, the last Binding Of Isaac expansion is due in December.

More Bum-bo info and a wishlist button can be found on the Steam page.