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