"OVER 500 HOURS of new gameplay", threatens Isaac.

This expansion is essentially the point where I took my first real plunge into this game. I was interested in Isaac after years and years of hearing "no two runs are ever the same"-esque platitudes, but it's kind of just "you'll never see this specific concoction of a handful of +/-1 stat passives ever again" so far. I'm fully willing to accept that the game only really opens up dozens of hours in; seeing the item list with like 600 greyed out boxes is very enticing, but I'd also be lying if I said I'm having any fun with this early game.

Dull item pools bloated with effectless stat ups and active items, with next to no wriggle room for rng manipulation - It really doesn't feel like I'm playing Isaac as much as the seed is stringing me along to whatever predetermined end it has devised for me, until I'm cut down by a slew of terrible and untelegraphed zero-delay room-wide lasers or pounces. The options to manipulate your luck with characters and items that synergise like mad just don't feel present at all until apparently tens of hours in? I had a 15 loss streak broken by a run that was so ridiculous I saw Delirium for the first time and killed him with such ease I could spare the time to play with my cat. It kind of shredded apart my honeymoon period. Nobody likes a pity win - which is how it feels. The variance is peaks and valleys with no in between. My successes feel obvious and detracted because I'm given a loadout where it's almost impossible to fail, not even helped when one follows a string of runs where I feel underpowered to the point where failure appears inevitable.

Granted, I could just read a wiki or watch some streamer with thousands of episodes of playtime so I can get a grasp of how to play efficiently. I COULD. But I'd rather just hold R until the shop stocks Chaos. A man can only Lemon Party so hard.

Exceeds at being addicting as fucqe, though! This soundtrack is filled with hummable earworms, and it's easy to get lost in a cycle of "just one more go" in the hopes I'll find two items that go together like olive and feta. (I think I'm just gonna aim for all the endings, then I'll bounce.)

EDIT: Finished the Repentence content finally! Well, Final Ending - I don't care for anything else. I can honestly say without a hint of stockholm syndrome that the content of this DLC is genuinely fuckin incredible. These new floors look STUNNING, with rooms, encounters and bosses that are tough but completely fair. As a basic rule of thumb; if I like something, it was added in Repentence. Hilarious to think that this game took nearly ten years for there to be bosses that ACTUALLY TELEGRAPH their attacks with great animation quirks. Nice surprise to see it end on a deus ex machina sequence i was convinced was beyond the scope of the engine. would prob have hit harder if this game wasn't mostly just a boring trial by fire that bothered to ingratiate me with the setting but hey. They said "what this game needs is a Wonderful 101 finale" and they were right.

The item pool expands to fit passives and active items that greatly alter your approach to a given run - made better with outright upgraded crown rooms and item shops. What was once an absolute pittance of reward, ensuring that you had to follow the RNG's rigid script laid bare; you eventually become able to make risky decisions that let you feel more in control of your fate.

It absolutely fuckin should not have taken this long, my first tens of hours of playtime could mostly be chalked up to sheer spite playing, frantically trying to see the appeal - which thankfully rears its head up to a point. An honest to god easy improvement you could make would be to reduce all "Kill X boss Y times" unlock criteria to just one. Just dump items on you for beating a boss, who wants to fucking grind.