The player moves their character around the screen, shooting their tears in other directions the tears are bullets which defeat enemies. The game is controlled similarly to a multidirectional shooter. Map seeds can be shared, allowing for multiple people to try the same dungeon layout. Rebirth allows a play-through to be saved at any point. Like most roguelike games, it has permadeath when the chosen character dies from too much damage, the game is over. The gameplay is presented in a roguelike style the dungeon levels are procedurally generated through a randomly generated seed into a number of self-contained rooms, including at least one boss battle. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (like the original) is a top-down 2D game where the player controls the character Isaac, alongside ten other unlockable characters, as he traverses his mother's basement, fighting off monsters and collecting items. By July 2015, Rebirth and The Binding of Isaac had sold over five million copies combined. Tools for modifying Afterbirth+ were criticized. Afterbirth and Afterbirth+ also had a generally-favorable reception, with reviewers criticizing their difficulty but praising their DLC. Reviewers praised its gameplay and improvements on the original Binding of Isaac, but criticized its story and graphic imagery. Unlike the game's predecessor, Rebirth has a multiplayer mode, allowing an additional player to join. The player defeats monsters, using Isaac's tears as projectiles, and collects items which modify his attributes and abilities, potentially creating powerful combinations. When Isaac's mother is about to sacrifice him, he escapes to the basement and fights through random, roguelike dungeons. The player controls the eponymous Isaac, a young boy whose mother, convinced that she is doing God's work, strips him of everything and locks him in his room. Similar to the original Binding of Isaac, the plot is based on the biblical story of the same name and was inspired by McMillen's religious upbringing. A third expansion, Repentance, was announced in September 2018.
Two expansions have been released, Afterbirth and Afterbirth+, in October 2015 and January 2017, respectively, with more game content and gameplay modes Afterbirth+ also added support for user-created content.
This platform had limitations and led McMillen to work with Nicalis to produce Rebirth with a more-advanced game engine, which in turn enabled the substantial addition of new content and gameplay features. Rebirth is a remake of The Binding of Isaac, which was developed by McMillen and Florian Himsl and released in 2011 as an Adobe Flash application. A version for the Nintendo Switch was released on March 17, 2017. After an initial rejection due to its controversial content, Nicalis released Rebirth on iOS on January 11, 2017. Rebirth was released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita in November 2014, and for Xbox One, New Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U in July 2015. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is an indie roguelike video game designed by Edmund McMillen and developed and published by Nicalis.