The Binding of Isaac continued to sell extremely well.
This wasn't something that could truly be ignored just because Takayuki had said not to worry about it.
At the very least, the staff in charge of the indie game crowdfunding section had been quite excited lately.
Over the past couple of days, more and more games had appeared on the crowdfunding pages.
Quite a few of them sounded very interesting just from their concepts alone.
If there were a chance to actually play them, they would probably be pretty good.
Previously, many high-concept games had remained stuck at the idea stage. Developers with such ideas either lacked sufficient development skills or were constrained by funding and other practical issues.
But now that a dedicated indie game crowdfunding page had gone live, they had finally found an outlet.
A member of a studio under a well-known game developer was preparing to go solo, because an indie game development plan he had posted on the crowdfunding page just a few days earlier had gone viral.
His concept was a ball-rolling game that sounded deceptively simple.
This ball-rolling game would make use of the gyroscope-enabled controllers that were now built into modern consoles.
In his design, players would barely need to press any buttons at all—just control the game entirely through the controller's gyroscope.
It sounded like a very strange game. If he had pitched this idea to his boss or superiors, the response would probably have been nothing but ridicule and disdain.
But on the crowdfunding page, while mockery and skepticism certainly increased, so too did the number of people who were genuinely interested in the game.
This was the effect of a massive player base.
Out of ten thousand people, perhaps 9,999 wouldn't like your game—but as long as even one person did, you hadn't failed.
And now, according to official statistics, the global video game player population was approaching one billion.
Even one ten-thousandth of a billion meant a potential audience of one hundred thousand people who might like your game.
For an indie game, selling one hundred thousand copies was already a huge success.
Indie games didn't need to answer to so-called shareholders.
Their scale was small, nimble, and flexible. Even if they failed, it was just a minor mistake—one that an ordinary person could afford to bear.
After accepting that failure, you could wipe the sweat from your brow and start again, developing a new game with a fresh outlook.
Of course, the platform also had reminder and warning mechanisms.
Creators who developed games that were too poorly made would be warned, and in severe cases could even be completely banned from publishing crowdfunding projects on the platform.
Darry realized that he had recently begun to like the atmosphere surrounding indie games.
The Binding of Isaac had left a very deep impression on him.
Whether in terms of gameplay or narrative, the game was incredibly compelling.
He had never imagined that such a rough-looking indie game could be so fascinating.
Especially the story—he was almost completely immersed in it, feeling everything as if it were happening to himself.
The protagonist of The Binding of Isaac was someone who couldn't really be labeled as good or evil.
At first, people tended to think that Isaac was simply suffering unilaterally, bearing pressure from all sides.
But as the game progressed, it became clear that things weren't that simple.
At least, not as simple as they seemed.
When the game reached the third playthrough, players had to choose whether to enter Hell or Heaven. Different worlds meant Isaac would face different enemies.
When Darry reached this part, he felt genuinely confused.
Were the hardships Isaac had suffered really that unbearable?
He also began to recall his own past.
As a child, his experiences had been very similar to Isaac's.
Fortunately, he hadn't been quite as unlucky as Isaac—he at least had a family that loved him, a safe harbor to retreat to.
But in the game, Isaac didn't have such a refuge.
Or perhaps he did—his own mind.
Isaac confined himself within a mental framework, letting his imagination run wild, imagining how to fight against the injustices he had suffered.
At the same time, Isaac had another refuge: his toy chest. After his mother had taken away all his toys and entertainment, it was the only thing he had left.
In the game's story, Isaac ultimately chose to enter the chest in search of peace, creating an imagined world inside it—an adventurous world that fought against injustice.
However, as Darry continued playing, he realized that what he was fighting against was no longer just past injustices, but Isaac himself.
In the game, Isaac had to confront his own inner darkness, the unpleasant side of himself—represented by the Hell route that players could choose.
At this point, the boss became a small blue figure.
At first, Darry didn't understand what the blue figure represented.
But it didn't take long for him to remember that when a person is suffocating, their skin gradually turns bluish-purple.
He had originally learned this from an item description in the game.
He hadn't expected it to connect so seamlessly here.
That blue figure was likely Isaac himself, suffocating—the Isaac in the real world who was about to suffocate inside the chest.
The player had to choose: either adjust Isaac's mindset, help him escape that hellish fantasy world and embrace rebirth, or let him sink completely into the fantasy forever.
From an adventure-game perspective, this was extremely counterintuitive.
Players wanted the adventure to continue, but continuing meant that the protagonist might truly die within the story.
In the end, Darry chose to let Isaac reform himself, leave the chest that served as his refuge, and pull himself together.
That choice also meant the end of Isaac's story.
After clearing the game with that ending, Darry felt a sense of emptiness, as though something was missing.
The story didn't feel finished.
But if he chose the other path, wouldn't Isaac die completely? If Isaac died in reality, how could the story continue even if the player kept playing?
Driven by this curiosity, Darry couldn't resist returning to the game and starting a new run.
This time, he was far more skilled than before.
After more than a hundred hours of continuous play, he had a deep understanding of the game's mechanics.
After a grueling series of battles, he once again reached the point of the previous ending.
This time, he chose to let Isaac completely immerse himself in the fantasy world, becoming nothing more than a withered corpse in reality.
In the cutscene, Isaac's mother searched for him for a long time but couldn't find him. Eventually, she discovered a foul-smelling chest in Isaac's room.
When she opened it, she found Isaac's body, long since decayed.
Yet the story didn't end there.
The adventure continued. In the game, Isaac kept exploring this fantasy world, and what followed became even more surreal.
During this phase of play, what Darry felt most was sheer exhilaration.
Gradually, his deaths became fewer and fewer, and he finally seemed to understand where the true fun of the game lay.
That was in dying over and over again—until rebirth.
Now he himself was in a reborn state. He no longer game-overed easily like a novice.
He could now clear each Binding of Isaac run with ease, then enter a new adventure and start again from scratch.
At this point, Darry had begun to truly enjoy the game. From initial disdain, to stubborn determination to clear it again and again, to his current effortless mastery.
The story continued—and now it reached a critical turning point.
What seemed to be the game's final boss.
By then, Darry had logged around two hundred hours in the game.
He could hardly believe he had spent over two hundred hours on a single-player game.
The longest single-player game he had played before was Cyberpunk 2077. He spent a little over a hundred hours on it before losing interest.
He admitted Cyberpunk 2077 was a good game, but not one he loved to an extreme degree.
But The Binding of Isaac—
No matter how much he tried to deny it, deep down he had already acknowledged the game's appeal.
When facing the final boss, Isaac returned to the place where he had once lived—the starting point of everything.
It was the tutorial room at the very beginning of the game, the first room on Basement Level 1.
A room every Binding of Isaac player inevitably entered.
Then Isaac continued upward, arriving at the room he had once lived in.
That room was filled with Isaac's memories.
The familiar bed, the toy chest that served as his refuge, and various familiar items scattered around.
Darry stared intently, unwilling to miss a single frame. He wanted to etch every image of the game into his mind.
As the story reached its final moment, everything returned to its origin.
At last, he guided Isaac to the place where the dream began.
The TV room that appeared in the game's opening story.
At the center of the room stood a television flickering with static.
Then, accompanied by a trembling sound, a blurry, snowflake-like figure appeared on the screen.
This figure was named: Dogma.
Just looking at this boss made Darry's scalp tingle.
Despite having played The Binding of Isaac many times before, he had never felt like this.
He recalled reading a discussion article earlier.
Some people had seriously analyzed The Binding of Isaac.
Many players who claimed to have experienced injustice themselves said they deeply identified with the protagonist, just like Darry.
The most discussed topic was: who was the villain of the game?
Some said it was obviously the mother.
After all, everything started going wrong with her.
These players usually had only played the opening part of the story.
Others argued that the game had only one villain—Isaac himself.
They believed Isaac imagined the injustices he had suffered, and instead of resisting them in reality, he chose to endure them while only rebelling in fantasy, which was meaningless.
Such players were usually midway through the game, just beginning to understand it.
Some people went even further, carefully dissecting the entire story in detail, and ultimately concluded that the game had no villain—only Isaac's painful journey through countless injustices.
Those were players who had nearly reached the latter half of the game.
Darry had once shared that same mindset, believing the game had no villain.
But now, he finally understood.
If the game truly had a villain—
There was one, and only one.
Not the mother.
In the story, Isaac's mother had her own suffering.
She was abandoned by her husband, raised Isaac alone, and bore the burden of caring for him.
Her pain was no less than Isaac's.
And later in the story, she wasn't truly trying to kill Isaac as it first seemed. Rather, it was a pathological manifestation of love, imagined by Isaac as his mother preparing to sacrifice him.
Isaac himself wasn't the villain either, because the injustices he suffered were central to the entire game and couldn't be ignored.
That left only one villain.
The voice—like a divine revelation—that had brainwashed Isaac's mother from the very beginning.
It represented religious background and the brainwashing influence of religious belief.
Religion was terrifyingly powerful—it could turn a normal person into a monster.
This was Darry's most genuine feeling upon reaching Dogma.
Without the religious brainwashing from the television, none of this would have begun.
The story wouldn't have started.
Perhaps Isaac would still have suffered some injustices, but within the family, his mother would have loved him and given him the best possible upbringing, instead of turning both herself and her child into monsters under the influence of indoctrination.
Ending the story with this boss was truly a masterstroke.
Darry tried many times but couldn't defeat it.
This final boss truly lived up to its name.
Its difficulty was enough to plunge players into despair, making it feel completely unbeatable.
If such a boss had appeared at the very start of the game, Darry would have quit immediately.
But now, with the ending so close, he had a premonition—if only to see the final conclusion, he had to clear it.
No matter the method.
So what was there to hesitate about? Pull himself together—he was going to smash this final boss to pieces.
Once didn't work? Then twice. Three times. Four times.
He would crush the game's one and only villain completely—only then would the dissatisfaction in his heart truly fade.
In the end, Darry succeeded. He defeated Dogma, the final boss.
There was another boss afterward, the Three-Eyed Demon, but its difficulty was much lower—clearly just a final wrap-up.
For new players, the Three-Eyed Demon was still tough, but for Darry, who had endured countless battles, it posed no challenge at all.