Tear Jerker / The Binding of Isaac

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

In a game about an abused little boy and the nightmares awaiting him in the unknown depths below, you'll naturally have moments that will max out your real-life Tears stat faster than you can say "soy milk".

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General

• Isaac's life in itself is a massive tear-jerker. Everything that is presented to us about him only makes him look more and more miserable, and we're still in the dark about many other aspects of it. Not that the game leaves that many possibilities for a happy ending, and if it does, it's more than likely it won't last long. And now that we also know the true ending and the nature of the game itself, it's little wonder Isaac thought ending his own life was a valid option…
  • Mom's Establishing Character Moment involves taking away Isaac's toys and his clothes in a bid to "remove all that is evil from his life," and then locking him in his room when directed by the Voice to "cut him off from all that is evil in this world."
  • It's doubtful by this point that Isaac's mother is chasing her son around the house and into a basement with a knife on her hands, but there is enough evidence to support that she's cold and unloving at best, and psychologically abusive at worst. Isaac is still deprived of his clothes for most of the game, one of the endings shows that his bedroom window has metal bars on it, he perceives his own mother as a literal monster, laughing maniacally as she tries to stomp him to death, and to top it all off, he's had a pet cat (likely more than one, if items like Tammy's Head and Bob's Brain are taken into consideration) which has been long dead — most likely due to his mother's negligence — and all he has to remember Guppy by are his torn body parts. The loading screen showing his mother giving Isaac a turd as a gift is probably one of the least awful things she's done, and she did that out in public for others to laugh at her own son, and, as previously mentioned with the other item examples above, there's a lot more leads to her treating her son like an afterthought, if not worse.
  • Which leads to a topic that isn't as touched upon: Isaac's school life. The loading screen flashbacks heavily imply that it's not much better than his home life and there have quite a few instances of kids pointing and laughing at Isaac's misfortunes, even when he's not doing anything but just trying to mind his own business, hinting at a possible history of bullying from cruel classmates. Granted, the validity of these flashbacks is questionable, given that it's still from Isaac's perspective, his mind is shutting down from oxygen deprivation in the chest, and one of them involves his junk falling off. But with the inclusion of a schoolbag as a passive item in Afterbirth+, one has to wonder if he really did go to school at one point, and how long he stayed there.
  • And then there's his father, a man we know very little about besides the fact he left Isaac and his mother behind after an angry scuffle, and the items that mention him in-game, none of them too flattering. If anything, he seems very much like his ex-wife. The items are "Dad's Lost Coin" (which increases the Range stat and make Isaac look positively miserable) ^note which, if the card of it in Four Souls is any indication◊, is a Soberity Coin of Alcoholics Anonymous fame, "Dad's Key" (opens all doors), "Dad's Ring" (creates an aura around Isaac that petrifies enemies) and, albeit only implied to be his, a belt (increases the Speed stat).
• This bit of promotional art◊ depicting Isaac weeping in fear to the point of flailing, clutching his head and wetting himself while a group of bosses looks on with worried expressions plastered on their faces.
• The whole premise of the game is pretty bad, what with Isaac's mother wanting to kill her son. It doesn't help that Isaac is crying throughout the game.
  • On that note, every memory he has during level transitions (mentioned above ^) are just horrible to look at. The poor kid just never got a break…
• Some of the text flashes that randomly appear when you start the run, presumably written from Isaac's point of view, just ramp the sadness up with lines such as: "Mom?" "Where are you?" "Do you really want me to die?"
• Not precisely game related, but the notice that Guppy, Edmund McMillen's cat and the base behind the Guppy-related items in the game, passed away. Becomes Harsher in Hindsight, considering that in the game, Guppy is obviously dead.
• During the Keeper ARG, the last step was for the community to use Greed's twitter account to "give him a voice". They did… and the things Greed said are positively heartbreaking.
  Greed: Do I have a voice?
  Greed: Where are you?
  Greed: Father? Where are you?
  Greed: Who is my father?
  Greed: Why did you leave me dad?
  Greed: Where are you?
  Greed: Where are you?
• The fact that Isaac has what amounts to a will and a suicide note when you Game Over. The boy very well could have made one for real before locking himself in the chest, and the fact that he leaves whatever random stuff you have on him makes it even sadder since in real life he has none of that to pass onto anyone.

Original game

• The original Isaac theme does a good job at setting the tone for a sad and sinister game.
• Many of the items that increase Isaac's tears are, understandably, Tear Jerkers:
  • There are several tear power-up items that take the form of the severed body parts of cats and dogs, heavily implied to be Isaac's pets. Isaac's reaction to the "Max's Head" item, a severed puppy's head, is especially notable.◊
  • Isaac can find food items that increase his maximum HP, all of which are rotten and at least two of which are dog food. The fact that they're referred to as "Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Dessert" has some rather sad implications.
  • One item, a brass knuckle, causes Isaac's face to become badly bruised and occasionally replaces some of his tear shots with teeth. The item is named "Tough Love."
• Ending 13. It depicts Isaac, his pre-insanity mother, and a skinny man who's presumably Isaac's dad, the first few pictures are of all of them living happily, then it gets dark, it shows Isaac crying by a chest, a demonic him in the mirror, and the very last photo? Isaac, with his mother setting her hand on his back to comfort him, looking out to the hill where an earlier picture showed the family picnicking at, that now shows Isaac's father abandoning the family. The End.

Rebirth

• Somewhere among this and Nightmare Fuel is Isaac finding Guppy's head in one of Rebirth's trailers, where he holds it in his hands with despair.
• The new endings of Rebirth also count. The first, number 15^note if you're curious about the numbering, there are now 11 Womb endings instead of 10, so the previously-mentioned Ending 13 is now Ending 14, shows that Isaac has gone missing, with his Mother desperately searching for him. The second, 16, shows Isaac locked in his chest, as his breathing gets faster and harsher, and his heart beats quicker and quicker. Flashes are shown of him turning into a demon, and as his heartbeat slows down, Isaac morphs into a demon, and stays that way. A harsh Downer Ending that’s even harsher when you find out this isn’t even the worst the game gets.

Afterbirth

• Afterbirth's Ending 17, which confirms for good that Isaac is dead. His mother finally decides to look in the chest and finds nothing but flies and bones inside. Isaac's spirit is then seen looking over the afterlife's wastelands while a demonic shadow emerges from him. At least he seems surprisingly calm about it.
• Ending 18, obtained by clearing Greed Mode. After successfully defeating Ultra Greed, Isaac is buried by a cave-in. He hangs himself, and his corpse becomes the next Greed.

Afterbirth+

• Ending 20, which at the time of the release was the definitive final ending of the game. Where to begin? It serves as a Mind Screwdriver to all of the other endings. In it, Isaac is within his toy chest, his life flashing before him. You hear his mom and dad arguing, and see a shot of Isaac watching his mother cry in front of her TV. As Isaac begins to turn blue ^note (just like Hush or ???) from the lack of oxygen, we see Isaac holding a family photo with his dad's face burned away, and (perhaps most heart-wrenching) a series of Isaac's drawings, showing his descent into self-loathing and suicidal insanity. Finally, we see a shot of Isaac's skeleton within the chest as his mother opens it, and the missing poster from Ending 15 flies away, symbolizing Isaac's demise. The final shot of the ending is Isaac walking through the afterlife from Ending 17, while a somber remix of the title theme plays.
  • The final floor, boss, and ending confirmed a morbid fan theory. None of the actual game is happening. The whole game is in the final dream of Isaac's dying brain while he's suffocating from the lack of air in the toy chest he locked himself into. There's no grand underground cave works under his house, no bibles falling to save him from his abusive mother, no deals with the devil to give him superpowers, no anything that we've seen thus far. Isaac is a suicidal boy who killed himself by suffocation and had one last wild dream as he slowly died. That's all this story ever was. It's an incredibly sobering note to end on, but considering how the rest of the game was, were you really expecting anything else?
    • To add to it, we see Isaac's mother not as the violently murderous madwoman she was introduced to us as. She's all too human and vulnerable, weeping over the bitter divorce she's going through. And then she finds her (only?) son dead in his toychest. All the searching hinted at in the previous two endings, and she overlooked him in his own bedroom.
• The Forgotten, from the fifth and final Booster Pack. The reanimated skeleton of Isaac and a buffed version of The Lost would seem cool, but when one remembers the story, it's downright devastating. After Isaac's death in Ending 20, his soul is eternally chained to his bones, unable to move on. After the absolute hell his life was, he will find no peace in death.
  • The trailer for this update is both tragic and terrifying. A very real terror that no one should have to undergo; A mother burying her own child's body. And to drive the knife in, she stops part of the way in to do one last thing; Drop a little handheld console into the pit. A silent admission of her guilt in abusing him by taking anything that could remind him of his father away by giving it back to him all too late. And then Isaac's skeleton reanimates… and as the name of this character suggests, Isaac seems to interpret this as being just like why she took them away to begin with; To try and forget about him.

Repentance

• A minor tearjerker, but one of the newly added loading screen dreams shows Isaac playing with a cut-out of Bum-bo, only for Mom's leg to fly in from above and smash it to bits. Knowing that Bum-bo is a representation of Isaac's missing father only makes it worse.
• Ending 21. The ending shown after killing "Mother" reveals that the creature was in fact a drawing that Isaac came up with, only for the real Mom to come in and look at it. In spite of her seemingly abusive behavior, she is genuinely hurt at the realization that Isaac sees her as a monster, even tearing up after she locks him in a closet.
  • Mom really did show him what a monster looks like. To a child his age, Isaac just had one of his stories brought to life, and thus began the poor child's downward spiral into religion-induced self-loathing and insanity that eventually took his life.
  • Want more tears to fall? Isaac is honestly right about his mother. Sure she's not trying to kill him, but she really isn't winning any parent of the year awards. (See Kick the Dog on Mom's tropes page for more info.) Plus, her actions are not the way to handle a child who is really trying to cope with everything he's going through. So, honestly, Isaac isn't really in the wrong for thinking his mother like that, and yet she says her own son is the disturbed one.
  • And even worse, it's obvious that his mother has some serious, serious issues regarding his father, who she regards Isaac as being just like. You get the sense that she is hurting because of Dad having left and the things that led up to it. Isaac's family was clearly not a happy one.
• As you make your way towards Dogma and the Beast, you begin to hear snippets of dialogue showing how Isaac's parents' marriage fell apart, with Mom furious at Dad blowing the family's savings and drinking all the time, and Dad horrified by Mom's increasingly deranged fundamentalism. It culminates in the day Dad leaves, with Mom begging him to stay and Dad sadly admitting that he just can't anymore.
  • During the Ascent, an admittedly awesome remix of Genesis, played backwards with additional instrumentation added in the further you go, plays throughout. It really helps sell the idea of Isaac going all the way back to the beginning, all in a heartrendingly beautiful version of the title theme that doesn't lose the tearjerking potential despite sounded warped and strange.
  • "I'm sorry, Isaac..." That one line from Dad says so much. He may have lost all patience and affection for Mom, but he clearly still had attachment to Isaac. Even when he realized he needed to pull a Screw This, I'm Out of Here!, he was filled with serious regret over his son having to bear witness to all of this.
  • Anyone who's had to put up with parents arguing and steadily approaching divorce will definitely empathize with poor Isaac. Remember, Isaac is around five when this is happening, and the entire game is influenced by it. What makes it worse is how realistic it is — instead of portraying one parent as the sole bad guy and the other the definite good guy, both Dad and Mom have done equally bad things that led to their marriage falling apart (Dad taking Mom's money and being an alcoholic, Mom growing increasingly fanatical and putting a lot of blame on Dad's shoulders for how Isaac has turned out to be). In a game as insane and messed up as this, the strikingly realistic portrayal just makes everything even sadder, because it really puts into perspective how much it's affected the poor boy.
  • The song that plays on the Home level is pretty sad. It's a melacholic piano piece with snipplets of other instruments, perfectly encapsulating the clean, yet absolutely empty floor. The OST version punctuates this further by adding in Mom's screams for Isaac's name, with the voice lines themselves not being altered in any way aside from the echoes.
  • Another tiny, but very noticeable change during the Ascent: The narrator disappears. It doesn't matter which pickup you use, the narrator's nowhere to be heard. Really helps drive home the fact that the narrator was Dad all along, and that Isaac's finally realizing that he's no longer with him.
    • And even if you have a Lua-based mod enabled, the vanilla announcer will be completely absent here. You may have a more witty narrator, but they will never truly replace your father.
  • Really, this YouTube comment sums the whole situation up.
  This game is no longer a comedy or a satire.... It’s a tragedy.
• Ending 22. More of a happy tearjerker, but in the ending of the fact that Isaac's parents (or at the very least the father) were actually just normal and supportive parents of Isaac and the entire thing was his dark and twisted bedtime story idea, with the father even giving Isaac one last happy bedtime story to help him sleep.
  • It becomes a significantly less happy tearjerker after Edmund has confirmed that Isaac is still dead. Nothing in the ending actually happened. It was never a bedtime story, Isaac's father abandoned him, and the ending is either Isaac's afterlife, or his final moments before passing on. Turning what would be an unexpected happy ending into a Bittersweet Ending at best, and a full-on Downer Ending at worst, only saved from being such due to Edmund noting that he doesn't really know what happens to you after you die, opening the door to a lot of possibilities.
• The context for the alternate/Tainted characters. In short, they're all the characters who suffered some horrible fate in the worst possible timeline, from Azazel losing his wings and horns to Lazarus being stuck between life and death to the Forgotten's Soul literally dragging the skeleton around and forced to use it in place of tears. Even the ones who got off relatively lightly look significantly more decrepit and sad, like the Lost all covered in cobwebs and Eve hiding her face more with her messier hair, plus her tears looking black. What makes it worse is that the already somber remix of Genesis for Repentance gets a more depressing, warped version with masculine vocals just for the alternate characters, driving in the theme of how badly they all have it.
  • Special mention goes to Tainted Isaac, who appears to have been severely beaten, being covered in bruises and having a black eye. Unlike the other Tainted characters, there's something viscerally realistic about his injuries. He's not carrying a demonic fetus like Tainted Lilith, nor was he corrupted by darkness like Tainted Judas. He just looks like a child that had been kicked down and abused, which makes it all the sadder. One of his gimmicks is that he can only hold eight items at a time, which implies that his injuries have left him so weak that he can't carry any more than that.
  • Another goes to Tainted Jacob. It's based on the Book of Genesis, in which Esau attempts to kill Jacob after both Jacob and their mother tricked their father Isaac into giving Jacob a blessing intended for Esau, resulting in Jacob fleeing from Esau's wrath. This is also further backed up by Tainted Jacob's unlock achievement name, "The Deserter." The worse part is the sprite of Tainted Jacob makes him look like he clearly regrets this..

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