"Five years ago, a young boy took his first trip down into the basement, facing the endless threats below to escape from the murderous delusions of his loving mother. Three years later, he found himself facing the same predicament but with an even greater plague of horrors and peril. Very shortly afterward, a modest few among us decided that even this was not enough. In the two years since then, fate has worked tirelessly to place by far the most fearsome challenge yet in his path. This time, Isaac will face our free and fan-made The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth expansion, Antibirth."
— The Official Antibirth Website
The Binding of Issac: Antibirth is a Game Mod for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth that was created by Public Entertainment Networked Interactive Softwarenote and released on December 23, 2016. The mod acts as an alternate expansion for Isaac separate from Afterbirth and Afterbirth+, and adds tons of new items, trinkets, bosses, enemies, and even two new characters and a new final chapter. While currently available to play, the developers consider this an "early-access" release, with more updates to come in the future.
The Binding of Isaac: Antibirth can be found and downloaded on its official website here
, and can be played if you own the original The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (the expansions are not necessary).
Tropes exclusive to the mod include:
- Adaptational Context Change: The original ending for killing the Witness in this mod heavily implies that Antibirth is set in a different continuity where the events of the game are literal to some extent, rather than being a farce for the real plot about Isaac's family and his declining psyche. While the aforementioned ending is still All Just a Dream, it's one Isaac has in the Basement as it appears in-game, rather than a part of his delirium within the chest.
- Ascended Meme: One new active item is the "R" key on a keyboard. In Rebirth, this is used to end a run and start a new one quickly, something that players are known to frequently abuse.
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Ascended Fanfic: Basically everything in this game in Repentance. - Back from the Dead: Following from the trend in the original games, Antibirth gives several preexisting bosses stronger, dead-er forms:
- The Pile is Polycephalus reduced to nothing but bones and a little bit of skin.
- Beezleblub is a drowned variant of the Duke of Flies, hosting leeches instead of the usual flies.
- The Heretic is The Haunt with cloak-like skin and a cracked skull, revived by the necromancy of cultists at the beginning of the fight.
- The Visage is a revived Mask of Infamy, locked up in an iron helmet and chained to its heart.
- The Witness resembles a zombified Mama Gurdy, which is fitting considering that it was inspired by a false rumor about an undead variant of Gurdy being a secret boss in Rebirth.
- Cast from Hit Points:
- The Alabaster Box is a weird variation. It drops Angel Room items and pickups when used and then disappears, but it doesn't gain charge from clearing rooms. Instead, it absorbs heart pickups to charge, being fully charged after the equivalent of six hearts.
- Magic Skin uses up a Heart Container to generate items. The heart is replaced by a broken heart that cannot be replaced by other pickups, essentially lowering your maximum health.
- Because of how The Lost's health* works,
he can use Magic Skin with absolutely no limits to get every single item in the entire game. This was heavily Nerfed in Repentance, with Magic Skin now being a one-time use item for The Lost.
- Because of how The Lost's health* works,
- Voodoo Pin is the reverse; it hurts Isaac without damaging him, triggering any effects that occur when he takes damage normally.
- Blood Bombs allows you to place bombs while you have none, at the cost of half a heart per bomb.
- Clingy MacGuffin: The Magic Skin, a new item added to the game, is more or less this. If you use it several times and then ditch it for another active item, it will show up as the next item you get. It's also an example of Schmuck Bait; using it will generate an item from the room's pool...but every use will PERMANENTLY lock away one of your heart containers. The temptation for using it for free powerups is significant, and if you decide to ditch it after doing so, it'll just keep showing back up in place of normal items, not only depriving you of a normal item, but also ensuring that the temptation is always there...
- Cool Sword: The Spirit Sword replaces Isaac's tear attacks with a sword attack that works much like the one in the Legend of Zelda games; the fire buttons now swing the sword to attack at melee range, and holding down the button allows him to perform a Spin Attack. Additionally, both the regular swing and the spin attack will launch Sword Beams. It even comes with its own synergies: for instance, Monstro's Lung causes the spin to also fling tears in all directions, Mom's Knife lets you throw the sword during the spin attack, Lost Contact allows it to deflect bullets, and Technology reskins it into a Laser Blade that shoots Frickin' Laser Beams and has slightly longer range.
- Developer's Foresight:
- To unlock the final chapter of the alternate route, Corpse, you need to find and assemble all three pieces of a knife hidden throughout the Alternate Route, then use it on the fleshy door that appears after defeating Mom in the Mausoleum; however, if you have Mom's Knife, you can use that instead. This was removed in Repentance, though there are still other means of opening the door (Cracked Orb, Soul of Cain, etc.)
- One of the new unlockable items is called the Meat Cleaver, and it divides all enemies in the room into two weaker versions of themselves when used. What does it do when used on the boss Loki? Why, it turns it into Lokii, a boss from the vanilla game that's just a Loki cut in half! Additionally, if used on an enemy that splits into other enemies, such as a MemBrain or Moter, it will split into the enemies that normally spawn when it dies (Brains and Attack Flies respectively, in this case). This includes The Fallen, instantly putting him into his second phase where he splits into two mini-Fallens.
- The Siren steals your familiars with her song, and almost every familiar in the game has a working effect when used by her. This includes reviving items such as Dead Cat; if you kill her without rescuing the familiar, she'll fully heal and consume the extra life.
- When playing as Jacob and Esau, Esau will automatically use any card, pill, or rune he picks up. Likely as a direct result of this, the Suicide King card will not spawn when playing as Jacob and Esau.
- Down the Drain: Downpour, the beginning of the alternate route, is set in a flooded sewer section of the Basement. It contains appropriate enemies such as bug-like water-sliders, as well as more original concepts like humanoids that are invisible aside from their reflections.
- Drugs Are Bad: The Black Mushroomnote is an active item with a recharge time of a few seconds that increases tears and stacks with itself, so theoretically, you'd want to use it as much as possible... except each use also increasingly distorts your screen. You have to clear rooms to make the distortion clear up, but if you're relying on the Black Mushroom for damage, you probably have to use it every room. If you really spam it to hell and back, it's entirely possible to render a run Unintentionally Unwinnable due to the screen being distorted to the point of unplayability.
- Dual Boss:
- The Tuff Twins are a rocky variety of Larry Jr., so naturally you fight two at once.
- In the base game, the Mask of Infamy has you fighting two parts of a boss, but you have to focus on one and then the other. Its new upgraded form, The Visage, requires you to fight both the mask and heart at the same time once you destroy the chain connecting them.
- After taking enough damage, Chimera's head falls off, splitting it into a Cage body and a Monstro/Gurdy Jr. head.
- Easter Egg: By fiddling with the "options_remix.ini" file,you can enable an announcer, similar to the one in Afterbirth, voiced by LeatherIceCream, one of the mod's developers.
- Escort Mission:
- One of the new items, Lost Soul, invokes this. If it gets hit even once, it will disappear for the rest of the floor; however, if it survives the floor, it gives you a new item.
- This is also Jacob and Esau's main shtick. Esau does far more damage than Jacob, but has less health, so you'll have to try to arrange them so Jacob takes hits meant for Esau.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: One of the new bosses, The Heretic (an undead The Haunt), plays out this trope during the battle against it. The battle starts with several enemies from the level summoning it in a ritual. The first thing The Heretic does? Transform them into Mooks (by making their heads asplode), which it then sends after you.
- Fire/Water Juxtaposition: The first two chapters of the Alternate Route, Downpour and The Mines. Interestingly, the juxtaposition is an inversion of that used by Afterbirth's alternate chapters, Burning Basement and Flooded Caves.
- Flashy Teleportation: The main gimmick of the Mausoleum. The floor has teleportation tiles that turn the teleported into light, and make a sound, that send Isaac to a matching tile when stepped on; these often form puzzles in room layouts. Additionally, Mausoleum has special rooms with teleporters that allow the player to access a secondary area of the floor, which can have extra special rooms such as Treasure Rooms and Shops, but usually require the player to solve some sort of puzzle to get to the teleporter.
- Flunky Boss: Frequent as expected from Isaac, but two new bosses do it uniquely:
- Great Gideon is immune to attacks like normal Grimaces. To beat him, you have to clear out every enemy he summons while dodging his attacks. Once they're all gone, he deactivates.
- In addition to summoning allies in the usual fashion, The Siren sings a charming song that steals your familiars to use against you. Attacking the familiar returns it to your control.
- Game-Breaking Bug:
- There is a small chance that after beating The Witness, an item from the boss item pool will spawn instead of the endgame chest, rendering the run unwinnable.
- While holding the Red Key, quitting the run (by manually quitting, the game crashing, or so on), re-entering it, and using the Red Key will cause the game to crash.
- In a minor example, Bethany's achievements for defeating Sheol and The Witness are bugged and cannot be unlocked; this also renders the items associated with those achievements unobtainable.
- The Birthright item (has a different effect for every character) occasionally crashes the game when picked up. It's especially easy to trigger with Jacob and Esau (whose Birthright effect gives the one that picked it up three of the other's passive items) while one of them has less than three items collected.
- The Menorah will crash the game when combined with The Ludovico Technique, due to the game not knowing how to handle the shot multiplier.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: Most of the challenge in Hornfel's fight comes from him popping in and out of the arena on his mine cart, which has many tracks and exit doors. Once you weaken him enough that his cart breaks, he tries to flee on foot, and killing him before he gets away makes him drop bomb pickups or bomb-related items.
- Guide Dang It!: While the first three chapters of the Alternate Route are relatively easy to get to (requiring a key, two bombs, and two soul hearts to access, in that order; clearly given a visual cue in the form of a lock, a boarded up door that gets cracked after one bomb, and a door with a gray heart in the middle), getting access to the final chapter, Corpse, is much, much more convoluted. You have to bomb open an invisible chest on the second floor of Downpour to get one piece of a knife, solve a pressure-plate puzzle on the second floor of Mines to obtain a second piece, and put out fireplaces in a certain pattern on the second floor of Mausoleum to obtain the third and final piece. Once you have all three, defeat Mom in the Mausoleum and use the knife to open a fleshy door, leading you to Mom's Heart. Defeating Mom's Heart unlocks the Corpse chapter. Nowhere in the game is this hinted at, and to make things worse, the fleshy door to Mom's Heart only appears after you get the knife! The only saving grace is that you only have to solve each puzzle once, as unlocking each knife piece leaves it out in the open on all subsequent runs.
- Hailfire Peaks: The Mines has a strong emphasis on both fire and earth, with a minecart theme (as the name implies) and a little bit of Blackout Basement.
- Hard Mode Perks: The alternate floors are more difficult than their regular counterparts, but the treasure rooms there always have two items to choose from.
- Skipping Treasure Rooms gives a chance for a Planetarium to spawn on the next floor. These are similar to Treasure Rooms, but contain exclusive items that tend to be Purposely Overpowered.
- HP to One: The Blood Oath gives Isaac increased speed and attack at the cost of stabbing him down to half a red heart at the beginning of each floor.
- Improbable Weapon User: The Sharp Key item lets you throw your keys as an attack (no, the Golden Key doesn't let you spam this item). They still function as regular keys, letting you open doors and chests by throwing keys at them from across the room.
- King Mook: Several of the new bosses are this:
- Baby Plum is a larger, cuter version of the Level 2 Fly.
- Reap Creep combines the shot types of all three Creep enemies into one massive, nasty spider.
- Great Gideon is a big Grimace, and it has traits of every Grimace variant, including being invincible just like them and ceasing fire once every enemy in the room is dead.
- The Scourge is a boss variant of the new Whipper enemies, mainly the Snapper (as both have a single eye).
- One phase of Rotgut has you facing a obese Spitty maggot.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The three new characters (two at the moment), Bethany, Jacob/Esau, and Edith.
- Bethany starts off doing pathetic amounts of damage, and can't add soul hearts or their variants to her health. However, her active item gives her a blue fire minion that shoots tears, and she can summon up to twelve at a time. Even better, she keeps any soul hearts (and variants) in a reserve that she can consume in exchange for a free charge; this means she can quickly boost her damage output, at the cost of an active item and a wider hitbox (since the flames will be destroyed if they make contact with an enemy) and reduced Devil Deal chances (since she can't use soul hearts to avoid red heart damage).
- Jacob and Esau are both played at the same time, with Jacob having more health but Esau doing far more damage. They pick up items separately, and if one of them dies, the other dies instantly.
- Edith, a currently cut character, is petrified and cannot move. She instead jumps around the room via a cursor, letting her squash enemies and rocks if she lands on them.
- Motif: The game seems to focus around knives. The new title has a knife in the logo, you need to use an assembled knife or Mom's Knife to access the final chapter of the Alternate Route, The Witness uses a knife for one of its attacks in its first form, and in the Alternate Route ending, Isaac turns his mother's knife on her in self-defense.
- Mythology Gag:
- You can now go into negative health via Devil Rooms, and the mechanics are identical or near identical to the mechanics in the original game — not Rebirth, but the original Flash game. Furthermore, some Antibirth Devil Deals, such as the Quarter and Bloody Lust, were Devil Deals since at least Wrath of the Lamb that were removed in Rebirth.
- Certain items from Community Remix, the Flash counterpart of Antibirth, are also in the mod, such as Blood Oath and Sulfur.
- The Eternal D6 works identically to the D6 in the Eternal Update. It's even called "Florian's Dice" in the files, as Florian Himsl was the one behind the Eternal Update.
- New Game Plus: The R Key is a Forget Me Now taken to the highest level; upon use, you restart at the beginning of the game in your character's current state. This does not reset the timer.
- No-Damage Run: Enforced by the Perfection trinket, which can only be found as a boss drop after you clear 3 floors in a row without taking damage, and if you take damage while holding Perfection, it disappears. In return, it gives you a colossal Luck boost.
- Point of No Return: The player is free to jump to the alternate path from almost any floor, or go back to the main path after every second alternate floor. However, whether or not the Mausoleum variant of Mom's Heart is killed will make a definitive point on whether or not the next floor will be Womb/Utero or Corpse. There is no going back to the former once the latter is accessed, and there is no way to get to Sheol/Cathedral/Dark Room/Chest from Corpse.
- Power at a Price:
- Damocles generates an additional item for each item pedestal you come across — even shops and Devil Rooms, with the extra items being free to take. The catch is that, starting from when you first take damage, Damocles can kill you at any time without warning, so you better hope those items are enough to keep you from getting hit (or give you an extra life or two, as it can only kill you once). Fortunately, it's a single-use spacebar item that only applies its effects if used, so you can swap it out if you don't want to take the risk.
- Magic Skin generates a collectible item when used, but turns one of your Heart Containers into a broken heart that can't be removed by any means, permanently reducing your max HP for the current run.
- Shout-Out: Hey, there were a lot in the vanilla game, and the mod doesn't skimp out on that front.
- Screamer, is a large, mummy-like enemy that emits a scream that paralyzes Isaac. It's totally not a Gibdo, we swear.
- A new Active Item is the Mega Mush, which makes Isaac humongous for a limited time.
- One of the new Passive Items is called Rotten Tomato.
- A new challenge is called Isaac's Awakening, and it gives Isaac a sword, shield, and power bracelet.
- The Oculus Rift is a passive item. Here, it's a dimensional rift with an eye inside of it.
- Spared by the Adaptation: in the mods alternative lore Isaac isn’t dead.
- Spiritual Successor: To Community Remix, a mod for the original flash game. Antibirth includes most of the features and items from Community Remix.
- The Binding of Isaac: The mod adds "Immortal Hearts." They function identically to Soul Hearts, but will regenerate at the end of the room if they don't get destroyed.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Right before the fight against the True Final Boss of the Alternate Route, you'll find four locked chests, each containing an item. Unless your build was already game-breaking, you will need all of them.
- Sword of Damocles: Appears as a collectible item. Congratulations, you get all kinds of free items! Hopefully you don't mind having a sword dangled over your head by a string that could snap at any point and kill you without warning…
- Take That!: The song Non Funkible Token being attributed to Ultra Greed isn't very subtle with what it's mocking.
- Trick Boss: The battle against Mom becomes this on the Alternate Route once you get all 3 knife pieces. After defeating the boss and using the knife to open up the sealed door in the boss arena, you have to fight a buffed Mom's Heart, with no chance to go back and gather more hearts.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: When you defeat The Witness's second form of a floating head, it turns to stone and falls to the ground. If it happens to be at the center of the room, it will block all access to the chest that ends the run. However, it can be saved in a couple of ways; either a teleport item (which will despawn the boss' dead body when you reenter) or just quit and reload.
- Averted in Repentance, where The Witness (now called "Mother") instead melts into the ground, leaving nothing behind when the ending chest spawns.
- Womb Level: Aside from the one from the original game, the final chapter of the Alternate Route, Corpse, takes place inside of a dead womb. Yummy!
