More Challenges Done... Another Ending Unlocked

I am trying to unlock all the playable characters in the Binding of Isaac. The next in line was Lilith. To unlock her, we needed to complete Greed Mode with Azazel, but it was not easy at all. I talked about the frustrating experience of playing Greed Mode with this character because it has no red heart containers at the start. You can read about my failed 9 attempts in a row in this post.

But I persisted and finally, after a lucky run where I got a lot of health upgrades, I was able to beat the Ultra Greed, the boss of Greed Mode and unlock Lilith.

The unique thing about Lilith is that she is blindfolded and cannot use tears herself, but she has a little demon friend who shoots tears. She has a chance to spawn a random familiar after taking some amount of damage in your run. Also, her active item can duplicate those familiar with the room. So, she almost completely relies on her army of familiars to deal any sort of damage, especially at the start of the run.

Her incubus friend has a slight delay copying her movements, so it gets tough to adjust and dodge enemy projectiles when you have a lot of them in the room.

Duplicating those familiars for a boss room or big rooms with many enemies is a good strategy for Lilith runs, and anything that can increase the damage of familiars is gold. My first run with her ended in Utero I. Just because it gets harder to increase the amount of red hearts when you start with just one.

I shifted my focus to completing some more challenges. One of them is called "The Tank", where you start with 7 red hearts, which is a lot, but you are very slow. Just 0.25 speed, so you will not be able to run away from most enemies. That's why the game also gives you a defensive item called "Infamy", which has a 50% chance to block a bullet or projectile. Also, there is an item which lets you destroy rocks by just walking into them.

This is a very unique set of constraints you have. At first, it feels like this run is going to be easy because of so many red hearts, but you soon realise how much your mobility is restricted and you cannot run away from enemies, especially bosses.

I had multiple failed attempts, but on one of the attempts, I found "Brimstone", one of the coolest items in the game, which replaces your tears with a chargeable laser dealing a massive amount of damage on contact. This is a kind of game-breaking item for me. I can easily reach Mom's boss fight once I have this item. And with enough hearts to take some of the damage from this fight, it was not too tough to kill Mom and win the challenge.

I am starting to like these unique challenges. I am noticing that I am spending more time on the Greed mode and Challenges than in the normal mode.

Challenge #6 - Solar System

I liked the name of this challenge. In this challenge, you are blindfolded so you can't shoot tears and even worse, there is no familiar that shoots tears in place of you. You just have some flies that revolve around you, just like how planets revolve around the sun. Those flies deal contact damage to enemies. And since they are revolving around you at a constant pace, it makes it much more difficult to attack enemies.

This is probably one of the hardest challenges yet. The flight helps you hide from some of the enemies over rocks and other obstacles, but the lack of tears makes it very tough. Some of the enemies which move in unpredictable patterns are very tough to deal with, like the spiders.

It shouldn't be a surprise that I failed to complete this challenge on my first few tries.

I started a normal run with Madelene to see if I could beat Mom's heart after a long time. This was a lucky run because I found "The Halo", which is one of the best items in the game and increases almost all the core stats.

I found some unique bosses in this run, too.

"Daddy Long Legs" gave me a good chuckle. I found Brimstone in this run, too and with enough damage output and good stats, it turned out to be an easy run. I had the Curse of Unknown on the last floor, but I had enough hearts not to worry about it.

Defeating Mom's heart was easy with my build. I didn't have the second piece of the golden key, so there was no golden door on this floor to fight Satan. But this was enough for me. I reached out to the giant golden chest to collect my reward.

It turned out to be a different ending. This was Ending #4, where in the cutscene, Isaac found a coat hanger and then that coat hanger was put inside his head, which was a disturbing ending. Another one of these endings. Most of the endings so far were quite traumatising for Isaac. But there are still plenty more left for me to find out.