The Big Rant - Tainted Lost

[AlluMan96]

It's about time I finally came to it. For the past 2 months now, this has just about been my entire experience with Binding of Isaac. Grinding Tainted Lost in order to get all of his check marks. There has been alot I've wanted to say and there has been alot that I have already talked about in other posts here, but on the whole, I really just wanted to wait and see how it all pans out before I started making any bigger statements about the character. There have been many times, when something I didn't like has been turned around on me, because there was such a well-thought, deliberate plan behind it. Now that I only have 2 marks left undone on him (Greedier and Delirium), I think I have enough playtime to make my peace with the character.

With that said, ♥♥♥♥ Tainted Lost. As an addition to The Binding of Isaac, he exploits nothing but the game's most critical weaknesses and barely embraces any of it's strong points, many times actively avoiding them. There are tainted characters that are less fun. There are ones that are more lazily designed. However, Tainted Lost has to stand as one of the biggest sour-points of the game for being such an awful experience from beginning to end.

The problems;

#1: He's the wrong kind of challenge character for the game.
I figured this would be a good one to start off with, as it addresses the first thought that might come to someone when thinking on Tainted Lost. In fact, it was evaluating whether this was a problem or not why I didn't wanna write this until I had sufficient experience with the character.

Yes, Tainted Lost is supposed to be a challenge. He's supposed to demand perfection from the player. However, it's that latter statement that's precisely the issue. Perfection is a tall order from a game that by it's very design eschews such a notion. Randomness doesn't really lend itself well to a highly punishing form of difficulty like this, because uncertain factors and chaotic elements inherently make games inbalanced and in some parts broken. This is something that is hard-coded into TBOI's core design pillars. After all, it is a roguelike, games built around randomness and adaption in spite of more traditional structured challenges. This is a fact that the developers ought to have known already, because the original Lost was given the Holy Mantle precisely for this reason. It made him demanding, but there was a clear safety-net that worked just well enough to negate alot of the issues of the random roguelike elements. To see them fall for the same trap almost deliberately is perplexing.

Not to mention, the consequences of failure are way too high for what is a massive challenge. You look at any kind of game that revolves around highly punishing, highly demanding gameplay. Your Dark Souls', your Devil May Crys, even McMillen's own Super Meat Boy. They are often designed to be taken a single challenge at a time. Checkpoints are frequent in these games, which allow you to practice the hard parts in a way, where you are only focused on them alone. Tainted Lost on the other hand only has one shot and a single mistake can take you back all the way to the beginning. In a very unlucky run, Tainted Lost can be left with only a single hit's worth of wiggle-room and your punishment for failure can set you back 40 minutes. This doesn't really motivate anyone to "just keep practicing", when progress is such an ice-skate uphill to achieve. Even reported rage-games that will set you back on failure like Jump King will have checkpoint-spots to catch you in you fail. They don't just drop you back to the start after every missed jump. Though speaking of that previous example-

#2: His gimmicks are bad.
Tainted Lost has some issues with his defining features. The first of which being the holy card gimmick. Having every card have a 10% chance of being holy cards is supposed to be your silver lining. That saving grace that keeps you going. Between the now hundreds of runs I have played as him, I can tell you that this gimmick is way too subtle. For being his primary source of guaranteed protection, they just have a chance of not showing up at all. Cards aren't the most common items and for every tenth of them to have the chance to be holy cards makes them incredibly rare to see. Between all the runs I've played, there is a good 25% of them at least, where I had to make do with my starting holy card as the only card I had. In fact, there was a time, when I played with a mod that gave me wooden cross instead of the holy card and those runs made it so clear exactly how rare those cards are, where there were so many runs, where I just never had a holy card.

Then there's the "better items" gimmick, where his item pool is skewed to be more offensive, he has a better damage modifier and eliminates certain items he has no need for. Honestly speaking though, I think it makes him a little boring. First of all, the "better" in that name is just for show. You are still very likely to just have crap runs as with anyone. However, with a limited item pool, some of the more fun interactions in the game are lost on him. And again, some of these decisions like taking out Dead Cat are further pushing that punishing gameplay that actively works against the nature of roguelikes. I don't even know how that one even sounded good in anyone's head.

#3: He's just kind of boring.
At the end of the day, playing Tainted Lost is playing Isaac at a net loss. Any character that removes the standard health mechanics of the game are already playing the game with a crippling disadvantage, but with no one is this more evident than Tainted Lost. Using health as a resource is part of the fun of Isaac. So many of the elements in the game are built around it. Curse rooms, sac rooms, blood donors, demon beggars, all of these are wasted opportunities for a character like Tainted Lost. Even Tainted Eden can theoretically play these to secure advantages.

Also, I just kind of find it mystifying why he has nothing in his starting kit. He literally lost an item in the transition from Tainted Lost and the best they gave him was a one-use consumable that puts him back to square-1 effectively. The original Lost always had a dice to compliment him. Why couldn't Tainted Lost be given a unique dice to use? Hell, without the Holy Mantle, he'd get more out of d4 than the og Lost ever did. The point is that just starting with a slightly beefier attack value and less chances to get some fun items isn't a good trade-off for a character, I feel.

#4: The culmination of these elements.
Tainted Lost is an overly punishing character whose gimmicks are either too subtle to notice without actively gaming the system or are actively working against you as a player and starts the game without anything he can use to secure advantages. What this all results in is a character that is literally bottle-necked into playing in a way that immediately addresses his issues. Overall, playing Tainted Lost is very samey, because his gameplan is super linear and entirely luck-dependent. There's a reason why Blank Card, d1 and Book of Shadows are such a meme to this character. He needs these items not to win, but just to get his run started and there isn't really alot of justifiable reason to carry any other active items or consumables because of it.

After a while, playing T. Lost became boring purely from the sense that all his runs feel the same. You're looking for the same set of items every time. You see so many repeats of items again and again. There isn't anything this character offers other than big-♥♥♥♥ attack numbers and that is the ultimate reason I dislike him. He's too hamstrung by his relatively weak starting position to be considered truly skill-based and his routes to victory just revolve around completely ignoring the gimmick he's built around, making him a stale character that doesn't feel like anything more than a pain in the ass to play.

[ᴼDAE]

KEMPER eredeti hozzászólása:

Weird how no one mentinoed messed up hitboxes.
Nothing more frustrating than dying to a shot that didn't visuallly connect.

Not mentioned but totally true. I've posted before how poor the hitboxes are. Pretty much every category has an offender...

It's a problem with the game engine as it was initially built as a 1st person rogue-like. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating.

[AlluMan96]

KEMPER eredeti hozzászólása:

Weird how no one mentinoed messed up hitboxes.
Nothing more frustrating than dying to a shot that didn't visuallly connect.

I have to be honest, I've played this game for such an unforgivable amount of hours, that the thought honestly didn't even cross my mind, because I am so used to the hitboxes being how they are. Might just be my inner fighting game player talking, but I can adjust to hitboxes being disjointed. The important part for me is that the hitboxes behave consistently.

[TrumpetBoiTrey]

Wow Tainted Lost is such a BS character I just did boss rush, hush, and delirium all on my first run of the day and the game didn't give me any invincibility items or holy cards. What an outrage!

[ToxicBoo]

TrumpetBoiTrey eredeti hozzászólása:

Wow Tainted Lost is such a BS character I just did boss rush, hush, and delirium all on my first run of the day and the game didn't give me any invincibility items or holy cards. What an outrage!

Tell that to the people who get telefragged by delirium.

[TrumpetBoiTrey]

ToxicBoo eredeti hozzászólása:

TrumpetBoiTrey eredeti hozzászólása:

Wow Tainted Lost is such a BS character I just did boss rush, hush, and delirium all on my first run of the day and the game didn't give me any invincibility items or holy cards. What an outrage!

Tell that to the people who get telefragged by delirium.

I don't disagree that delirium can sometimes be unfair, but everything else is avoidable. As a wise man once said, just don't get hit!

[Roshan]

TrumpetBoiTrey eredeti hozzászólása:

ToxicBoo eredeti hozzászólása:

Tell that to the people who get telefragged by delirium.

I don't disagree that delirium can sometimes be unfair, but everything else is avoidable. As a wise man once said, just don't get hit!

Kinda hard when you have rooms that can instantly kill you when you enter tho.

[Lucifer ★✬]

Roshan eredeti hozzászólása:

TrumpetBoiTrey eredeti hozzászólása:

I don't disagree that delirium can sometimes be unfair, but everything else is avoidable. As a wise man once said, just don't get hit!

Kinda hard when you have rooms that can instantly kill you when you enter tho.

T lost can get past most of the rooks that people complain about due to his flight

[Roshan]

Lucifer ★✬ eredeti hozzászólása:

Roshan eredeti hozzászólása:

Kinda hard when you have rooms that can instantly kill you when you enter tho.

T lost can get past most of the rooks that people complain about due to his flight

There's still a few rooms that can insta-kill you. In Chest there's a room with 4 blue Gurdy.Jrs where one of them spawn right ontop of you. Here's a video of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/bindingofisaac/comments/qct9i0/thanks_edmund/

[Scumbo]

hes not that hard lol

[Lucifer ★✬]

Roshan eredeti hozzászólása:

Lucifer ★✬ eredeti hozzászólása:

T lost can get past most of the rooks that people complain about due to his flight

There's still a few rooms that can insta-kill you. In Chest there's a room with 4 blue Gurdy.Jrs where one of them spawn right ontop of you. Here's a video of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/bindingofisaac/comments/qct9i0/thanks_edmund/

sure, theres "a few" but not as many as a non flying character needs to deal with. for rooms like them just use the holly card

[ICountFrom0]

and how would you know it's the deadly room that spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter, and to use the card, ahead of time, unless your playing known seeds?

[Lucifer ★✬]

ICountFrom0 eredeti hozzászólása:

and how would you know it's the deadly room that spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter, and to use the card, ahead of time, unless your playing known seeds?

just pop the card at the start of a floor if you know that some rooms may screw you or just quickly pop it when you enter caz no room "spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter"

[Roshan]

Lucifer ★✬ eredeti hozzászólása:

ICountFrom0 eredeti hozzászólása:

and how would you know it's the deadly room that spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter, and to use the card, ahead of time, unless your playing known seeds?

just pop the card at the start of a floor if you know that some rooms may screw you or just quickly pop it when you enter caz no room "spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter"

Did you not watch the video? The room literally spawned a monster on top of him as he entered. You can even slow it down to watch. If your entire solution to a problem is to either have the holy card (which is not always possible, what if you get two rooms like that before you find another holy card? At the moment it's so rare you can barely even find one in an entire run) or have impossible reaction speed, then it is a big problem that needs to be adressed.

[TrumpetBoiTrey]

Roshan eredeti hozzászólása:

Lucifer ★✬ eredeti hozzászólása:

just pop the card at the start of a floor if you know that some rooms may screw you or just quickly pop it when you enter caz no room "spawns a monster on top of you as soon as you enter"

Did you not watch the video? The room literally spawned a monster on top of him as he entered. You can even slow it down to watch. If your entire solution to a problem is to either have the holy card (which is not always possible, what if you get two rooms like that before you find another holy card? At the moment it's so rare you can barely even find one in an entire run) or have impossible reaction speed, then it is a big problem that needs to be adressed.

I've never encountered a room that instantly damages you in my life and I'm approaching 1000 hours in this game. I'm not saying they don't exist - that room in the video looked pretty unfair - but the chances of running into a room like that is very low, and you would need dream luck to encounter two of those rooms in the same run. If this is such an issue, then how on earth are people pulling off Tainted Lost streaks? Surely it wouldn't be possible if there were rooms that instantly hit you, right?

[AlluMan96]

TrumpetBoiTrey eredeti hozzászólása:

ToxicBoo eredeti hozzászólása:

Tell that to the people who get telefragged by delirium.

I don't disagree that delirium can sometimes be unfair, but everything else is avoidable. As a wise man once said, just don't get hit!

But what if getting hit is fun? I say that jokingly, but it is honestly one of the things that contribute to T. Lost feeling so boring. Isaac has so many great ways in which it encourages you to gamble with your life-bar and use it as a resource, that a character not having access to that is actually a big hit to their enjoyment in my eyes. Blood Donors, Curse Rooms, Devil Beggars, Confessionals, Sacrifice Rooms, T. Lost doesn't really get to play with any of those mechanics. He either just doesn't interact with them or cheats them in a way that takes away all of the interesting decision making that comes with it. And that's just the surface of the iceberg. Playing Devil Deals or the new Magic Skin item, items that proc when damaged are another aspect that the character just doesn't get to have any fun with.