I’ve been playing through The Basement Collection recently and it contains several exclusive Q&As with Edmund McMillen about some of his older games. First off, The Basement Collection is only $4 and it contains nine of McMillen’s earlier flash games. Also included in the Collection are drawings and comics from McMillen’s younger life; it is as if he wants to be very open with his acknowledgment that his childhood was troubled. There is a comic strip he wrote depicting unfeeling adults and very dark themes based on his childhood. And yet somehow, he manages to make it all comical…like his games.
McMillen inserts many deep themes in his work, but I’ve noticed one particularly overarching theme after viewing all of this new media: it tends to involve a person retracting into themselves when their home and social lives become too much for their view of reality to handle. Now, let’s look at three games that are incredibly dissimilar, but that I still see as chronological in a bizarre, thematic way. The Binding of Isaac endings have always been the most mysterious so I will work towards that one at the end.
Heavy spoilers follow, and I’ll try to mark them as best I can, but you have been warned….
