Mother

Lore & Background

The voice speaks to her three times. First it asks her to remove all evil from Isaac, so she takes away his toys, drawings and even his clothes. Then it says he must be cut off from all that is evil, so she locks him in his room. Finally it tells her that she has done well but that her devotion is still in question, and that she must sacrifice her son.

She takes a butcher's knife from the kitchen and walks to his room; Isaac, watching through a crack in the door, escapes through a trapdoor under his rug as she bursts in. Rebirth tells its story through ending cutscenes. In one, after Isaac has beaten his mother in the basement, the scene cuts back to his room, where she is about to kill him with the knife; a Bible falls from a shelf and strikes her on the head, apparently killing her, but she then appears behind Isaac, alive and still holding the knife, revealing the sequence as imagined.

Other endings suggest that Isaac, overwhelmed by religious guilt, locked himself in a toy chest, with the events of the game a hallucination. The expansions add that Isaac's father abandoned the family and that his mother has been abusing him since. In the final ending the narrator, whom Isaac calls his father, offers to tell a new story featuring Isaac and both of his parents.

Reader's Guide

In the original game Mom is fought on the sixth of the eight floors. After she is defeated, Isaac crawls into her womb, where the floors get much harder, until a fight against her heart on the eighth floor. In Rebirth, Isaac battles his mother after venturing through various floors, and defeating her or the other final bosses unlocks the endings that carry the story. Edmund McMillen built the story around his own family, split between Catholics and born-again Christians, and around 1980s propaganda films in which satanic cults sacrificed children, which he found mirrored in biblical stories.