The House
The small house on a hill where Isaac and his mother live, and whose basement is the game.
The house is the home of Isaac and his mother in The Binding of Isaac. It is a small house on a hill where the two keep happily to themselves: Isaac draws pictures and plays with his toys while his mother watches Christian broadcasts on television. Its basement, which turns out to be full of monsters, is where the whole game is played.
Quick Facts
- Game
- The Binding of Isaac (2011)
- Location
- A small house on a hill
- Residents
- Isaac and his mother
- Below
- The monster-filled basement
Lore & Background
Only a few parts of the house appear in the story. There is Isaac's room, where his mother first takes away his toys, drawings and clothes and later locks him in; the kitchen, from which she takes a butcher's knife when the voice tells her to sacrifice him; and a trapdoor under the rug in Isaac's room, through which he escapes as she bursts in. Below lies the basement, a monster-filled dungeon where Isaac must fight to survive. In Rebirth's endings the house returns: after Isaac defeats his mother, the game cuts back to his room, where she is about to kill him with the knife, and a Bible falls from a shelf onto her head. Another ending implies Isaac locked himself in a toy chest and asphyxiated, with the events of the game a hallucination.
Reader's Guide
In play, the house is the dungeon under it. The player controls Isaac through procedurally generated floors fashioned after the dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, clearing rooms of monsters, collecting items and beating a boss on every floor. Isaac's mother is fought on the sixth of eight floors, her heart on the eighth, and an optional ninth floor, Sheol, holds Satan.
More in Rooms & Locations
Elsewhere in The Binding of Isaac
Spotted an error? Know more?
Reader corrections go straight into our review queue. Suggest an edit · How this site is sourced