About
The Binding of Isaac is a 2011 roguelike action-adventure game by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, in which players control Isaac fleeing into a monster-filled basement to survive procedurally generated dungeons, defeating enemies and bosses while collecting items and power-ups. Witch Blast is a free, open-source roguelite dungeon-crawl shooter heavily inspired by The Binding of Isaac, casting the player as a novice magician fighting through a dungeon using found items and spells. It runs on Linux and Windows, supports local 2-player co-op, and has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian.
How it differs from the original
Unlike Isaac's basement setting, Witch Blast casts the player as a magician in a procedurally generated dungeon, with its own systems for temples and divinities offering piety-based effects, a merchant, chests with traps, and spells that use cooldowns rather than passive pickups alone.
Getting started
Movement uses WASD (or QSDZ on French keyboards), with shooting via arrow keys, right-control, or a mouse click, and spells cast with the spacebar; progress saves automatically upon clearing an area, but exiting mid-fight destroys the current run.
History
Development ran from 2014 to 2015 under solo developer Seby, who later gained community contributions including additional 2D art and music, a particle system with multilingual support, and a 2-player co-op mode added by contributor Cong.
Additional notes
- License
- Code is licensed under GPLv3, while the 2D art and music are separately licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.