The Binding of Isaac is one of my favorite games ever. With 500 hours of hours and a Dead God under my belt, I I saw this Reddit thread where players guess items with the fewest hints possible, I thought it would make a fun little Wordle-style daily puzzle. A weekend later, here it is. (✪‿✪)
Play it: avelouk.com/something-of-isaac
How it works
- New puzzle every UTC day, the game reveals one hint.
- You type a guess - search the item’s name, its pickup quote, its effect, the pool it comes from, or even a snippet of the description.
- Wrong guess? The next hint shows up.
- Six text hints, and if you still haven’t got it, an four-tile multiple final round.
- Share string at the end, like Wordle.
Hints
By default, the game generates a six-step hint ladder from item metadata - quality first, then type, pools, DLC, the first sentence of the description, and the pickup quote. Generic but works.
When I have time, I add hand-crafted hints via a small local-only admin UI: pick a date, pick an item, type six hints. It writes back to the schedule JSON. Past dates are read-only so I cannot accidentally rewrite history.
Later on, I added a free tier Cloudflare worker to store the number of daily players and the hint schedule. That way I don’t need to deploy the app every time I add hints.
Result
A small daily ritual for Isaac fans. New puzzle at 00:00 UTC, share your score, come back tomorrow.
https://github.com/avelouk/something-of-isaac
I got actual players!
Great success! (✦ ‿ ✦)
I made my own post on the subreddit once the game was finished, and I got a very positive response, along with a few bug reports and very cool suggestions. 622 players tried the game on the first day, with 40 of them playing every day since launch. I haven’t done any further promotion as I am not sure how to do it.
I would say this retention curve is not bad at all. While there is no viral growth, many people who tried it once keep playing for almost 2 weeks now. (✪‿✪)ノ
Credits
Fan project, not affiliated with Edmund McMillen, Nicalis, or the official Binding of Isaac team. Item data from Platinum God, IDs and seed helpers from Isaaconnect (GPLv3).