The Madness of Little Emma

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery Full disclosure: review copy provided by developer/publisher! So I really enjoy The Binding of Isaac – I mean Spelun – I MEAN The Madness of Little Emma! I just need to get this out of the way right off the bat: yes, it is highly derivative. Yes, it doesn't nearly sport as much wacky variety as the aforementioned indies. And yes, ladies, I am in fact single. Point is: The Madness of Little Emma is fun and charming in its own right despite treading a well worn path. Starts off pretty much like Isaac: little girl lives with her kid brother in a Brothers Grimmesque scenario – they got nothin' but each other and the bounty of the woods or... something. Maybe they steal food? They probably steal food. One day Timmy (quintessential orphan name) goes missing; the only clue to his whereabouts is an open hatch to the basement and more blood than can be adequately explained by your standard boo boo. Emma says ♥♥♥♥ it, I can't see, #YOLO (paraphrasing), and our journey begins. You, the player, guide Emma through the dungeon depths to gather various child-themed powerups (candy, teddy bears, financial reports), money, bombs, and whatnot. Each room is generally filled with enemies that you defeat by... spitting at them. Not sure why Emma is so enthusiastic about spitting but I'll roll with it. Enemies consist of flies and ghosts and ♥♥♥♥ me this is – I can't even. Nope, stopped the paragraph short. Listen, I know this is The Binding of Isaac. Like, to a T. The item effects, the bosses (their attack patterns and even some eerily similar names... or just, y'know, Haunt), the kid motif, the gross bodily fluid ranged attacks, tiny ambiance animals skittering around, WHY THE HELL AM I NOT TEARING THIS GAME APART? It's fun, that's why. It's cute and gross and there isn't anything wrong with it. It's a perfectly adequate game with its own mouth feel (gross Spirit; mouth feel meaning playstyle and flow). Biggest gripe I can level is, Emma dev, you cribbed so much good ♥♥♥♥ from some excellent games... why not the weird transformations? Yes, her spit balls change occasionally, but I wish she'd make a sour face after getting sour candy, or tub out after a slice of pizza, or take fiduciary responsibility of Timmy's estate after grabbing the financial report. I wish this was in Early Access because that's the direction I could see it going in – more fleshed out, more variety, more zaniness. Instead it's just a competent, HIGHLY derivative little roguelike platformer. Is that bad? Meh, it's up to you. I had a lot of fun with it – and will continue to. It's challenging, Emma and her weird head spinning around is adorable, the pixel artstyle is excellent, and there's a ton of collectibles and secrets. The Madness of Little Emma is... it's the Rudy of roguelites. Put him in the game, give him a shot. Just might surprise you.

I love games like The Madness of Little Emma where you play a run at a time and try to get farther and farther, defeat difficult bosses, unlock powerful and fun items, and discover secret areas and challenges. This game fits that mold fairly well, but I can't recommend picking up this game for a number of reasons. 1. Unbalanced Items: The majority of items you will come across are pretty useless and sometimes (I'm not sure what determines this) picking up items increases your Madness stat by 1, a stat which makes the game harder. I'm not sure how exactly the difficulty increase works; I'm not sure if it scales with your Madness level or just increases the difficulty once you hit a certain threshold, but this mechanic encourages the player to pass up on most items due not only to their unhelpful effects, but due to the negative consequences of picking up a large number of items over time. That being said, there are a select few items that are really, really good. If you manage to find a combination of two or three items that work super well together, they can carry you for an entire run. 2. Stats rely on RNG: This is a pretty common aspect of similar games, but it doesn’t work very well in The Madness of Little Emma. Your main source of stat boosts (which you won't get very far without many of) are random Herbs scattered throughout the game. Sometimes they drop from enemies, sometimes you get them for clearing a challenge/arena room, sometimes you get them from treasure chests. Regardless of how you get them, there is a major flaw to this mechanic: the most common Herb type (green) has a chance to lower your stats. With how rare all Herbs are and with how quickly the difficulty of this game picks up, you need as many stat upgrades as you can possibly find, so not taking green Herbs isn't a reliable option. You get one guaranteed purple Herb (increases a random stat) per boss fight, but sometimes that's all you'll get on the first floor, which to me is an instant restart. And it's even worse when that stat upgrade happens to be Luck instead of Damage or Fire Rate. Some items will grant stats too, but, as mentioned above, a lot of items you'll come across are simply not worth taking. 3. Run Ending Rooms: When you get farther in (floors 6+ usually), you can run into rooms that will completely ruin you if you don't have an incredibly overpowered item loadout. Most normal enemies aren't a problem, but get a room of the wrong champion enemies and there's little you can do. The worst champion effects are explosive shots, slowing aura (which sometimes comes with another champion effect), and double damage shots, and these can be especially bad if you get a room with a lot of champion enemies, which honestly isn't too uncommon. 4. Unavoidable Damage: When you start playing this game you won’t run into a ton of this, but the farther you get in the game the higher the chance you’ll come across rooms where there’s so much going on there’s legitimately nothing you can do to maneuver out of the way of enemy attacks. Even if you’re completely overpowered (minus one combination of 2 items that actually completely breaks the game in your favor), run ending rooms are still likely to beat you up a little bit. The game tends to be pretty generous with dropping hearts for the player to pick up, but then you could enter another room where you’re guaranteed to take damage and it won’t have really helped much. These are my main gripes with this game, but it’s enough to make the game almost entirely unfun. Other than what I’ve listed, I have had the game crash on me once, but I did have it open for about 7 hours straight before that happened so that could easily have had something to do with it. In any case, there is definitely some fun to be had here, and I actually really love the Arena mode a whole lot, but the main game itself becomes incredibly painful to play. The difference between The Madness of Little Emma and many other roguelikes is that skill and knowledge of items/enemy patterns can only get you so far; you have to be incredibly lucky to have a shot at making real progress in this game. Because of this dependence on luck, you can try to get a good run started for hours and still not get anywhere, and then suddenly have two perfect items fall into your lap one after the other that will grant you a win. If you’re interested in trying out this game, it has been pretty heavily discounted in the past and I would assume it’s likely to be on sale again at some point. If you’re still on the fence about picking it up, with the Steam refund you’ve got a two hour window of opportunity to try it out for yourself a bit and see if you’ll end up enjoying it more than I did, so I do encourage anyone interested to at least try the game before writing it off. Furthermore, there is a demo for this game available on Steam to try out without any worries of refunding. I would definitely recommend starting with the demo version.

I very much enjoy playing this game. The overall game experience is wonderful. The backstory is great, I enjoy the mechanics, and the randomization is great as well. The leaderboard concept is very fun, it's a game that you can keep playing over and over (which I have). It's a great game that is worth the buy is you like randomized platformers.

The Madness of Little Emma is one of the few rogue-likes that caught my attention and didn't let go. It certainly has lots of things in common with other rogue-like games, but it feels completely different. Mainly due to the fact that this is a platformer with rather satisfying movement physics. The game has a good learning curve: it doesnt tell you anything about its mechanics, you have to play, observe and note the changes. First couple of hours i had difficulty getting past 1st stage, 60 hours later the main reason for not reaching the 5th or 6th ending is that i made some mistake early on. Surely TMoLE has some rough edges, for example the cursor is somewhat bleak and sometimes i lose it in the background. But the developer is constantly working on the game, fixing bugs and adding new free content. In conclusion: a great game for its price, challenging but rewarding.

UPDATE: Since the recent patches, I now no longer continue to have the problem when trying to open the game. It will now open from Steam and the desktop, so that was fixed pretty quickly. Sure, the game is influenced by other Rogue-like titles such as Isaac, but the one thing that this game doesn't do is hold your hand. A 2D rogue-like platformer that easily can stand as one of the tougher rogue-likes on the market. From the couple of hours I've spent in the game, hardly do I even come CLOSE to seeing any 1 of the 4 endings mentioned. Little Emma requires skill, simply put. You'll get damage ups, but the enemy placement and mini boss rooms range from "easy to dodge" to "this room is the WORST". Some of the late game mobs, including these crying women who start bombarding you with explosions that are hard to track, are just a pain to deal with, if you even make it that far with no damage. Is it a bad game though? Absolutely not because it's still a very interesting rogue-like. The story involves two children, Emma (oldest) and her little brother Timmy, who survive pretty much on their own. One day, Emma wakes up to find Timmy missing as well as blood all over the room. As she looks around, she notices a trap door (similar to Isaac's adventure into the depths below) under a rug. Assuming Timmy has been taken or wandered down there, she soon follows. As far as story, it's not strong. I mean it holds a very similar take of the Isaac story that people have accustomed themselves to, but instead of a hateful mother, you're the loving big sister. Whether Timmy went down there on his own is still unknown. Still having a hard time beating it once, I know nothing about the endings. Controls are pretty standard and easy to understand at least for mouse and keyboard. The room you spawn in shows you your controls. A to move left, D to right, W to jump (as well as space), and D to go down platforms you can jump through. You can also use the arrow keys for these commands as well. You can also rebind keys if you have a more comfortable control scheme. To use activation items, you press E. Activation items, unlike space bar items in Isaac, require money to use instead of having to clear rooms. It is here to prevent any of the items from seeming too overpowered, such as an item that freezes everything in the room or turns back time by a couple of actions. You aim with your mouse, left click to shoot balls of spit and right click to drop bombs. It'll be best to have a mouse that you can change sensitivity on because there are moments where it's hard to connect your hits. While the keyboard controls are fine, the controller support is less desirable, even though it's still supported. Every time I've tried to play with the controller, I just put it back down because it feels weird. You also don't have as much freedom with aiming than you do with a mouse. You also can't rebind controller buttons, so right now whatever your buttons are mapped to, that's what you'll have to deal with. The worst offender of this release is the current technical issues. Some issues, like what I'm having, is I can't open the game from Steam or desktop. I simply have to go into my steamapps, common, find Little Emma, and open up the "Win" batch file. That then opens up a command window and does it's thing before the game opens. Slightly sloppy and a small hassle to play a game. You also need Java installed for some reason. These issues don't prevent me from still enjoying the game, but I can understand why people buying and installing would be confused as to why their game doesn't open. In the end, Emma is still an enjoyable experience if you're looking for a rogue-like that is a little more tougher and requires more skill than RNG. RNG still matters, of course, but it's almost treated like it's a second thought instead of a primary mechanic. This game will not hold your hand, it will not pay you kindly with optimistic words of victory. It will wreck you and frustrate you, but not because it's unfair; because you require the skill to overcome the obstacles that lie ahead. If the previous negative remarks about this game get fixed, it'll only continue to show how valuable this game is to the rogue-like genre.

This is how it should be done. Instead of shoving your money up the arse of some early access scum buy this game. I bought in on release day, played through it, had a good time. But that was not it, the Dev Dude keeps updating it as frequently as I get disappointed by early access games. And that's about once a week. I could see how the game improved with every patch, and now its better than ever before. So that guy published a finished, perfectly fine game and now he even keeps updating it with new totally free content. Its sad that there only so few people who are playing it. If you love rogue like as much as I do, then this is a must buy. Give the Dev Dude you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ money!

This is a perfect example of everything an imitator game should be. It's obviously "The Binding of Isaac as a platformer", but it successfully captures the mood, feel, fun and design philosophy of Isaac. The madness mechanics and the item pool do a good job capturing the feel of Isaac without feeling like a rehash. There's great music, great enemy and boss design, varied items, and tons of secret levels. And oh yeah, it's fun and really does feel like you're playing a new version of Isaac. Cons: Game balance isn't perfect for some items, characters, champion enemies and bosses. Neither is Isaac's, but this game definitely occasionally has me going "that room wasn't fair" while Isaac didn't. Also, it's hard to tell what some items do.

This game is fun, but it feels so unpolished. The last update was over a year ago and it seems like the dev no longer is working on it. It just feels incomplete. Because of that, I can't recommend it despite how much fun it is.

Really good music and I like the unique Binding of Isaac adaptation. However, the movement alone is enough to deter me away from playing this game. It is beyond clunky. I really had high hopes because I love Binding of Isaac and this is similar, except in platformer format, but the movement need to be smoother for me to pick it up again.

If I were grading on concept alone this is probably an "A" for me. That concept being that of a roguelight twin stick platformer featuring a seedy cartoon atmosphere and tons and tons of unlockables. Obviously heavily influenced by the Binding of Isaac everywhere from concept to theme to mechanics all the way down the line. No suprise to find it's still a winning formula her even while I wish it was more original in some aspects it's still a fun ride. I would say the underlying platforming/shooter mechanics are solid but not spectacular. To elaborate on that point a bit I just feel that the running around shooting etc. feels functional here as opposed to spectacularly fluid or satisfying. Luckily the vast number of unlockables and different playstyles and upgrades makes the experience a plus 1 and the fact that I got this for just under 2 bucks makes me smile and shake my head at some of my other purchases. 6/10