- Part 1: A quick(ish?) rundown of the Keeper ARG;
- Part 2: The no-good bad times with Keeper before his Repentance glow-up;
- Part 3: How to Make Money and Keep it From People, by Tainted Keeper;
- Part 4: His final form ends beyond greed.
I: Playing for Keeps
Ultra Greed called. It’s time to pay your debts, and he’s not in the mood for a jubilee.
It’s 2016. Afterbirth‘s dropped, and its feature attraction, Greed Mode, is the talk of fan groups everywhere. The hot poker of FOMO prods you in the back. Although you’ve already paid full price for a game twice, experiencing what Edmund McMillen and the BoI team have produced is a kind of debt; you have to play it.
Completing a Greed Mode run, that latter debt feeds into the former. Ultra Greed, bullied into o-bullion, leaves behind a donation machine. You can’t spend your money elsewhere, so what the hell? Charity ensues, and, as more runs are won, accrues. Lucky pennies and nickel-eyed shopkeepers provide opportunities to make more coin; they say you shouldn’t take any wooden nickels, but the one this machine gives you pays out half the time. In conclusion: Charity is greed; greed is good; QED.
Often, it’s hard to tell between the two1. When Rebirth released, and dataminers took 109 hours to discover the Lost’s convoluted unlock method, was that charity – helping those without the time or skills to complete the game? Or, was that greed – spoiling a surprise that the community was supposed to figure out together? Either way, players begin to notice a pattern with the Greed donation machine: it always explodes after receiving 109 coins.
The web is abuzz with theories, and when a patch releases 109 hours later, these don’t go unnoticed by Edmund: On the 10th November, he writes to the community:
The machine can now be filled to its intended limit. Eve now starts with the Razor Blade, intensifying her risk and reward; the Store Key trinket saves you a key on shops; at 879 coins, the Lost receives the Holy Mantle, drastically improving his survivability. It’s hard to turn your nose up at free stuff when it’s for charity. Mind you, these aren’t really gifts, are they? I hate to be cynical, but if it helps you to live longer, it helps you to spend more money.
When the machine is maxed out, players receive the Generosity achievement: “If only everyone was as generous as you are…” That’s lies, of course. This was never about our capacity for generosity. Someone wanted us to fill the machine. It was an investment. We fundraised, full of piss and vinegar, like venture capitalists swarming a new Silicon Valley startup, and we never once stopped to consider if that investment was ours, or theirs.
With the community’s pockets emptied, the runways were foamed enough for the next clue. On the 12th November, the Generosity achievement’s icon on Steam changes to look like this:
At this point, things really begin to kick into high gear. For the next two days, the community scrambles in a frantic scavenger hunt – online, and along the boardwalk of Santa Cruz, CA. Cryptic voicemails from Isaac’s father are hiding something, and throughout the day, Edmund offers the community hints on how close they are:
https://twitter.com/edmundmcmillen/status/665419722708619264
Warmer. When the trail leads members of the community to a photography studio in Santa Ana, it’s as warm as a Californian winter can get:
But not warm enough. PC Gamer journalist Tom Marks had emailed Edmund prior, but his only response was: “Bring a shovel!”
https://www.pcgamer.com/an-insane-arg-is-happening-in-the-binding-of-isaac-community-right-now
They notice some loose change littered around a patch of dirt. With shovel equipped, they know the only way to get warmer is to go deeper. All the way to Hell, if they have to:
And where once Greed had fallen, he rose once again:
https://twitter.com/mikeyahdoot/status/665465663952146432
And they gave him a voice:
https://twitter.com/iamisaacsbody/status/665467709241585664
After being sealed away for so long, he remembered:
https://twitter.com/iamisaacsbody/status/665475939166371840
The community’s investment had paid off. Someone was begging to be set free. All you had to do was beat Greed mode one more time, and donate one final coin…
He’s a keeper, ain’t he?
II: Rags to Riches
I feel it’s important to retell the Keeper ARG beat-for-beat, because it shows both how much BoI fans love this game, and how much Edmund loves the fans. What makes alternate reality games so appealing, in my opinion, is how you progress through the story by interacting with devices in the real world. It’s the stuff of any good story: one “And then what happened?” after another. The Keeper’s story is one worth telling.2
That said, folks may remember Afterbirth‘s version of Keeper for quite another reason: he sucked major ass. Oh, sure, you get triple shot tears, like you’re a shotgun; you also wait 20 years between each shot. He’s like a water pistol that holds a skoosh of water, discharges it in one spittle – a disappointing plib – and takes five minutes to fill up again.
Feeling sluggish is one thing, but here’s the real dealbreaker: you had to pay for devil deals with your coin hearts. That second coin heart was the only thing saving you from certain death. Trading it for anything was pure suicide. Angel deals are always an option, of course, and it’s real easy to exploit sacrifice rooms as Keeper, but, y’know, you don’t get Brimstone in angel rooms. Let my Keeper brim!
Another thing that sucked about Keeper, albeit not as much as his difficulty, was his unlocks. Most character unlocks award you with a new item or trinket that most characters can use. Many of Keeper’s unlocks just made him easier to play. The less that can be said of sticky nickels, the better. If luck’s any indicator, they replace your nickels way more often than the odds suggest3.
When Repentance dropped, however, the Keeper got a huge glow-up. He moves a little faster, shoots a little faster, and when you beat Hush, he starts with an extra coin heart. His other new unlocks, Keeper’s Sack and Keeper’s Box, can both be bought in shops; the rush you get from finding them as a Keeper is unbeatable. And devil deals? Bought with cold, hard cash – some of the best items’ll set you back 30 cents, but they’re worth it.
You’ve no idea how much I’ve said “the co-op update can’t come soon enough” to my friends. If Keeper’s existence allows everyone to buy devil deals, then he’s a must-have on any squad. Money can buy you friendship in this case – look after your pocket Keeper, he’ll look after you. Financially, anyway…
III: BUT IF YOU CALL, RIGHT NOW, WITHIN THE NEXT 20 MINUTES
When you play Tainted Keeper, you are required by law to have music playing that just lets loose. If I had a playlist of bangers to give you, I would. Some tracks that come to mind:
Have you played the Antonblast demo? You should play the Antonblast demo. The escape sequence music goes hard:
For Tainted Keeper, SilvaGunner’s Shop Fusion Collab is a must-shuffle:
And, look, I’m not really interested in playing, Rabi-Ribi, but I heard this in a video I watched recently, and it’s an absolute bop:
Enough with the showtunes. Let’s make some money.
Tainted Keeper is a big spender. Money is ridiculously easy to come by – every regular enemy drops a coin when killed, and bosses drop five. The catch, however, is that all pedestal items must be bought (save for those contained in gold chests). You touch, you buy. He spends so much, he’s the opposite of caveat emptor: Sellers should beware HIM. And he doesn’t need no Store Key: with his mere presence, all shop doors fly open, and have more on offer:
If you want to prioritise spending even more money on future runs, I recommend beelining for Mega Satan ASAP to unlock gold pennies. They make exploiting sacrifice rooms RIDICULOUSLY safe, and, if you’re lucky, you can get up to 10 coins or more off of one.
On the subject of unlocks, the Cursed Penny trinket is hit-or-miss for most characters. Not Tainted Keeper: when you get teleported out of an uncleared room, and re-enter it, the enemies that respawn will still drop coins. If you’ve got the time, this can be exploited to slowly reach the coin cap on every floor:
See, the thing with T. Keeper is that, while he’s fun, I can’t really say much else to differentiate him from regular Keeper. He’s got quad shot, I guess; Soul of the Keeper’s always nice to build some nest egg. But all this is chump change, y’know? Yesterday’s Keeper was a dead guy with no sparkle in his eyes. Today’s Keeper sees the vision. We’ve gotta think bigger. We need more money. T. Keeper’s not greedy– err, I mean, charitable enough.
We need to commit tax fraud on an institutional scale, and hide our ill-gotten gains in liquid investments. Do I sound like a financier yet? No, I could never – they mean to baffle you with bullshit:
https://brologue.net/2024/02/24/t-h-i-n-g-s-and-stuff
What we need, to embalm ourselves in private equity levels of charity, is to go even further beyond.
IV: What’s With All This ‘Change’ Nonsense?
His final form ends beyond greed. A return on investment this good is reserved for only the most charitable patrons. He’s the cashback king. He’s trusted by over one thousand Epiphany players worldwide. Lesser economies buckle, and crash in his wake; superior ones give tithe to him, for he is their invincible champion of consumer welfare. With a single gaze, he transforms desolate, empty vistas into oases of opportunity so rich, there’s no room enough to contain them4.
Find the secret room on a Greedier run as T. Keeper, and bomb the center of the room to receive his calling card. Make enough money on each floor to top it up; prove your worth by beating Ultra Greedier, and the door to his vault will appear.
In a previous Epiphany post, I described the Tarnished characters as basically being their Tainted counterparts, but even more messed up:
https://brologue.net/2024/04/09/isaac-mods-that-rock
TR. Keeper’s no different. He starts with a pentashot and a 1.2x tear multiplier; in one-upmanship terms, he’s not just been to Elevenerife, he’s bought Twelverife. With him, you get the vanishing coin drops of T. Keeper, but you also get a second chance to drop coins on hit, which scales with your luck. And we’re not done yet: all health upgrade effects grant you the Coin Mantle effect, which stacks with Holy Mantle.
All of these are massive upgrades to compensate for an equally massive caveat – everything he touches, from pickups, to pedestal items, and even enemies – turns into coins. You might also notice that TR. Keeper has no coin hearts. That’s because his health is literally tied to how much money he has. Every time you’re hit, you’ll lose 20 coins (if you have less than 20, you’ll drop to 0), and it’s impossible to recover them all. Live by the coin, die by the coin.
The silver lining to TR. Keeper’s mercurial finances is his pocket item, Turnover. Rest assured, there’s no Azazel Conundrum here:
https://brologue.net/2024/03/04/tainted-cains-amazing-commodities
Using Turnover in any cleared room spawns a shop – for a fee:
https://tboiepiphany.wiki.gg/wiki/Turnover#Turnover_Prices
The most basic use case for Turnover is using it in a treasure room to get your pedestal item. The more you use it on a shop, the better it gets. Secret rooms and arcades tend to offer runes when levelled up. When fully upgraded, secret room shops will offer secret room items. C’mon, get greedy – your dirty money will be spick and span with this Rock Bottom, going for 30 cents:
https://isaacguru.com/pools/secret
Following Keeper tradition, his unlocks add items and trinkets that’re poised to break runs by making you more money. Stock Fluctuation makes shop items flip from 0 coins to a 100% markup – you can pause buffer this to do a little… ‘insider trading.’ The Debit Card rerolls and upgrades pedestal items, but puts them up for sale; Golden Cobweb turns all blue flies and spiders golden, dropping coins upon hit. And Lucky Cat is just a better Perfection:
“Increases the player’s Luck stat based on the number of coins, similarly to how Money = Power works for damage”
https://tboiepiphany.wiki.gg/wiki/Lucky_Cat
I haven’t even talked about golden items yet. Sweet, golden WAMPUM. Defeating Mega Satan as TR. Keeper, item pedestals gain a 0.6% chance to become golden. Passive items give you an extra copy (which hopefully stacks). This, ironically, is the least exciting thing about this unlock. Take a look at some of the additional effects for active items:
https://tboiepiphany.wiki.gg/wiki/Golden_Items#Interactions
I can’t believe that TR. Keeper, by proxy, makes Void an active item worth taking. Why is the golden version of Dad’s Key just a better Red Key?! Golden Turnover’s just overkill, man…
Keeper’s come a long way since his Afterbirth days, but what’s always made him so compelling is his control over money. Other characters don’t get to splash some cash nearly as much. Some runs, you’re begging to scrape some coin together, constantly getting hit, and by the time you can afford an item, you’ve reached Depths II, and OH HI GREED NICE OF YOU TO WAIT FOR ME IN THE SHOP! Just as Isaac has leverage over item quality with the D6, the Keepers have leverage over resources.
With the Keepers, when you’re making money, you feel like you’re slowly building a winning deck, a little monopoly over your item luck. The game can throw as many mediocre items at you as it wants; sure, you don’t have the power of reroll, nor can you pick and choose like T. Cain, but you know what? SHUCHOREMOUF:
Screw the RNG, you have MONEY. lodsofemone. I hope I’ve made it clear here that money isn’t just power on its own. Money is debt, and the means by which it’s repaid. The very thing that makes these characters so fun to play perpetuates my experience, and thus my repayment to the Isaac team for producing such an awesome game. Greed, for lack of a better word, has never felt so good.
- For instance – if Apple CEO Tim Cook presents a donation to a climate change charity, he’d rather you not bring up the fact that Apple is one of the largest e-waste producers in the world, thanks to its stance on intellectual property and right-to-repair. Effective altruists have made a whole shell game around this rhetorical SNAFU – no-one wants to turn down financial aid, even from those whose activities make a large contribution to the very issue the charity is tackling. ↩︎
- While I wasn’t involved in the ARG, some folks who were provided a summary of accounts for posterity:
https://imgur.com/V2l5TaN
https://www.reddit.com/r/bindingofisaac/comments/3ss8oo/the_afterbirth_arg_a_stepbystep_summary/ ↩︎ - I don’t wanna clog the post with maths – on average, one in twenty pennies get replaced by nickels; and if the wiki’s accurate, sticky nickels have a 0.25% chance (1/400) to replace regular nickels:
https://bindingofisaacrebirth.fandom.com/wiki/Coins#Sticky_Nickel ↩︎ - Malachi 3:10. ↩︎
Ode to the Keepers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.