• Tainted Cain is contrived bullshit;
• The Azazel Conundrum: The agony of acknowledging the sheer enormity of one’s wealth, and having to put it to work;
• What is the price to pay for ‘NO DESTINY?’

Tainted Cain is the Binding of Isaac’s debug menu with extra steps. Cue the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG1sKG9YTY

He’s the closest thing you’ll get to the experience of playing Minecraft in vanilla Binding of Isaac. You spawn with the Bag of Crafting in your pocket, which can be used to craft your own passive/active items through recipes. You’re hassled by economic considerations no other character has to experience – do you put leftover pickups in the bag before heading to a new floor? How many of them do you collect while you’re exploring? This is just the Crafting Table from Minecraft, right?

Isaac has plenty of strong characters that warp entire runs around themselves. That’s fine. A game like Isaac ought to have characters distinguished through varying levels of difficulty. For the longest time, Azazel was the poster child for easy characters: free flight, free Brimstone, three black hearts (you’re pretty much guaranteed an angel/devil room) – somehow, having to get up close to deal damage is the downside.

He’s a privileged little brat, is Azazel. He has all this stuff, and the very tragedy of having this stuff is that he has to use it. It’s like how some of us are preoccupied with the fact that billionaires own a lot of stuff. What we ought to be thinking about is the sheer agony one faces when one owns too much property – paying it a visit. That’s the Azazel Conundrum.

Then there’s Tainted Lilith, whose one disadvantage – having to shoot tears from a disjointed familiar – is offset by the fact you can just spam Gello and slap enemies to death. Razzle thinks T. Lilith is the strongest character in Repentance, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s very little she needs to get the ball rolling.

But T. Cain, if you know how to use him, is a whole new dimension of bullshit. Item recipes are randomised via seed,¹ and while you could argue ‘NO DESTINY’ means ‘shut up and get in the bag,’ it’s not information that the game ever conceals from the player. Hence, if you’re on PC, the External Item Descriptions mod (EID) is a must-have for showing you what you can make at all times:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836319872

T. Cain is the kind of little fucker who, moments before being vaporised by nuclear armageddon, scuttles across the floor like he saw the flash of a £50 note in a scramble, mumbling to himself, “I need to make the Wafer, or this’ll affect my stocks.” He probably has a YouTube channel where he spreads odorous grifting advice to saps who’ll never make a buck. He’s definitely taught people how to commit wire fraud for his crypto scam. Where we’re going, we don’t need no morals.

The price of ‘NO DESTINY’ – if there is such a debt to pay – is not being able to hold all your pickups at once. Every time he touches an item pedestal (or buys a passive item), he’s showered in them – coins, hearts, bombs, etc.. Become back your money, and then some – T. Cain sees more pickups on one floor than everyone else sees in entire runs.

EID will usually tell you what you can craft once there are at least eight on the floor. But it’s not the quantity of pickups that nets you the good gear – it’s the quality:

https://bindingofisaacrebirth.fandom.com/wiki/Bag_of_Crafting#Component_Types_and_Qualities

Usually, there are enough lower-quality pickups lying around that I can take them without regret. Mine is hardly the best strategy, but I like to make familiars when they’re available. I’ll prioritise the Leech/Lil’ Brimstone/Buddy in a Box, and oftentimes, BFFS! isn’t far on the back of them.

Where lesser characters need good pickups in Basement to not play on the backfoot the whole run, there is no point at which T. Cain cannot MacGyver himself out of bad luck. Keep your coins topped up, and pay for shop items, and you’ll never be in want of better ingredients.

Talking of which… where do those coins come from, anyway? Answer: he makes them. He’s not just a forger – he’s the magic money machine, nickel-and-diming funny money into the economy, and laundering it in shops, until everyone’s got a wee bit of that tainted debt. The bastard.

In this clip, under protest, is the Azazel Conundrum in its purest form. The tragedy of having to leave pickups lying around is that, at some point, shock and horror, you have to pick them up. Backtracking kind of sucks in vanilla Isaac, and with T. Cain, there is a LOT of stopping and starting. It makes getting the Hush completion mark a pain in the ass, but that’s just a skill issue.

T. Lilith has an honesty about her when she’s on her ‘post this Gello instantly’ bullshit. T. Cain, meanwhile, is contrived bullshit. You literally make it up as you go along. When you pick T. Cain, you cease playing the game and engage in pure play, divorced from Fortune’s adversity, the very thing that makes the Binding of Isaac’s gameplay loop what it is.

No destiny. No rules – of course, you can still get hit, and die, but that’s really just a guideline with T. Cain. He dies when he feels like it. Carefully curate a cornucopia of Q4 items, or LARP as impoverished have-nots like Jacob and Esau, who have to share their stash of worthless Q0 trash, it’s your choice. You have limitless potential.

Absolute ludo, thy name is Tainted Cain.

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1. Not so on Repentance’s release – before being reworked, every item was tied to a fixed recipe, which is why this shitpost doesn’t make as much sense as it used to:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqw7KvH4v_c ↩︎