The Madness of Little Emma

this game is kinda gas

This game really wants to be The Binding of Isaac.

There was a good amount of effort put into making it and I did find myself wanting to keep playing at times, but it really lacks polish.

Character movement feels a bit too fast for precision but too slow to navigate some of the more obnoxiously designed rooms with way too many walls that form labyrinthian paths to the next room.

Character progression feels slow and unrewarding, and you'll feel underpowered in most runs. There's a pretty large pool of items but so many of them have underwhelming effects so the few items that the game gives you in an average run barely give you any power. Too many similar status effect modifiers and worthless active items, and not enough damage. The game is so stingy that you'll be lucky if you find a damage up after two floors. It doesn't help that a lot of enemies are really spongy. There's even a few items that are so bad that they can end a run on their own.

A significant number of chests spawn on top of large rows of spikes and low ceilings so you're pretty much guaranteed to lose life trying to get the items inside. There's also chests that are only reachable by bomb jumping. The game does not drop enough hearts to compensate for the forced damage chests. It's usually not even worth it to try since chests barely give anything good. A lot of them only give 1 coin or 1 half-heart.
Consumables don't drop enough in general. You only get enough coins in a typical run to maybe buy two items from shops, and that's only if you avoid using active items altogether, which have coin costs that can go up to 4 coins per single use. There's an optional secret area that only spawns if you're holding 50 coins and you'll most likely never see it unless you play the character that starts with 30 coins and still avoid buying items.

Some enemies and projectiles are hard to see in some of the later areas. Red orbs on a dark orange background or pale homing skulls on a light brown background, and the same skulls also look exactly the same as some projectiles that are created by player items so you don't even know which are good and which are bad sometimes.

Arena challenge rooms can spawn enemies a few pixels away from you so you have no time to react, or even directly on your character if you're playing the flying character.

The flying character gets stuck on slopes instead of moving along them.

Multisegmented bosses can have a trawl effect on each segment that instantly wipes out your entire inventory of consumables. Regular enemies can have that modifier, too, so you tend to lose your bombs and coins a lot but at least you have a chance to save a coin or two in regular rooms.

The mouse isn't locked to the game window in Windowed Mode.

You can't rebind the bomb key for some reason.

A room in an early area that can spawn a dozen high HP mobs in a small space that fly through walls closing in on you, is almost guaranteed death on most characters. There's bullet hell rooms that are near impossible to survive in, made worse by your imprecise movement. Mini bosses with modifiers that can immobilize you in said Bullet Hell rooms. There's a bunch of rooms in general that feel like trollish traps that are almost guaranteed to end a run. You can't skip them, and it wouldn't matter anyway because you don't know which rooms are death traps until you enter them. 90% of the rooms in this game are brain dead easy and a dozen or so that are so ridiculous that you'll lose 5 full hearts just trying to get a couple hits in.

Enemy bullets have infinite range but your character's shot range is very short. Sometimes it's impossible to even get near an enemy because there's 3 or 4 enemies near the ceiling that never stop shooting an absurd amount of projectiles, and you're just stuck in a corner inching back and forth to dodge the unending barrage of projectiles.

I had a lot more fun in the separate Arena mode than the main mode since it's a lot more generous with its items and buffs, not to mention you get a choice of multiple items instead of getting stuck with whatever garbage RNG throws at you in the main mode. There's item synergies and special item interactions in this game but you'd never know if you only played the main mode. Finding all four Monster familiars combines them into a single, larger familiar, à la Isaac's Super Bum, that shoots large piercing lasers, for example. It feels like a lot of secrets are tied to RNG.

Some of these complaints were minor nitpicks but there's definitely a lot of unfair or unpolished design that sours the entire experience. A lot of my deaths felt like they weren't my fault, and most runs aren't very fun because the game refuses to give you any damage buffs. The game could be really good with some more development time and proper balancing but I can't recommend it in its current state. It seems development has ended, though.

Really fun and well made. I love the art style, the sound effects, the items and characters (my favourite is Elizabeth, because she's OP). I wholeheartedly recommend this to any rogue-like fans!

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.

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 don't have much to add that others haven't already said. It's got a lot of similarities to Binding of Isaac, but as other reviewers have noted, it doesn't feel like a rehash. There are a handful of new and interesting ideas in the game, and there's more than enough content to entertain you for a dozen or more hours - much more if you want to see what the unlocks are, find new power ups, and see the various endings. There are unfair moments that will frustrate you, and the rare bug (in 150 or so times i've done a playthrough so far, i've had 3 games where a bug prevented me from continuing), but overall the game feels pretty good - even if maybe it's a bit unbalanced at times.

It's disappointing that more people haven't snagged this game - i think it's much better than the numbers are indicating (only 94 reviews as of this post). Maybe some folks are turned off by the $8.99 price - i think i got it on sale for just a couple dollars myself. But my opinion on that might be a special case, since i don't buy any games over 10 bucks as a rule (after all, i have about a hundred games i haven't even installed yet - anytime i think i want a game more than $10, i remind myself of that fact!)

My strongest endorsement of the game is simply my number of hours in game - 64 at this point, and still going. That being said, i don't feel like the replay value is anywhere near Binding of Isaac - but maybe that doesn't really say much, since i have about a thousand hours in that game across the original + rebirth + afterbirth.

If you like difficult platformers that have tons of things to unlock and discover, then this is certainly worth a try. If you do decide to buy this, try to give it a couple of hours before your verdict - my own opinion of the game has only improved with more playthroughs...

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.

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

Basically, Binding of Isaac as a platformer - downright to the dark setting, artwork and general gameplay. If you liked binding of isaac and like platformers, you're going to enjoy this.

The only thing that can be bothersome are the controls. I've never been a fan of platformers with mouse aim, so if you are bothered by it, you better maybe playing something else.

Also, the game is a little rough on the edges: the trasition between the screens sometimes can cause a shaky effect on the screen because the camera goes up and down really fast a couple times before settling in the new character position. Also, the game over screen could be a little more flashed out, instructing the player to press any key to go to the main screen (I found myself waiting for visual feedback every time I died lol)

But nonetheless, is a fun game. Like I said in the beginning, if you like BoI and platformers, you're going to like this game for sure.

TL;DR - Despite some of its flaws, low budget, and how heavy-handedly it draws from its obvious inspirations, Emma is a competently made game with enough fun and unique ideas to make it a worthy addition to the rogue-like-like genre.

As someone with over 1000 hours in the Binding of Isaac games, I've been curious to try the Madness of Little Emma for awhile now, since Isaac appears to be its most obvious influence.

I'm writing this review of my initial impressions of the game after only having played a few runs, with my latest being a fairly decent one (I made it to "Misery" and managed to clear some sort of Love-themed optional dungeon). I'm not sure how close to the end I made it, but I feel I experienced enough of the game to give me a good idea of what kind of experiences I can expect from it.

While the game draws heavily from its Isaac inspiration, the most obvious difference is its side-on perspective and the inclusion of some basic platforming elements. If Isaac is a variation on Zelda-type dungeon crawling, Emma is a variation on Metroid. The movement feels good - due to the game's focus on bullet-hell type enemies (more so than Isaac even), the ability to jump, dodge, and weave between enemy bullets is crucial, and game controls quite well in that regard. While I normally prefer to play platformers with a controller (and the game does kind of support it, but not very well), mouse and keyboard seems to make the most sense for this game.

The art style is quite dark, and lacks the silly gross-out humor found in the Binding of Isaac. Most of the early enemies are just some gnarly insects, but some of the later enemies are downright Lovecraftian masses of eyeballs, slime and sinew. Though there is some humor in the game, most of it seems pretty straight-faced and grim, and the music, which is mostly subdued and atmospheric, adds to that aesthetic.

The spirit of the gameplay is very much like Isaac. Players play as Emma or one of several unlockable characters and traverse procedurally-generated dungeon maps. Maps are randomly populated with a series of rooms - upon entering a room, the doors lock behind you until all the enemies have been cleared. Also like in Isaac, death is permanent, and each run starts you over from scratch aside from any unlockables you managed to get from your previous run. The enemies themselves seem quite varied in both appearance and attack abilities. Some fire bullets in a wide range of patterns and effects, some chase you down in varying ways (through walls, divebombing from the sky, teleporting across the room, etc), some spawn other enemies, some fire beams, and some are, frankly, just hard to describe - I'm actually tempted to say there might even be more individual enemy variety in this game than in Isaac. In addition to enemies, some rooms have chests of varying quality (brown, gray, gold, and red in rare cases) some of which require a bomb to open. The are also spike traps, and bombable walls, secret rooms, and occasionally colored herbs which grant the player stat buffs (or debuffs) when consumed, sort of like pills in Isaac. Each floor contains one treasure room which randomly draws from a large pool of stat/ability altering items (over 250), one boss room, and sometimes one or more "special rooms" like a sacrifice room (sacrificing health/consumables for herbs [maybe items?]), Arenas (fighting off waves of enemies for loot), Shops (which contain herbs, chests, and a creepy hooded skeleton man who doesn't understand the meaning of "personal space"), and what I call "Hanging Rooms" which feature a girl hanging by a noose who drops an item when you shoot her.

Of the items I've found so far, some seem familiar, and some unique. In my last run I found an item which caused friendly ghosts to spawn around me and chase down enemies (like blue flies in Isaac), a helpful robot friend that orbited my body and shot down enemy projectiles with a laser, an item which made my "tears" larger and stronger when I stood still, and an item that made me fart enemy-stunning perfume. It's not yet clear to me whether or not Emma features the same level of item synergy found in Isaac, though I would assume it does to some degree or another.

Combat is only superficially similar to that in Isaac. While Emma also fires white tear-like projectiles (or maybe it's spit?), the high movement speed, ability to jump, and the 360 degree aiming makes for a much faster and potentially more hectic experience than in Isaac. After the first few floors, the bullet hell aspects of this game seriously ramp up - whereas Isaac is more focused on predicting enemy shots and carefully placing yourself between them, Emma seems to require more twitch reflexes and simply running the fuck away from situations when they get too hairy. The later levels can become seriously overwhelming in that regard, so much so that I find it difficult to imagine that player should be expected to be able to dodge all of the shots instead of simply taking it on the chin and using your (generous) invincibility frames to better position yourself around some cover. On the one hand, this seems somewhat reasonable despite the game being fairly withholding when it comes to health and especially health upgrades, on the other, one of the things I love so much about Isaac is the predictability of enemy attacks and being able to avoid damage simply by being smart.

Bosses are also a big part of the game, and so far I've only found a couple that remind of those from Isaac. One was a segmented snake monster that bounced around the room, the other was a big face that split into multiple smaller faces when enough damage had been dealt to it. So far, other than those two, I haven't seen any others which immediately reminded me of Isaac bosses. That said, I can't say I found most of the bosses I fought to be particularly fun or compelling. One was a giant fly that lazily glided around the room occasionally popping out two smaller flies that would each fire a single projectile (and small flies dropped hearts, which seemed unnecessary given how easy the fight was). In the optional Love-themed dungeon I stumbled across, the boss was a large heart that bounced around the room spewing out bullets in an octagonal pattern, which would split into more large bullet-spewing hearts as it got damaged, repeating this process until 8 or so of these large hearts had been defeated. Of the bosses I encountered, my favorite was called Entozoon, who looked like a giant demented Pez dispenser and flew off-and-on the screen spewing bullets and carpet-bombing the room, requiring some interesting dodging to avoid being hit. While admittedly I haven't even seen half of the bosses in the game yet, I'm a little disappointed in the boss rooms, which so far have been empty rectangular rooms that don't seem to take advantage of one of the game's main mechanics - the platforming. You're mostly just running back and forth across the floor dodging projectiles and hopping over the bosses when they get too close. There's no verticality to fights from what I've seen (though, again, it's possible I just didn't get to see those fights). On the later levels the game somewhat manages to remedy this by spawning bosses in the normal rooms which makes more a much interesting fight. I just wish platforming had been more of a consideration for those early boss fights to keep them from feeling so dull.

Overall, aside from my complaint about boss fights, and a few bugs I noticed during the screen transitions, I quite enjoyed my time with this game. Emma manages to wear its inspiration on its sleeve without being overshadowed by it and has its own unique brand of fun charm. Fans of the Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, or even Terraria will probably find more than a little to love here.

Take the theme and collectibles of Binding of Isaac, mix it with the 2d platformer aspect of Spelunky or Rogue Legacy; and you’ve pretty much got The Madness of Little Emma.

It’s difficult – some rooms and bosses can get downright bullet-hell-esque with the amount of fire they’re throwing at you, and even some fairly early enemies can be extremely vicious – especially ones that make quick leaps at you, potentally trapping you in a corner.

The items you pick up tend towards passive bonuses, allowing for vicious stacking combos (if you get lucky, anyway – there’s plenty of dud items, although I have yet to find anything actively negative like accidentally picking up Soy Milk or Cursed Eye in Isaac.)

The music is good, and the pixel graphics work pretty well.

Importantly, as of this writing (September 29th), the game is 80% off – a mere $1.79. At that price, I’d say that it’s a great pickup for anyone who enjoys rogue-like/light/platformers/any of the games that I mentioned in my first sentence.

Edit: Changed some of the wording and updated it a little bit.

The Madness Of Little Emma is a nice little action platformer. If you're a fan of The Binding Of Isaac (TBOI) it should kind of feel familiar as it is heavily inspired by it at times. Normally, I don't write reviews, but this game has so few players that I feel I have to.

What is The Madness Of Little Emma?
The Madness Of Little Emma is an 2D action platformer set in a dark world. As in TBOI you have one "item room" on every floor, there are sacrifice rooms - though they're not working like the ones in TBOI - shops, dare rooms, secrets and some more. You also have to beat a boss at the end of the floor to go down deeper and deeper until you reach the final boss.
But most things still are working quite different than in TBOI. So TMOLE isn't just an "TBOI as an action platformer", but is its own game and has its own appeal.


What could be better:
- Items
Some items are really good and fun to play with, but most of the items don't really help you or worse make your run worse. While TBOI also had the same kind of items, I feel that they had more use.
After having played some more I don't think the items are that big of a problem anymore. I probably expected too much of them, but unlike in TBOI in this game most items won't make your run. TMOLE relies more on the skill of the player than having great items which doesn't mean that good items can't save your run.
Example for "bad" items: I was really disappointed in the shuriken, it looked really nice in the trailer, but when I obtained it, it just felt bad. Having to fight enemies with a shield is pure horror, as you can hit them twice mostly or even just once and you have to wait for the shuriken to return to you before you can throw it again, while their shield is back up.
Example for "good" items: The raven. I just love that little ugly bird. He can fly through walls and instantly attacks the first enemy in sight while you can still shoot and he does quite some damage. Always nice to have and it makes the run much easier.

Neutral:
- It's hard
Like really really hard. Maybe even harder than TBOI. But that's ok, I like challenging games. After having said that, you can still beat the "endboss" on your first day playing. The good thing is, that this game doesn't end there. It more or less just begins.
I also like the fact that you can control the hardness by collecting madness from items or the hanged girl. The more madness you have, the harder the game gets. Like TBOI elite enemies also get a lot more common, if you beat the "endboss" the first time.
But there are things right now that I feel are to difficult. Of course it could be my limited skill, but I find most of the elite bosses to hard. For example elite Liquid Sisters are taking up 2/3 of the bossroom and the bubbles they shoot, which explode into more shots, are taking the rest of the room. Some bosses are easier than others and you have to get used to most of them and even then it's still a challenge.

What's good:
- Leaderboard
You gain points by how well you played and by how far you could go in your playthrough. Note that every playthrough counts as long as you play the ladder mode. The Ladder gets reset every two weeks (at the time I'm writing this review).
Edit: It seems like the ladder wasn't resetted since i wrote this review the first time.
- RNG/ randomly generated dungeons including which items, rooms, shops etc you get
Every new run just feels kind of unique and refreshing. You always want to find out, which item you get on the floor. But even though I love that there are 250 items in the game - some of which you have to unlock -, if you haven't unlocked enough it feels like you get the same items again and again. Maybe it's just me, but I get baseball glove like 50% of my runs.
- No tutorial-ing
You get to know the basics of the game and thats it. Not even the specialties of the characters you can unlock are explained, so you have to find everything out yourself (or use the wiki). It feels like starting TBOI all over again and I love it.
If you want to get into this game, I suggest you check out the official beginner guide by the creater, Hugeowl. You can find it in the steam guides, it explains the basics and helps a lot for the start.
- Active Items
I just like how they work. Most of the time you have to pay some small amount to use the item. In TBOI it would probably suck, but here it works really well.
- Unlocks
Like TBOI there are different endings, items, bosses etc to unlock. I love unlocking things.

After all TMOLE is a fun indie game and it still gets patches from time to time, so it has the potential to get better and better. It may not be a flawless game and sometimes even a little bit too hard, but if you have fun with TBOI you pretty sure will have fun with TMOLE. Also, supporting an indie developer feels nice.

A great game! Kind of short, but it's just the right amount of time for a busy, working-class guy, like myself. I'm very happy with this purchse. I know everyone has said a lot of good things about this game so I'd like to point out something different:

One thing that really annoys me about platforming games, rouge-like ones in particular, is when the dev doesn't take the time to get the running/jumping/platforming mechanic solid. This game achieves that very well. You move around the screen at a good pace, not too fast not too slow. You won't find yourself running into damage because your character failed to react to your movements. Also you don't continue to slide around after running/jumping. I rarely found myself getting frustrated at not being able to reach a ledge and at no time was it due to my character just continuing to move and fall off due to bad mechanics.

Big kudos on nailing the basics of gameplay! A lot of devs tend to overlook that.

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 god damn money!

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.

Although I enjoy this game, I don't feel like it offers much more than many of the other rogue-lights I've played. I feel like its good, but I don't feel like its for me.

That being said, that doesn't mean its not for you. It's definitely fast paced, has an enjoyable environment and atmosphere, and requires some point awareness at times.

Do I recommend this game? Yes. Not for me, but I wouldn't tell you not to try it.

An amazing game, all it's own once you get past it's similarities with other games.

I've played this a fair bit, and stream it often, and intend to carry on doing so.

While it's obvious that it's heavily influenced by other games, such as The Binding Of Isaac, the creater has clearly defined this as a seperate game, adding other mechanics not see in similar games, differentiating it from the rest.

I enjoy it immensely, the game having huge replayability, and a ton of unlockables (with more to come, hopefully).

Challenging and fun, people really need to give this more than a few minutes playing and complaining.

Can't wait for more updates.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

That said, calling The Madness of Little Emma a clone of The Binding of Isaac would be giving it too little credit. It very obviously draws heavy influence, using a very similar HUD, (almost) identical means of attacking and even all but reusing some of the enemies and bosses from TBOI, including directly borrowing names (I'm looking at you, Haunt). Despite the striking resemblance to Isaac, the platformer aspect helps to keep the gameplay fresh. It helps to think of The Madness of Little Emma as what it is, a standalone game, and not as an Isaac clone. The side view as opposed to a top-down view offers possibilities for interesting items and enemies, such as giving your shots weight allowing you to shoot in arcs, and the Twin Sisters boss which drops from the ceiling above you. Jumping around to dodge enemies and shots is difficult and a little frustrating at first, but I enjoy it more and more as I play. The knife-throwing enemies on the third floor are surprisingly fun to fight in narrow hallways with ceilings just low enough to evade damage with a well-timed jump.

Aesthetically, The Madness of Little Emma really shines. The Binding of Isaac has some of my favorite concepts for bosses (The Cage, The Lamb), and even though I've only seen early-game bosses and enemies as of the writing of this review, Emma does a fantastic job of being more creepy and less cartoony. The mass of eyeballs that can be found on the third floor that make that wonderfully creepy sound when they split and the first chapter boss 'The Haunt' that floats around menacingly with that horrific smile (think that weird distorted smiledog.jpg picture) are two of my favorite examples. The dark color palette looks great and I love what little I've heard of the soundtrack thus far.

All in all, The Madness of Little Emma is a fun little game that I'm definitely glad I bought. I won't say that it's better or worse than Isaac, I'll just say it's a fun standalone rogue-like that I would definitely recommend.

I was quite happy to see this gem made it to steam and bought it immediately.

It's a rather obvious hommage of The Binding of Isaac and it's influences. You'll recognize a lot of things quickly, if you are familiar with BoI. There is, however, a crucial difference: The Madness of little Emma is a platformer, which adds a refreshing spin to it.

There are already plenty of items in this game and it is possible to see what they do by pressing Esc and going into the items menu, which removes a bit of the guessing game and makes it easier to learn the ropes.

As far as the enemies are concerened, most patterns are easy to learn, though, not surprisingly, there are some that need some getting used to, as well as those that very likely need some tweaking.

There's also an insanity meter in this game. The higher it goes, the faster enemies become and the earlier more difficult ones/variants spawn.

Personally, I only experienced a glitch and one crash/freeze, but I'm fairly confident that those will be fixed/tracked down quickly, since a look at the discussions shows that the dev is communicating closely with the community to get rid of those problems.

This game also comes with a very good soundtrack as far as I am concerened, so all in all I heartily recommend it.

Finally: This is my first review, so i hope I managed to touch upon the important points.

The Madness of Little Emma. Even though it was heavily influenced by The Binding of Isaac, gameplay is very different. Well, it's obvious because Emma is a platformer game.
Although the game is a bit unpolished at this moment, it's still very enjoyable. The most noticeable thing is that there's no much variation in room layouts. Of course they're different from level to level, but you can see the same layout on the same level pretty often. But oh well, it's just a matter of time.
Of course, it's really hard and you may need a bit of a time to get used to it. Especially it's important to get used to spikes - they're a major game element.
The music is pretty nice. Episode 3's theme is probably my favorite.

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.