The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ (Unlocked FULL GAME)

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ adds a chapter called The Void, a single enormous floor holding eight boss rooms. Players stuck dying in the Womb who have never once seen Delirium get the exact route to him here. Reaching that floor starts with killing Mom’s Heart inside 30 minutes, and that one clock shapes the whole run.

How to Play The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ is an action roguelike expansion where players move Isaac through procedurally generated rooms and fire tears at enemies. Each floor ends at a boss, death restarts the entire descent, and only permanent unlocks survive between attempts.

That loop sounds small. In practice it holds 111 new items, 38 new trinkets and 22 new pickups on top of everything the earlier releases already carried. Nicalis released the expansion on January 3, 2017 for $9.99, then fed it five free content updates called Booster Packs over the following year.

A first hour goes badly for almost everyone. However, the difficulty comes from pattern reading rather than reflexes, and item synergy does most of the heavy lifting once a few pickups stack. Isaac, Apollyon and The Forgotten all play from the same basic footing, so the roster only widens the options rather than raising the floor.

What a Single Run Looks Like from Basement to Chest

Every run opens in the Basement with Isaac holding almost nothing. Players clear rooms one at a time, take the trapdoor down, and repeat through paired chapters that rotate between Basement, Cellar and Burning Basement, then Caves, Catacombs and Flooded Caves, then Depths, Necropolis and Dank Depths, then Womb, Utero and Scarred Womb.

Mom’s Heart sits at the end of chapter four. After enough kills it permanently becomes It Lives, which opens chapter five as a split between Sheol and the Cathedral. Beyond that lie the Dark Room and the Chest as alternate endings, so a single successful descent can finish in several different places depending on which item a player picked up after Mom.

Isaac’s Basement Story and the Endings That Carry It

Isaac’s mother believes God has demanded a sacrifice, so the boy runs into the basement. The dungeon below is not a real place. Instead it is built from his fears, which is why Mom’s body parts show up as bosses and why Satan and The Lamb sit at the bottom of it.

There are no cutscenes and no dialogue. Short animated endings play after each major boss falls, and each one adds a piece of context that the previous ending withheld. Because these endings arrive out of order across dozens of runs, the story assembles itself slowly rather than arriving in a single sitting.

How the Descent Compares to Dead Cells and Soul Knight

Dead Cells is the closest thing on phones to this kind of run-based combat, but it builds sideways through biome routes and permanent blueprint drops rather than through random pedestals. Soul Knight sits nearer in structure, since it also throws players into short randomized dungeon floors with a fresh weapon each time.

The gap between them is item synergy. Soul Knight hands out weapons that behave the same way every run, whereas this expansion stacks passive effects that combine in unscripted ways. For example, a tear modifier and a familiar item can produce behaviour neither one describes on its own, and that unpredictability is the whole draw.

iOS and Switch Versions Against the PC Build

Rebirth sells on the iOS App Store at $14.99, with Afterbirth, Afterbirth+ and Repentance offered as in-app purchases inside that app. Google Play has no official release at all, so Android searches mostly turn up companion apps and item databases instead of the game.

Touch controls handle the two-input movement acceptably, though item slots move to the bottom of the screen and controller support is narrower than on desktop. The Switch release arrived on March 17, 2017 and plays closest to the PC build. No cross-save exists between platforms, since each version received its updates on its own schedule.

How Afterbirth+ Controls and Room Combat Work

Movement and shooting sit on two separate inputs, so Isaac can walk left while firing right. Rooms lock until every enemy dies, and clearing one may drop coins, keys, bombs, hearts or nothing at all.

Keyboard and mouse, gamepad and Steam Deck native input all work, and shooting direction stays rebindable. There is no difficulty slider. Instead the game offers Normal and Hard, which changes enemy stat scaling and how generously drops appear.

New players usually lose their first dozen runs to contact damage rather than projectiles. Soul hearts and black hearts sit above red heart containers as a buffer, and they cannot be refilled by ordinary red pickups. Because trinkets, pills and cards each carry their own smaller catalog of effects, the pickup layer alone takes a few hours to read comfortably.

Firing Tears While Moving in Two Directions

Tears fire in a fixed direction relative to the input held, and they travel a set distance before dropping. Range, fire rate, damage and shot speed all sit as separate stats, so a damage item can make a run worse if it drags fire rate down with it.

Strafing matters more than aiming here. Most enemy patterns punish standing still, so the correct habit is circling a room’s edge and firing inward. Similarly, boss rooms reward diagonal movement, since almost every projectile spread in the game is designed around cardinal escapes.

Item Synergy and How Pickups Rewrite a Build

Nearly every item interacts with several others, and none of those interactions are scripted as fixed builds. A tear replacement effect layered onto a multiplier effect can multiply the replacement instead, which is how absurd damage output appears out of two ordinary pickups.

Drop pools decide what a player ever sees. Treasure rooms, shops, boss rooms, devil rooms, angel rooms, curse rooms, secret rooms and the Void-exclusive pool all draw from separate lists, so the route a player takes changes the item pool as much as luck does. Therefore skipping a devil room is a real decision rather than a small one.

What Drops After a Room or Boss Falls

Clearing a normal room may spawn a pickup, a chest or nothing. Boss rooms always drop an item from the boss pool alongside hearts, and they open a trapdoor to the next floor. On Hard, those heart drops thin out noticeably.

Optional rooms sit off the main path. Curse rooms cost health to enter, secret rooms need a bomb, and sacrifice rooms trade hits on spikes for rewards that escalate the longer a player keeps stepping on them. As a result, room order becomes a resource plan rather than a straight line downward.

How to Unlock The Void and Reach Delirium

Killing Hush unlocks The Void, the final chapter that Afterbirth+ added. Reaching Hush requires killing Mom’s Heart inside 30 minutes, which opens the Blue Womb, and that timer is the real gate rather than the fight itself.

The Void is enormous. It holds eight boss rooms, seven of them pulling random bosses from across the whole game, and exactly one containing Delirium. Champion enemies appear far more often here than anywhere else.

Delirium is the reason the floor exists. He morphs mid-fight into bosses already encountered that run, inheriting their attack patterns and carrying heavy damage reduction while transformed. Consequently the fight rewards adaptability rather than a memorized pattern, and a run with high sustained damage output beats one with a single burst option.

Killing Mom’s Heart Fast to Open the Blue Womb

The 30 minute clock starts the moment a run begins, not the moment a player reaches the Womb. Checking it means tapping the map key, which swaps the minimap for a timer readout. Most failed attempts lose the window on chapters one and two rather than at the end.

Speed comes from skipping, not rushing. Players who take every optional room on the first two floors almost never make the cut. Instead, clear the path to the boss, grab the treasure room, and leave secret rooms alone until the Blue Womb is secured.

Void Portal Odds After Each Major Boss

A Void portal can spawn after major boss kills even on runs that never touch Hush, and this is the part most write-ups leave out entirely. The odds run roughly 5 percent after Mom when Isaac has 10 or more tear damage or 20 or more items, around 10 percent after Mom’s Heart or It Lives, about 15 percent after Isaac or Satan, roughly 20 percent after ??? or The Lamb, and a full 50 percent after Mega Satan.

That last number connects two goals that most players chase separately. A Mega Satan kill unlocks Apollyon and also gives a coin-flip chance at a Void portal in the same run, so the character unlock and the first Delirium attempt frequently land together. For example, a player farming key pieces from angel rooms is already halfway through the best Void route available.

Finding Delirium’s Boss Room Inside The Void

Delirium occupies a 2×2 room that displays as a single square on the minimap. Because a 2×2 room needs space, any boss room that could only ever connect through one door is a strong candidate. Rooms that would need several doors, or that would spill past the map’s 13×13 limit, cannot hold him.

Working this out first pays real dividends. The other seven boss rooms each drop a boss pool item, so a player who identifies Delirium’s square can farm the entire floor before committing. A teleport card makes this safe, and Star of Bethlehem points straight at Delirium’s room if it turns up.

How to Unlock Greedier Mode and Beat Ultra Greedier

Five hundred coins fed into the Greed Donation Machine unlock Greedier Mode, the harder version of Greed Mode. Coins bank permanently across runs, so the total accumulates over many attempts rather than in one sitting.

Greed Mode locks each floor into one arena room with a button in the middle. Pressing it spawns eight waves of enemies that pay out in coins, with a shop, a curse room and a devil or angel room attached to the same floor. Ultra Greed waits at the end.

Greedier Mode changes the shape of that fight. It adds a ninth wave per floor, shortens spawn timers between waves, and swaps the finale for a second phase called Ultra Greedier. Because the arena never lets a player retreat into corridors, positioning inside one room becomes the entire skill test.

Feeding the Greed Donation Machine to 500 Coins

The machine sits in the shop room on every Greed Mode floor. Coins go in one at a time, and the counter persists between runs, so a bad attempt still contributes. However, the machine can jam permanently on a run, which stops further deposits until the next attempt.

Banking coins beats spending them early. A run that buys nothing from the Greed Mode shop and dumps everything into the machine reaches 500 far faster than one that keeps upgrading. Keeper, unlocked through this same donation system, then becomes considerably easier to work toward.

What the Ninth Wave Changes in Each Arena

The ninth wave arrives when most builds are already stretched. Enemy density rises sharply, and the shortened spawn timer means the previous wave’s stragglers often overlap with the next one. Therefore crowd clearing matters more here than single-target damage.

Bombs earn their keep in this format. A player holding four or five bombs can open the arena’s pressure points instead of kiting endlessly. Similarly, familiars and orbitals outperform high-damage single shots, since they keep working while Isaac is busy dodging.

Handling the Ultra Greedier Second Phase

Ultra Greed opens as a slow, heavy fight with predictable slam patterns. The second phase is where Greedier Mode separates itself, since the boss returns in a more dangerous form immediately after the first one falls. Health carried into that transition decides most attempts.

Saving a full active item charge for the switch is the practical answer. Players who burn their active on the first phase almost always die to the second. Instead, hold soul hearts back and treat the first phase as a resource test rather than a damage race.

How to Unlock Apollyon and The Forgotten

Apollyon unlocks the moment a run ends with Mega Satan dead, and he starts with two red heart containers plus the Void active item. The Forgotten takes considerably longer, since his unlock chains four separate conditions inside a single run.

These two characters are the roster additions that Afterbirth+ contributed, bringing the total to fifteen. The final Booster Pack retroactively attached an unlock condition to Apollyon, who had previously been available from the start on most platforms.

Both characters reward different habits. Apollyon converts unwanted pedestal items into raw stats, so he thrives on runs with poor item luck. The Forgotten swings a bone club and uses bone hearts that take three hits each, which makes his health bar behave unlike anyone else’s on the roster.

Reaching Mega Satan for the Apollyon Unlock

Mega Satan needs two key pieces, which drop from angel statues in angel rooms. Angel rooms only appear on runs where no devil deal has been taken, so the route commits early. Dad’s Key works as an alternative entry if a player finds it.

Apollyon’s Void item then defines his whole approach. Using it destroys every pedestal item in the room and converts each one into two random stat increases, regardless of that item’s quality. Consequently low-value pickups become fuel rather than dead weight, and a poor treasure room stops being a lost floor.

The Broken Shovel Route to The Forgotten

The Lamb must fall at least once before this unlock is even possible. After that, start a fresh unseeded run and kill the first floor boss inside one minute, which Azazel handles most reliably. Mom’s voice calls out, a shovel shadow appears in the starting room, and a bomb there drops the Broken Shovel.

Carrying that piece makes Mom’s foot stomp continuously in every room. Using the shovel stops the stomping for the current room only. Clear Boss Rush for the second piece, descend to the Dark Room, then stand on the loose dirt mound in the Grave Room and use the completed shovel.

Which of the Fifteen Characters to Play First

Isaac starts unlocked and remains the cleanest teacher, since his D6 rerolls pedestal items on a six-room charge. Magdalene unlocks by holding seven red heart containers at once and gives new players the largest health buffer on the roster. Cain arrives after holding fifty-five cents at once.

Judas hits far harder but starts on a single red heart, which suits players who already dodge well. Azazel’s short-range brimstone beam trivializes early floors, making him the standard pick for timed unlocks. The Lost and Keeper both sit at the punishing end, so leave them until the Completion Marks grind begins.

How Completion Marks and Permadeath Progression Work

Progression here happens entirely between runs, never inside one. No experience bar exists, and no currency carries over, so every unlock comes from meeting a specific condition during a run that then applies permanently to the account.

Completion Marks form the real spine of that system. Each of the fifteen characters carries a grid of marks for specific bosses, tracked separately on Normal and on Hard, and filling every grid is the game’s genuine completionist target.

Players commonly cite many dozens to low hundreds of hours for a full clear. Several late marks demand deliberately low-resource victories, which is a different skill from simply finishing a run. For example, clearing Delirium with The Lost turns a familiar fight into an entirely new problem.

What Survives When Isaac Dies

Death drops the player back to a fresh Basement with a new layout. Coins, keys, bombs, items and trinkets all vanish. Nothing about the run itself persists.

What does persist is account-level content. New characters stay unlocked, newly unlocked items enter future loot pools, new floors stay accessible, and challenge runs appear on the select screen. Because of that, a run that ends badly on the Caves can still be the most productive run of a session.

Filling the Completion Marks Grid on Both Difficulties

Each character’s grid tracks kills against Mom’s Heart, It Lives, Isaac, ???, Satan, The Lamb, Blue Baby, Mega Satan, Hush, Ultra Greed, Delirium and Ultra Greedier. Normal and Hard hold separate slots, which effectively doubles the workload.

Order matters more than most players expect. Marks that require the Blue Womb depend on the 30 minute clock, so batching those attempts together while the routing is fresh saves considerable time. Alternatively, running Greed Mode marks in blocks keeps the arena pacing consistent across attempts.

Transformations Like Guppy and What They Grant

Collecting three items from a themed set transforms Isaac visually and mechanically. Guppy grants flight and spawns blue flies on hit, while Bob applies a poison effect tied to a set of bomb and fly items. These are gameplay changes rather than cosmetics.

No separate skin shop or outfit system exists in this expansion. Every visual change on Isaac comes from what he picked up, which means a player can read another player’s screenshot and reconstruct most of the run. Transformations therefore double as a build summary sitting on the character sprite.

All Five Afterbirth+ Challenge Runs and Their Rewards

Afterbirth+ shipped with five challenge runs, occupying challenge slots 31 through 35 on the challenge select screen. Each one locks a fixed item set and a fixed goal, removing the randomness that defines a normal descent.

Their names are Backasswards, Aprils Fool, Pokey Mans, Ultra Hard and PONG. Completing four of them unlocks permanent additions to the loot pools rather than cosmetic rewards.

Challenges also serve as a training ground. Because the starting items are fixed, a player can practise a specific interaction repeatedly without waiting for a treasure room to cooperate. Pokey Mans in particular teaches summon timing that transfers directly to ordinary runs.

Backasswards, Aprils Fool and Pokey Mans

Backasswards strips a heart container and an item from Isaac at the start of every floor, which inverts normal pacing entirely. Completing it unlocks Lazarus Bleeds More, changing that character’s starting loadout permanently.

Aprils Fool disguises everything on screen, and bosses arrive as champion variants that misrepresent themselves. Its reward is Maggy Now Holds a Pill. Pokey Mans hands the player a throwable that summons a random monster to fight alongside Isaac, recharging fully when that monster dies, and it unlocks the Charged Key.

Ultra Hard and PONG

Ultra Hard is the hardest of the five by a wide margin. It stacks permanent curses and still demands a Mega Satan kill through the Dark Room, which means taking the trapdoor rather than the beam of light. Finishing it unlocks Samson Feels Healthy.

PONG sits at the opposite end and finishes quickly. Its main trap is item choice after Mom, since taking the wrong ending item routes the run to the Cathedral instead of the Chest and voids the attempt. Checking the goal icon on the left side of the HUD prevents that mistake entirely.

Daily Runs and the 24-Hour Leaderboard

Every owner receives the same seeded run once per day, scored on completion time and depth reached. The leaderboard resets every 24 hours, so a strong result disappears the next morning.

This is the closest thing to a recurring reward structure in the expansion. No promotional codes exist, no seasonal events run, and no limited-time content appears. Nevertheless, a shared seed makes Daily Runs the best available comparison against other players, since item luck is identical for everyone.

Common Afterbirth+ Mistakes That End Runs Early

Most lost runs in this action roguelike end from preventable damage rather than bad item luck. Contact damage on the first two chapters kills more attempts than any boss does.

Economy errors sit close behind. Coins, keys and bombs reset to zero every run, so hoarding them past the point of usefulness wastes them entirely. Meanwhile spending them in the wrong order costs access to rooms that would have paid better.

The third category is a purchase mistake rather than a gameplay one, and it costs actual money. Buyers regularly misread how the expansions stack on the PC storefront, then find themselves unable to install what they wanted.

Spending Coins in the Shop Before a Wallet Upgrade

Early shop items rarely justify their price. A run that dumps its first fifteen coins on a chapter one shop usually arrives at the Caves with nothing to open a locked door and no bomb for a secret room.

Wallet-expanding items change that calculation completely. Once a player can carry more than the default coin cap, shops become a genuine option rather than a trap. Until then, saving coins for keys and bombs produces more items per floor than buying does.

Taking a Devil Room Deal That Closes Angel Rooms

Taking any devil deal removes angel rooms from the rest of that run. This single rule invalidates the entire Mega Satan route, since the key pieces only drop from angel statues.

Players chasing Apollyon therefore need to decline every devil deal, however tempting the pedestal looks. Additionally, taking damage on a floor reduces the chance of either room type spawning at all, which makes clean floors valuable well beyond their health cost.

Assuming Repentance Replaces Afterbirth+

Repentance does not replace this expansion. It requires it. On the PC storefront the expansions chain in order, so Repentance needs Afterbirth+, which needs Afterbirth, which needs Rebirth, and none of those requirements are optional.

That chain has a practical consequence almost nobody states plainly. Afterbirth+ is no longer sold as a loose item on its own store page and appears instead inside expansion bundles, so a buyer who owns only the base game cannot simply add the newest expansion alone. Checking which bundle covers the gap before buying saves a refund request later.

Best Afterbirth+ Tips and Tricks for Beginners

The D6 rerolls every pedestal item in the room where a player uses it, on a six-room charge. Isaac starts with it, which makes him the most forgiving character for anyone still reading item effects.

Two habits separate players who finish runs from players who stall out. First, treat the first two chapters as a health preservation exercise rather than a loot sweep. Then, once damage output is stable, start taking optional rooms again.

Pickup literacy is the other half. Trinkets, pills, cards and runes each behave differently, and several of them are actively harmful. A player who can read those at a glance loses far fewer runs to self-inflicted damage than one who grabs everything on sight.

Rerolling Pedestals With the D6 Instead of Gambling

The D6 works best on a room holding several pedestals rather than one. Devil rooms and angel rooms often present two or three at once, so a single charge can reshape an entire floor’s offering.

Charge management matters here. Six rooms is a long wait when a player is clearing efficiently, so entering a treasure room with a full charge is worth a short detour. For example, clearing two side rooms before opening the treasure room usually times the charge perfectly.

Reading Trinkets, Pills and Cards Before Grabbing Them

Pills are unidentified until used, and the same colour means the same effect for the rest of that run. Testing an unknown pill at full health rather than at half a heart turns a possible death into a minor setback.

Cards and runes carry fixed effects that are far more reliable. Tarot cards can force room types, reveal maps or reposition Isaac instantly. Trinkets, by contrast, apply passive modifiers that stack quietly, and dropping a bad one costs nothing since only one slot exists by default.

Saving Teleport Cards for Delirium’s Room

A teleport effect is the safest tool for the Void’s layout. Entering a suspect boss room without one means committing to whatever is inside, and Delirium punishes an unprepared entry harder than any other encounter in the game.

Holding a card back changes the floor into a farming opportunity. A player can open the seven ordinary boss rooms first, collect seven boss pool items, and only then walk into the last one. That order alone lifts a Delirium attempt from a coin flip into a fair fight, and it is the single most useful habit this Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ walkthrough can leave behind.

Frequently Asked Questions About Afterbirth+

Is The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ available on Android?

No official Google Play release exists. The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ reaches phones only through the iOS App Store, where it sits as an in-app purchase inside the Rebirth app rather than a separate download. Android searches mostly surface companion apps and item databases instead. Windows, macOS, Linux, Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One remain the supported platforms.

How long does one run take?

A basic descent that stops at Mom’s Heart runs roughly 25 minutes. Pushing deeper doubles that easily. Difficulty comes from two settings rather than a slider: Normal and Hard, and Hard raises enemy stat scaling while thinning drops. Because progress never carries inside a run, a bad start costs only the time already spent.

Is Afterbirth+ still supported with updates?

Five free content updates called Booster Packs arrived after launch, and the final one retroactively added unlock conditions to content that had previously been available from the start. Engine fixes still land through the shared codebase, since every expansion runs on one build. Community creation tools shipped alongside it, which keeps player-made content flowing years later.

Who Should Buy Afterbirth+ Right Now

Anyone who already owns Rebirth and Afterbirth and wants a genuine endgame should buy this. The Void and Delirium give the run structure a real ceiling, and Greedier Mode adds a second discipline entirely. Newcomers on PC should buy the bundle instead, since the expansions chain in order and cannot be installed out of sequence. I finished my first Delirium kill on roughly my fortieth attempt, and no other boss in this series has made a victory feel that earned. For a player who enjoys losing and starting over, this expansion remains the best value in the whole chain.