The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - A Complete Overview for Platinum

This guide is meant as a review for the people which might be interested in going for the completion of all of the game achievements. Being an achievement hunter myself and having already obtained this platinum, I will go over the game and its achievements, analyzing them to the best of my abilities.

Also it should be noted that this in not a comprehensive guide on HOW to obtain said achievements, since I think there is more that enough material online for basically all of the games I will cover, which will be able to help you gain the specific achievements you might still need. This guide will instead go over the game and will show you what you should expect while achievement hunting for this game.

One thing that should be clear to all readers is that this guide is a reflection of the game at the moment in which I am writing about it, so it might not be completely accurate if much time is passed as there might have been more updates released with adjustments and so on. The only thing I will try to always keep up to date will be eventual new achievements that might be released in the future. Of course keep particular attention to multiplayer-related achievements, since they might be affected by server closure or simply by drop in popularity of the game which might affect the easiness of which you might find the other people needed to obtain certain objectives. This of course might not pertain to the game in question since that's a common disclaimer I put on all my guides, so it’s just a warning.

Last thing, of course this will NOT be a spoiler free review, since the goal is to analyze what is necessary for the platinum it will be necessary at times to discuss the contents of the game. That said, it’s also not a full spoiler review, so when is not needed I will not spoil the contents of the game. For this reason you might want to avoid reading this review if you don’t want to risk any kind of spoiler to the game and maybe go back to it only after you’ve played your first run and are ready to hunt for the remaining achievements you might be missing.

Now, for the guide itself, it will be divided into four sections, the first one will be a brief general overview of the game and its achievements, the second will focus on the game itself and its pacing, the third will cover particularly difficult achievements to which you might want to put more focus compared to the rest, and the fourth will draw the conclusions based on the previous three analyses.

Usually when I write a guide of a game which is not the first of its series I write it assuming that the reader has prior knowledge of the previous installments. Technically The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth it’s not the first game of its series as that would be the classic The Binding of Isaac. Despite this I will write this guide as a standalone as this game is basically an extremely expanded remake of the first, and it’s it is thought by the developers themselves as not something which should necessarily be experienced after the previous one.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth includes a total of 641 achievements, with 168 tied to the base game, while the other 473 are tied to the DLCs. I’ll say that the DLC history for this game is pretty complex if approached all of a sudden, basically to be able to reach full completion you just have to be sure to possess the Afterbirth and Repentance DLCs and their respective upgrades (Afterbirth+ and Repentance+, with the last one which is just be a free upgrade and doesn’t have to be bought).

Usually at this point in my guide I make a point of reference for the reader, identifying the achievements which are story-related and unmissable. I won’t do it here because of two main factors: the intrinsic nature of the game and the sheer number of achievements. The game is built on the need of making many different runs with multiple characters, which can last depending of the objective of said run from a few minutes to almost an hour, so even the concept of story-related can vary by a lot. I’d say that if you count as story-related the bare minimum number of achievements needed to unlock the final ending, they might not be THAT many (of course still compared to the 641 total), but one could argue that the REAL main objective of the game does not differ very much from the overall completion and that should include the obtainment of every completion mark with every character and in that case they could amount to well more that half of them. So in the end I’d say that for those reasons it would be useless for me to make said division.

In the unlikely chance that everything I’ve written so far didn’t made you suspect this, I’ll say it plainly: this is a LONG game. Likely one of the longest you’ll ever experience in your life, so don’t expect to just spend a hundred hours or so on it and then put it behind you (I myself spent roughly three and a half years to complete it, from the start of 2016 to half of 2018 for the base game and the Afterbirth expansion and then from roughly half of 2021 to half of 2022 when the Repentance expansion came out). Luckily this game is also built so that it can be experienced as single relaxing runs, so despite its length it doesn’t necessarily appear as a game which will take everything from you, although don’t misunderstand my words, if you want not to just play it casually but also to go for platinum it WILL BE incredibly demanding).

One last thing that I have to mention is that to this day this game still receives attentions from its developers and gets updated occasionally. Now, if we consider its overall content, it’s basically finished with the last big update in 2021, but occasionally the developers will sneak in the occasional added achievement (so far 4 achievements in as many years since the release of Repentance, 3 in November of 2024 and 1 in September of 2025), which might force you to reopen the game from time to time and earn them to reach platinum again. Luckily I’d say that if you’ve cleared all of the content the game has had since mid-2021 I’m pretty sure you should not be worried about any harder achievement that might be introduced in the future, as I think that with the last big update the game will only get minor new objectives from now on (if anything).

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is definitely one of my favorite games ever (with a few not-so-minor caveats which I’ll cover briefly), so I can’t avoid recommending it to everyone which is even remotely interested in its genre. But that only applies for a normal play of the game (the occasional run once in a while), because the platinum is something else entirely as it will take time, it will take effort, it will take patience, it will take dedication and many more things all at once.

Of course if you’re just worried about the validity of the game itself (as I would be in your shoes, since as every great game with a lot of success behind it, it’s also not a stranger from its personal toxic portion of the fanbase which elevates it to impossibly high standards and praises each and every thing it does, while categorically denying even the concept of mistake pertaining to its gameplay), let me assure you, it’s definitely valid.

Now let’s go to what I think it definitely does not do well. In the beginning of this section I’ve basically identified myself as a fan of the game and I am, or to be more precise I was, up until the release of the Repentance DLC. Now of course even the base game and the Afterbirth-related content is far from perfect, but it still was unbelievably well constructed. I personally think that this does not transpose in Repentance. A good thing of this game was that except for a few very specific circumstances, the skill of player was basically always rewarded. Even if you were unlucky with the items you found in a run or the random bosses that you had to face, with enough skill you would’ve succeeded. And the gameplay itself was sufficiently rewarding that it guided you during the process of getting better at it. Personally I went from not being able to surpass the easiest of levels to the point at my peak where I was doing for fun the Greed Mode (just Greed, never particularly liked Greedier) with The Lost and despite of what I got in terms of items I was still perfectly able to clear it nine times out of ten (not exaggerating), as I was able to evade virtually anything thanks to my knowledge of the game.

While most of that still applies to Repentance, unfortunately most of the DLC suffers from the addition of content which is just harder for the sake of being harder. Many enemies move in a way that to my opinion doesn’t belong to the game (way more rhythmic and far less harmonic compared to the ones it had before and believe me, if added rhythm seems like a good thing, the way it’s done here, it is not). That combined with a few chaotic bosses that occasionally can hit you before you have the chance of doing anything (sometimes even while they are outside of you field of vision) made me with time lose most interest for the game, especially because while it is possible to enjoy a run while staying away from the areas of the DLC, once unlocked some of these enemies and places can substitute the older ones even in normal runs and for me it just ruined the whole experience.

Like I said, this game’s content is extremely vast and while it means that you’ll have to spend a really long time to finish it, it also means that you’ll have to play countless games during which you’ll easily be able to collect most achievements. The general objective of the game is simple: collect all completion mark with all character, this gives you a conceptually simple goal towards which to work that while is not comprehensive of everything you’ll have to do is either directly or indirectly tied to most, so that’s what you should focus on at the start and once you complete it you can continue by selecting the few remaining achievements (few compared to the whole 641).

Usually at this point in a guide I make a list of the achievements which I think take most time/effort from the player, but in this case I will start by selecting the most annoying character to play with and with whom to obtain all completion marks. Since the big content of the game expands also to its characters which are 34, as I would do if they were achievements, I won’t go into every single hard one (otherwise I could as well list most of the Tainted ones on top of some of the normals), but I’ll just select a few which I believe are particularly tricky to play as. And of course it goes without saying that not every single completion mark of those character is a nightmare to do, as most are perfectly reachable. For the basic versions of the characters we have “???”, “The Lost”, “Keeper” and “Jacob & Esau”, while for the Tainted versions there is “???”, “Lazarus”, “The Lost”, “The Forgotten” and “Jacob”. While I think that some of these characters are undoubtedly hard, some of them have being selected because I personally found hard playing with them, so this list might not reflect totally in your experience, but I don’t think that a list like this can be completely satisfactory for all players.

Now that we have finished with the characters we can continue with a more traditional listing of the hard achievements and for this section I’ve selected six different points to which you should pay attention and they are: “Get Out of Jail Free Card”, “Blank Rune”, “The Chariot”, “The Hermit”, “Sin Collector” and “Death Certificate”.

The first four are all relative to the completion of a challenge, respectively “SPEED!”, “The Guardian”, “Hot Potato”, and “Red Redemption”. For one reason or another each of these challenges are simply a pain to complete, though I think that “Hot Potato” and “Red Redemption” are just a bit annoying but perfectly doable with a bit of effort (I probably felt they were worthy of this list because when I did them I was through with this game and probably felt heavier that they would’ve felt otherwise). “The Guardian” is definitely more problematic as you’ll be stuck babysitting a minion which will be the one to damage you if he is hit and this being an almost unique mechanic of the game it will go against most of your instinct to play it. “SPEED!” is the one I personally loathe the most as I’m not a speedrunner and as I don’t enjoy at all having any sort of time limit breathing down my neck, I did this early on in an extremely lucky attempt (I’m not saying that it could not have a more favorable RNG, but I’d say it was pretty close to it) and never attempted it again, I don’t know how much it gets easier with the level of skill that gets eventually matured for the rest of the platinum, but I would bet it won’t change THAT much.

“Sin Collector” requires you to collect every possible monster in the bestiary, theoretically you should do enough runs to abundantly complete it, but the thing is that when I did it I already had completed almost everything in the game (it’s one of the achievements added by the last DLC) and I discovered I missed a couple rare mobs present in certain routes that I hadn’t made in a long while since I already did everything completion-wise from those. With the DLC they added variants of certain common enemies that I never encountered, so I had to spent hours to actually meet them and it sucked. Someone that’s starting from scratch with all of the content of the DLC immediately available would probably not face the same problem, but I still decided to include it nevertheless.

“Death Certificate” is a really tough one, but not for the reasons you might think. To obtain it you have to gain all the completion mark for all characters, but if it was just this you might think that after the first point I made in this section this is redundant and you would be right. But that’s not the problem, the problem is the item it unlocks because to gain the achievement which reflects the true completion of the game, “Dead God”, you also have to unlock everything AND find each item at least once. The point is that you’ll unlock this REALLY rare item at the end of your platinum and since there’s no way to secure it in any particular run (just lucky RNG), after having spent hundreds of hours you’ll find yourself having to continue play indefinitely (potentially for dozens of hours if you’re unlucky) just to find this single item. Personally I have been lucky since the moment I found myself in this situation I realized I could’ve used the randomness of the Eden character to quick restart a run up until this item’s appearance and even then it took almost an hour with more than a thousand rerolls. But the reason I managed to use this method was because I stored up most Eden’s Tokens for all the time I spent playing the game and so by that time I had more than a thousand tries available, so my advice is to save them up for this moment and hope you’re lucky. So the real problematic achievement is not this, but “Dead God”, but I decided to consider the former because it is the hard part and because I’ll talk about the latter in a moment.

With “Death Certificate” the problematic achievements officially end, but I still would like to talk about a couple more categories: multiplayer and 100% completion. This game has also a few online achievements tied to daily challenges (“Play Online”, “Win Online”, “Win Online Daily”, “Broken Modem”, “The Marathon” and “Dedication”), they are anything but hard and you will do them easily, but like with every guide I do if there are online-related challenges, I always like to draw attention on them because they are technically obtainable only until the online support of the game is available. Now this games is definitely old, but it still receives a lot of attention by both players and developers, so I don’t think we’re immediately running the risk of losing these achievements for good even if you’re reading this guide a few years in the future, but since you never know you might want to do them quickly.

The other category I mentioned is the 100% completion, as I’ve said this game had multiple addition during its run and with every major update followed also a completion-related achievement. In this final version there are a total of 5: “!Platinum God!”, “The Real Platinum God”, “1001%”, “1000000%” and of course “Dead God”. They are tied to the completion of the content that was available at the time of their release, but since to go over that would take simply too much time and would also be unnecessary, I’ll just say that you’ll complete them sooner or later during your run while going for “Dead God”, which is the only one you should be concerned about.

Lastly (and I promise it’s really the last thing), as I’ve said this game occasionally gets new minor achievements. I don’t expect to update this guide in the future, as I don’t expect that there will ever be anymore important releases which will add something worthy of being considered here. In the unlikely case I’m mistaken though, I will just add a note saying up until which update this guide remains accurate while I’ll work on getting the new 100% for myself. If and once I’ll manage to do that, I’ll update the guide so it will include all of the new additions.

I think I’ve been more than exhaustive in my analysis in the previous sections of this guide, so to summarize I’ll say that this game despite the flaws derived from its last updates it’s worthy of being experienced. Of could it’s important to keep in mind that’s not a platinum for all people (not necessarily talking about skill level, which is still pretty high, but more on the time it actually takes), so consider it carefully. Of course you can always decide to play it casually and make a final decision in a second moment, so don’t be intimidated by the immense amount of content it includes.

Talking about time completion, personally it’s hard for me to give you an estimate, since it’s one of the few games in my Steam library that I’ve abundantly played even after having reached platinum. I personally got a bit more than 1200 hours in it, but they are definitely well beyond what’s actually necessary for 100% completion. Online there are estimates which go from 600 to well beyond 1400 hours, but the latter feels too much, so if I had to make a guess I would go for maybe 800. Of course you can definitely take your time, maybe even ignore the 100% completion and just play the types of run you like and spend well more than 2000 hours as the game has basically infinite replayability and so in the end it’s always up to you how you want to experience it.