Fans of Super Meat Boy have been looking forward to The Binding of Isaac, and rightly so. Although it's not from the exact same team, it carries all the hallmarks of Team Meat's big hit - weirdness, humor, super-tuned gameplay and bags of videogame history homage.

Edmund McMillen is best known as one half of Team Meat, the duo behind cult hit Super Meat Boy. He describes The Binding of Isaac as "a side project" for which partner Tommy Refenes sat out.

IGN visited McMillen in his Santa Cruz home to enjoy the world exclusive first play of his new game. It's due out in mid-September on Steam for five bucks.

Here are five things you need to know:

The Binding of Isaac is a top-down room-exploration action-adventure. The player moves from one randomly generated area to another, facing down enemies with a gun (it fires teardrops - don't ask), solving puzzles and picking up power-ups, modifiers and treats. Each room is different but you can find references in here to Centipede, Bomberman, Robotron, Arkanoid, Asteroids and, of course, Zelda.

As in Super Meat Boy, the grisly humor is folded into the raw ingredients of the game, rather than tacked on as some gimmick. It's a squidgy, squelchy world in which a naked, frightened boy is on the run from his murderous, fanatical mother. You can expect lots of curios along the way, involving skulls, dismemberment, splodges of blood and other satanic Meatish ghoulishness but most of the darkness comes from a vague feeling of unease rather than any graphical gimmicks.

McMillen says, "The fact that I like morbid things maybe has a lot to do with my Catholic upbringing, you know, growing up surrounded by pictures of a dying guy with blood all over his face."

Religion is a big part of the Isaac backstory, and of McMillen's world view. The Binding of Isaac refers to the Biblical story of Abraham making ready to murder his own son as a sacrifice to his god, who in turn stays Abe's hand at the last moment. It's a story that has fascinated Biblical scholars for centuries and intrigued critics of religion who see Abraham's devotion as perverse. Isaac, in this game, is at the mercy of a parent who is fully intent on seeing through her sacrificial party plans.

McMillen says, "I'm interested in the fire and brimstone aspects of the Bible and Isaac is an especially bizarre chapter. I do have a pre-occupation with religious extremists. When I was younger there was a lot of hate and propaganda directed at role-playing games by Christian extremists and I find a lot of that awesome, in the worst meaning of the word. But there are other themes at play here, of children hiding in basements and mothers who murder their off-spring. It's not just about religion."

Everything is randomly generated, so no two playthroughs are ever the same. Treasure, enemies, bosses, treats, power-ups are littered through the game, but never in the same way. McMillen knows the game as well as anyone ever will, but says, "I still get surprised and caught off guard."

Super Meat Boy wasn't exactly easy, but it was fiercely playable, allowing players to dip in and out of tricky levels. The Binding of Isaac works differently, in that rooms are random rather than static. But it's still a challenge that demands old- fashioned reflex gaming and tactical smarts.

Isaac's power-ups are concurrently collectable and graphically represented, so after a while he can become quite the monster, loaded down with weapons and destruction. In practice this means your character is walking around with a bunch of 'hats 'on, all at the same time, plus weapons, and other accessories. These can range from the utterly normal to the wildly unpredictable. At one point I was wandering around with a perfectly curled turd on my head. However, once he dies, all that goes away, and the player must start rebuilding a new Isaac, with a new combination of powers.

McMillen says, "A lot of people want to be challenged. It's not the same as Meat Boy that lets you correct your own mistakes, but there is major appeal in being able to let go and create a whole new character every time."

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