Picking Up Steam: Our Darker Purpose (PC)
One day at the Edgewood Home for Lost Children, the last remaining teacher left and never came back. While many kids would love to be left to their own devices at school, without any adult supervision, the children of Edgewood were not ones to embrace the chance for playful anarchy. Instead, they violently turn on each other, popular kids and bullies vying for power while others do their best to weaponize objects around the classrooms like chalkboard erasers and globes. Only one child, a girl named Cordy, seems to keep her faculties as she seeks out the faculty, believing answers may lie at very top of the towering home for lost children, her fight to the upper layers revealing there are much darker forces at work than her feral classmates.
Our Darker Purpose is a top-down action rogue-like that borrows heavily from The Binding of Isaac, playing almost identically at its core with the player able to launch a projectile attack up, down, left, or right as they explore randomized floors and gather upgrades to improve their power. Cordy flings little flames as her main means of attack and comes with a dodge that helps her avoid the attacks of her classmates, but to beat the more gifted students who can do far more than fling what they find laying around, you’ll need to find useful items to improve Cordy’s strength across your run. The dark and dreary halls of Edgewood don’t have many guaranteed ways to acquire helpful upgrades, the occasional vending machine even having a somewhat random inventory, but when regular enemies appear in their red upgraded forms you can count on a reward for taking out the tougher variant and general luck will usually mean exploring a floor will provide some fruitful improvements in some way, at least because taking out foes earns experience with each level up giving you a pick between two possible boosts.
However, the process of climbing Edgewood is one with a few limits. At first you cannot make a full run to the top no matter how well you perform, the game divided into four chapters. The first chapter culminates in a boss fight rather low in the building, but to face the second chapter’s major boss you have to fight through everything you did in Chapter 1 again, this holding true for Chapters 3 and 4 as well. This does mean that final run to try and beat the game will be far longer than the rest, and since a death will wipe away your upgrades and set you back to the first floor, you’ll become very familiar with the major bosses. Luckily, while each individual floor also has a boss, most of them are selected from a random pool, this pool expanding as you unlock new chapters so you can face brand new foes instead of always running into the same handful. The climb to the very top of Edgewood will still start to lose its charms as the regular enemy pool feels rather small though, one thing that perhaps holds the process back from being more exciting even more is how Our Darker Purpose designs its upgrades.
When you find a new helpful item in this rogue-like, it’s mostly going to be a pretty straightforward boost to your power. You might find an item that increases the chances of a critical hit, how likely you might dodge an attack without a roll, how much health the juice boxes you collect restore, and other small incremental improvements along the way, even many of the level up options being flat improvements to health or damage. Sometimes you may have a conditional option like sacrificing health for some money, and there are special items to be found that you can activate during a fight to do things like slow floes or unleash a special attack, but while you are getting more capable as you push onward, it’s in a very basic way. You never really have a reason to deviate from fighting in the same manner with your fire flinging attack, and while you can get helpful extras like your dodge roll leaving flames, the upgrade items you find mostly just determine how quickly a fight will go or how much damage you can afford to take. Since they are so often flat unconditional upgrades it is still nice to find them and some are a bit more exciting to find like ones that let you fire more than one shot at once, but the rogue-like structure doesn’t feel as exciting because you’re merely trying to keep pace with the competition rather than having the room to explore alternate combat approaches or materially impact your run beyond just having the health and damage to tangle with the tougher foes.
The basic action of Our Darker Purpose is at least fairly entertaining despite not being as variable as it could have been. You need to stay moving to avoid furniture being flung at you or to outrun children that try to run you down, and traps likes hands popping out of the floor or rapidly growing thorns can add a more dangerous shape to the rooms to you explore looking for helpful items. When you do head to a new floor you get to choose from a few options on what you’ll face, the enemy faction that inhabits it one part while an extra gimmick might change how the floor works like making it much larger, have more foes that drop money, or dangerous features like harmful paper on the wind or the darkness being more oppressive than it normally is. Your floor choice can impact how many credits you earn, the game allowing you to unlock and set specific boosts between runs so you can at least make small progress there even though you lose everything else on death. These “lessons” though are fairly mild in their impact, doing things like giving you some coins to start, raising crit chance when you’re close to a foe, or moving a bit faster after taking damage. Like many things, it’s an appreciated bump in competency should you have them, but at least here they don’t feel as necessary as mid-run power-ups because of their conservatively designed effects. However, they can at least provide enough of a helpful touch that they do improve the bosses a bit, each boss type you face having a special fight condition you can attempt in order to unlock a helpful lesson. Not only does this make boss rematches more interesting when they ask you to fight a familiar foe in a new manner, but you can at least have something new to help a bit if you’re getting stonewalled at later chapter areas.
Much like how your fellow students at Edgewood make clever use of materials around the school for fighting, the bosses are often rather clever but more fantastical twists on elements you’d find in a school. School projects like cardboard dragons act more like the beast they’re based on, the weird cafeteria food can come to life, and even machines like the elevator have been warped into something new to fight. Fellow students with too much power also appear, but that can lead to a weaker fight like The Disciplined, a trio of chess-based characters who move around so much the fight can drag even if you’ve got quite a lot of power at that point in the adventure. For the most part the concept and combat tie together neatly for the fight to make something challenging that will test the upgrades you’ve collected, many boss arenas ending up filled with incoming attacks that can be tough to overcome if item luck wasn’t on your side. Our Darker Purpose at least seems to understand if you do make it to the end you’ll likely be rather worn down and boss difficulty won’t just be a constant climb upward, the complexity of foes higher in Edgewood still interesting though so you aren’t just going to be handed the win when you finally make it to the top.
Our Darker Purpose is meant to be played beyond its conclusion with there being bits of lore to collect, more secret items and lessons to unlock, and even a hard mode that can add some extra attacks to boss fights, but its not as inviting as its inspiration The Binding of Isaac since Cordy’s fighting style rarely changes. The difference between good and bad runs is usually just how much health you acquired or if you got enough boosts to damage or attack speed, player skill still very important considering how cluttered fights can get even with regular foes with smart movement often the more important element than how you’re attacking. The final floors strain this some by denying you so much visual information in the darkness with the deadliest regular foes you’ve faced yet, but the fighting is usually engaging on some level even if it ends up feeling overdone because of the rogue-like resets that mean you’ll need to wade through the easier spaces again hoping you have the right tools for the parts that will actually test your abilities.
THE VERDICT: Our Darker Purpose has a stylish dark look and a soundtrack that suits its twisted school setting, but the rogue-like action isn’t quite fleshed out enough to make the required repeat runs that interesting. At its heart is a simple fighting system that involves smart movement and learning enemy patterns to survive, but the upgrade system, even when in your hands when it comes to leveling up, is mostly about straightforward improvement which means it’s rewarding to get what you can but also makes runs mostly differentiated by your power level rather than new approaches to the action. Effective boss design and the feeling you can always be working towards useful upgrades through combat and exploration make it work even though the climbs through Edgewood become a bit tedious, the game stretching its pool of content a bit thin with the enforced repetition.
And so, I give Our Darker Purpose for PC…
An OKAY rating. Before it comes time to climb to the top at Chapters 3 and 4, Our Darker Purpose feels a bit cleaner to repeat since there are fewer floors to visit. You’ll have better luck at seeing new bosses and be learning all the upgrades or getting chances to unlock lessons when things are repeated, but even if you do fairly well to start with, it’s easy to see that most of your improvement during a run is in small or nearly intangible ways. Unless you really get lucky with items that increase dodge or crit chances they can feel like they aren’t hugely impactful, and since damage scaling and having ample health become crucial to later success, some poor luck can dampen a run and lead to needing to attempt another run where the action keeps feeling more and more samey. If Our Darker Purpose didn’t want to fundamentally alter Cordy’s attack methods much or give you the room to pursue dedicated builds like trying to emphasis crit chance, it should have at least improved the variety found in the regular fights. Already some enemies are a bit rough in design by attacking so quickly they can be hard to react to so recognition can at least give you room to overcome that, but a cleaner and wider batch of baddies would not only improve the gameplay feel and allow things to stay fresher for longer, but they can lean even more into the game’s already captivating creativity when it comes to making the school setting into a hostile place. Seeing another new boss or facing off with the new factions in the higher floors is still an effective draw even when you know you’ll need to trudge through some early content you’ve gotten tired of, but perhaps the lessons could have made that process cleaner as well if they were more impactful in their boosts.
Our Darker Purpose works at first when things are new and you need to learn how everything works, but it starts running on fumes when you reach the later chapters and success starts to feel like it leans a bit too heavily on testing to see if you grabbed enough of the truly helpful items to continue. Smart play is still rewarded and there can be power trips if you do manage to luck into the best level up options and items, but the repeated parts of this adventure do slow down the fun without adding much beyond a necessary gathering phase of sorts. Our Darker Purpose is more of an effective game that starts to decline the more you play it rather than one that is rough from the get-go, but thankfully it never sinks so low that climbing to the top of Edgewood ever becomes outright boring or frustrating. No doubt the reason I stopped playing it years ago was because it was beginning to get repetitive, but Our Darker Purpose does have parts later in the adventure worth reaching since they can bring back some of those early strengths that nearly faded away.