14 DAY TRIAL // 
Our Darker Purpose is another iteration in the roguelike genre, one that follows the recent trend of integrating some permanent progression elements into the usual endless string of deaths.
Avidly Wild Games’ debut title certainly looks interesting from the outside, with its simple and poignant visuals and the blend of roguelike, action role-playing game with some adventure elements with a coating of grim humor.
Players will take on the role of Cordy, a little girl who, after witnessing how her fellow students turned against each other, is bent on ascending to the top floor of the Edgewood Home for Lost Children, making her way to the Administrators’ offices.
The action takes place in an uninviting orphanage/boarding school in which monsters are devouring the pupils and… well… the pupils are also devouring the pupils.
Our Darker purpose combines some great mechanics and bizarre storylines, succeeding in providing an enticing entry into its world, but unfortunately what could have been a great journey for the entirety of the game is marred by a couple of not so inspired design choices.
The game has you go through a succession of randomly generated rooms, shooting your way into oblivion until the unsavory denizens or innumerable hazards that lie patiently in wait for your arrival manage to send you to the afterlife.
Once you enter a particular room, you have to take out all the enemies before it is cleared and it allows access to the next one, and boss rooms will lock behind you, ensuring that only one of you will make it out alive.
Apart from the roaming baddies, you’ll also have to pay attention to various hazards, as many traps are itching for you to go near them so they can zap or poison you. The good news however is that many of them can be employed to your advantage, helping you clear rooms faster.
There are also some elites to tackle from time to time, which will pose a considerable threat and grant you some much needed items once you manage to take them down, and there is enough overall variety to keep you interested during your first few playthroughs.
You are initially armed with a trusty fireball, and killing stuff will net you experience points, which will allow you access to some upgrades once you reach a certain threshold, provided of course you manage to survive that long.
The game is pretty difficult, which is not something bad in itself, but unfortunately its difficulty is not always related to the rate at which you improve your skills and the various enemies and mechanics thrown at you, and in some cases it seems artificially augmented by the laws of hazard.
The controls for instance are one of the factors that contribute to the game feeling artificially difficult. You cannot use the mouse or a controller, and shooting is done using the directional keys, which will feel pretty confusing until you get the hang of it.
The bad part is that you cannot shoot diagonally and moving in a certain direction while shooting will make your projectiles have a slightly altered trajectory, not enough to be of any use when running away, especially since when you’re running you would really want to shoot in the opposite direction of your movement, but enough to make you miss a lot of shots, which quickly becomes frustrating.
Getting used to the system is moot, as the way it is designed hampers your attempts to dodge projectiles while still shooting your target, requiring you to do it in an unnatural fashion of dodging and then changing direction in order for your shot to hit.
Another sketchy thing is the speed at which you move, which seems to be a bit slow considering that rooms tend to be full of stuff that’s trying to kill you. It does make the dodge roll more effective, but it feels as if it’s forcing you to use it because you have no choice rather than offering you an exciting move to employ at the right time for great effect.
On top of this, the worst balance element is the randomness of the whole adventure. The core tenet of roguelike design is to beat the odds in an insurmountable encounter in order to be greatly rewarded afterwards. Or die miserably. And although the dying miserably part is pretty well implemented, the rewards are simply not there.
Usually, after defeating a big bad boss in a bullet hell scenario, you would expect some sort of reward. Instead, you only get a couple of points which don’t amount to much, making you feel like the game is designed to reward the amount of time you spend grinding the easier levels and not the excellence which can be attained in a single playthrough.
The permanent progression elements are certainly nice, and could offer a rewarding experience where you get a sense of accomplishment after unlocking several upgrades which will make you more powerful and allow you to breeze through what used to be some grueling initial levels.
Instead you don’t really know what or when you’re going to get, and you’ll just grind for points and donate them hoping to get some nice perks which will fail to impress in any way but will gradually make you stronger, permitting you to grind some more.
Which is really a problem, since item drops are so few and far between that they won’t really help you a great deal, especially since getting your health back up is entirely dependent on luck, such as finding a vending machine right after finding some coins littering a previous room, which when it happens feels like the stars are aligning, not like somebody designed the game to work in a certain way that allows you to make progress if you put enough effort in.
If the sounds and music can get pretty annoying after some time, although initially making a good impression, the musical score being extremely well suited but becoming too repetitive after a while, the visuals remain solid throughout the entirety of the game.
The grim cartoonish style presented by Our Darker Purpose is reminiscent of the illustrations seen in children’s cautionary tales, blending the humorous content with a cheerless and depressing presentation that greatly adds to the overall mood.
Our Darker Purpose is a great game in many ways, presenting an engaging and testing fast-paced gameplay combined with some dark narrative and grim, foreboding visuals, peppered with an essential dose of black humor.
It unfortunately suffers from some major pitfalls, robbing players of the quintessential control over their own fate that roguelikes rely on by being so random and difficult to control and requiring them to grind for permanent upgrades before they can progress through its content.
The game makes you feel like there’s nothing to really fight for, there is no incentive to kill a new and difficult boss when you can just let him kill you and start all over and get some permanent points with the previous easier ones, and it just doesn’t feel like it’s finished in its current state.
