The teachers have disappeared, the students have gone completely feral, and somebody’s started throwing furniture across the classroom. Meanwhile, the school’s administrators are hiding upstairs, leaving the children to sort out their differences with fireballs, flying desks, and whatever else they can get their hands on. It’s been a month since the adults vanished, and things at Edgewood Home for Lost Children have rapidly gone downhill.
For Cordy, a young girl trapped inside this increasingly murderous boarding school, surviving until graduation is looking pretty unlikely. Her classmates want her dead and the only way to find out what’s happening is to fight her way to the administrators’ offices.
Released on January 29, 2014, Our Darker Purpose is a gothic action roguelike from Avidly Wild Games. It quite clearly takes its inspiration from The Binding of Isaac with a twisted Victorian boarding school setting. It has distinctive hand-drawn artwork, brutal difficulty, and a Very Positive Steam rating from around 550 reviews. This overlooked little nightmare is still worth enrolling in more than a decade later.
School’s Out Forever
Edgewood Home for Lost Children wasn’t exactly a cheerful place before everything went wrong. Now that the teachers have vanished, the remaining students have turned on one another, transforming the huge Victorian building into a battleground filled with dangerous creatures and murderous classmates.
Cordy’s only hope of finding answers is to climb through the school’s increasingly dangerous floors and reach the administrators waiting above. However, the building changes between attempts.
Every expedition features procedurally generated levels, rearranging the rooms, enemies, and challenges you’ll encounter. You might find yourself dodging a nasty group of students during one attempt, only to stumble into an entirely different collection of horrors the next time.
The game also lets you choose between different routes as you ascend, forcing you to weigh up the dangers waiting along each path. One route could involve fighting a feral horde, while another brings you face-to-face with the dangerous Capulets.
Dodge the Fireballs and Watch Out for the Desks
Combat in Our Darker Purpose is fast, frantic, and quite happy to punish anybody who stops paying attention. You’ll fight your way through rooms filled with hostile students, bizarre creatures, and powerful bosses, using ranged attacks while dodging whatever the school throws at you.
Sometimes that’s a fireball, and sometimes it’s an actual desk. The top-down action takes inspiration from classic dungeon crawlers and bullet-heavy roguelikes, with positioning and quick reactions playing an important role in keeping Cordy alive. Enemies have different attack patterns, and some encounters can fill the room with enough projectiles to make finding a safe place to stand a challenge in itself.
Bosses introduce their own mechanics, giving you even more reasons to pay attention before charging into a fight. There’s also the small problem of possessed furniture.
Today’s Lesson…How to Die Horribly
Cordy might be a student, but her education doesn’t involve much reading, writing, or arithmetic. Instead, she’ll gain experience by uncovering Edgewood’s secrets and surviving its dangerous encounters. Every time she levels up, you’re offered a choice between two abilities, allowing you to gradually develop a build that suits your preferred approach.
You may focus on becoming a heavily armored bruiser, develop a fragile but powerful attacker, or invest in speed and mobility to keep ahead of the school’s increasingly aggressive residents. Randomized perks and upgrades make each attempt different, encouraging you to experiment with combinations rather than relying on the same strategy every time.
Some upgrades are more useful than others, though, and the game even includes cosmetic perks that offer no practical advantage. Looking fashionable is all well and good, but it’s unlikely to help when a classmate launches a desk at your head.
Even Death Can’t Get You Out of Class
After each failed attempt, you’ll meet an unusual guidance counselor…A kindly scarecrow who helps you spend the resources you’ve earned on permanent lessons and upgrades. Those improvements carry over into future attempts, giving Cordy a better chance of surviving the next trip through Edgewood.
You’ll also uncover more of the school’s story as you progress, gradually piecing together what happened to the missing adults and why the administrators have allowed everything to descend into chaos.
With 64 Steam achievements to unlock, randomized character builds, and multiple routes through the building, there’s plenty to keep you occupied.
A School Reunion Worth Attending
Our Darker Purpose has been available since 2014, making it one of the older games we’ve featured in Rogue Discovery. Its hand-drawn gothic visuals and grim boarding-school setting still give it a distinctive personality, particularly when paired with the game’s bizarre enemies and dark sense of humor.
It’s earned an 82% positive rating from around 550 Steam reviews, suggesting that the players who’ve discovered Edgewood have enjoyed their time there, despite its unforgiving difficulty. For fans of The Binding of Isaac looking for another challenging action roguelike, there’s plenty here to investigate, from the randomized abilities and permanent upgrades to the strange story unfolding behind the school’s locked doors.
With Halloween approaching, it’s also a fitting time to revisit this 2014 release and see whether Cordy can finally make it to the administrators’ offices.