Our Darker Purpose

[ColCol]

Issac Clone called Our Darker Purpose is out: http://store.steampowered.com/app/262790/


Any one try it?

 

[Name]

A Kickstarter game! Anyone backed it?

 

[kazgar]

FromWisdomToHate posted some screenshots in the screenshot thread. (scroll past the m&m x pics)

summoning for opinions.

 

[Coyote]

Picked up a copy of this a while back. As ColCol said, it's a Binding of Isaac clone, with the same basic structure - randomly generated Zelda-esque dungeons where you use ranged attacks to fight enemies, a boss at the end of every floor, items that give you new abilities and enhance your stats, unlockables, etc. - so I'm going to mainly talk about where it differs. I haven't played the BoI remake yet, so this is all based on the original+WotL.

Gameplay:

• Classes are traits you can choose between before starting a game and serve as a more customizable form of Isaac's character selection, as well as being where you choose to play in hard mode once you've unlocked it. Each class requires a certain number of periods from a fixed pool to equip, and deselecting a class frees up its periods to be spent on something else. You can unlock classes and gain more periods by succeeding at certain challenges within the game.
• Each time you complete a floor you gain a certain number of credits - with a bonus depending on your performance - that can be spent to equip any class you've unlocked. This is a one-time charge; you can select the class freely after that, provided that you have enough periods open to equip it. Up to 10,000 credits can also be invested in permanent benefits that affect all future playthroughs.
• You gain experience and level up as you beat enemies. When you level up you get to choose between two randomly selected books out of about thirty to apply 1-2 traits to your character. Here, possibly even more than what items appear in a playthrough, is where the RNG plays its largest role in the game, as some of the traits you can pick at level-ups make a huge difference while others are pretty unremarkable.
• Aside from the damage/range/health/firing speed/movement speed stats that mirror the ones in Isaac, there's also critical chance (chance of dealing double damage with an attack) dodge (chance of taking no damage from an attack) and resistance (chance of taking half damage from an attack, raised in larger increments than dodge).
• Juice boxes and chalk are single-use items that can be used at the press of a button like bombs from Isaac. Juice boxes are health potions that you can carry in limited quantities and serve as the primary method of restoring health in the game, and chalk (which forms clouds around you) blocks projectiles and can also be used to damage enemies and remove certain types of damaging obstacles. Both can be enhanced to have other properties via items and classes.
• You can roll out of the way of enemies' attacks, and there are some items and classes that modify your roll (e.g., making it faster, increasing your dodge stat while rolling, changing it into a short-range teleport/haste effect).
• Most of the time when you complete a floor you'll get 2-4 choices for the next floor. The primary criterion you'll use here is the floor's trait, a floor-wide effect that functions sort of like a curse in Isaac except that traits are either positive or involve a tradeoff. You'll also be able to see what sort of enemies you can expect to encounter and, with a certain item, which boss will show up at the end of the floor.
• Light plays a role in the game, as you have a limited visual radius around your character that can be expanded or diminished by certain items/floor traits. Some environments are also just naturally better-lit than others.
• Finally, the game is pretty text-heavy for the genre, though it's all entirely skippable. There are descriptions on the floor selection screen and at the start of each chapter of the game, you get lore entries with more information about the setting by beating bosses and exploring secret rooms, and there's a chance that some of the background objects will engage in conversation whenever you clear a room. Most of these chats are intended to be humorous, but they can also reveal background information and/or foreshadow boss fights.
• Edit: Oh yeah, and there's no built-in gamepad support for the game. Didn't bother me as I've always played Isaac on a keyboard, but it might make a difference for some people. There also aren't Steam achievements at the moment, but it looks like they're getting ready to add them.

My impressions:

• Easily the weakest part of the game is the lack of variety:
  • Each "faction" of enemies, which you can typically expect to encounter on 2-3 floors, has only ~5-6 enemy types, and it'd be possible to encounter all of the bosses in the game except two over the course of two runs.
  • There are very few special rooms to speak of: no gambling halls, minibosses, devil/angel rooms, challenge rooms, beggars, etc., just the occasional secret room, room with some trivial obstacles in the way of an item, or (on hard mode) room with enemies/traps that wouldn't normally be found on the current floor. Very rarely there's a room with some cat-like enemies that always drop an item when cleared.
  • You'll see the same items again and again on every run, as there are only about 100 and you can expect to encounter at least a third of them over the course of a full run. This is further exacerbated by certain items being less common than others and/or only showing up later in the game.
  • Most importantly, the items themselves are less varied in their effects than those of Isaac; there are very few gamechangers along the lines of brimstone, epic fetus, the dice, flight items, and so on. Some items are more useful than others, certainly, but for the most part they just make clearing rooms faster rather than actually changing how you should approach them.
• On the other hand, probably a good 90% of the items are handy on any run even if not ideal, which wasn't the case for me in Isaac, and even the most powerful item combos can't make or break a hard mode run on their own. Overall, it seems like the RNG has less of an effect and the game has a more consistent level of challenge.
• Speaking of challenge, ODP is much more difficult than Isaac, comparing hard mode to hard mode. For the most part it's also pretty fair; however, there is one major exception in the form of a boss who becomes a complete clusterfuck of poor design in hard mode. (To make matters worse, it shows up halfway through the game, you have a 50 percent chance of encountering it in any playthrough, and one of the other bosses you can encounter on the same set of floors is the second most aggravating boss in the game.)
• Most bosses have way too much HP bloat for this sort of game, so they can become pretty tedious to fight once you've mastered their patterns. Hard mode does help rejuvenate things a bit by adding at least one new element to every boss fight.
• Active items play a much greater role than in Isaac. You can use them as soon as you enter a room and once every x number of seconds afterwards as opposed to once every x number of rooms, and several tough enemies can be made much easier with the right active on hand. I found them a lot more useful than most of Isaac's offense-oriented actives as a result.
• The light mechanic is an interesting idea, but in practice it's not much fun flailing around in the dark, so if you're like me it'll mostly mean that you avoid certain floors until you're very familiar with the potential room layouts.
• Classes are pretty cool. I'm often not a fan of this sort of mechanic in roguelikes/roguelike-inspired games where you increase your starting power over the course of several playthroughs because it's often designed in such a way that you're robbed of potential wins early on in order to pad out the game's length. In this case, however, classes aren't so vital to a normal mode win for this to be a problem, while simultaneously being powerful and versatile enough that there's strong incentive to pursue the challenges that unlock them.
• I like the art design. To use the closest game example, it's a bit reminiscent of Don't Starve. Tim Burton would be the most obvious non-game comparison, maaaaaaybe Edward Gorey. I've just posted some pics in the screenshot thread, so you can judge for yourself.
• The music is pretty good, and each track is a good fit for the area in which it's played.
• Most of the humor fell flat for me. It's a pretty minor part of the game, though.
• The story is very opaque and open to interpretation. The ending may seem like a bizarre non sequitur at first, but something from one of the lore entries ties it all together rather neatly IMO, and it's one of those cases where you'll look back at the whole game in a different light once you see it.

Overall, I'd say that due mainly to how little there is to distinguish one playthrough from another, it's decidedly inferior to Isaac and doesn't have nearly as much lasting appeal. I still liked it and feel like I got my money's worth - it's satisfyingly challenging, and it's got the best art design I've seen among the Isaac clones and better writing than I would have expected - but I'd only really recommend it if you liked Isaac and are looking for something a bit different that scratches the same itch.

 

[Lucky]

The developers are still supporting this, with more patches having been released and more being in the making.

Important changes:
Gamepad support (for xbox360).
Save on Exit.
More items.
Stat tweaks
Bug fixes.
Confusion now only reverses your shooting (which kinda breaks some areas in the later levels).

Steam related changes:
Steam achievements are implemented.
Cloud saves.
Soundtrack is available.


The game itself is definitely an Isaac-clone, but only this and Nuclear Throne I'd say are nonetheless different enough to be worth checking out. There's less variety in terms of items, enemies and playstyles than in Isaac, but the game quite a bit more challenging. The levels themselves are also generally larger than those found in Isaac and the lesson system works well in that it is fun to tinker with and incentivises achievements in a non-forced way.
Nice artstyle and music, plus better written than is typical for this kind of game. One quibble though is that:

Spoiler

the final reveal as to whom the game is actually about lacks impact, since he's only a character mentioned in passing and not encountered during the playing of the game. That's the whole point of it, but that does make it more or less unrelated to Cordy, who the player will have a much stronger connection to by virtue of having played as her. This makes it less of climax to the story and more a separate story that paints the game in a different light. That doesn't make it a bad ending, but I do feel like it could have been done more elegantly.

Gameplay tips:
-The levels that give you tokens in exchange for a stat reductions are useless.
-Juice box boosts are better than chalk boosts, especially the ones that increase your damage and health.
-Most of the lessons that take up more periods are not worth it. Stacking several weaker ones is way more effective.
-The 'add dodge to roll', 'faster roll' and 'shoot while roll' are easy to get and will never stop being incredibly useful.
-Don't get the item that increases your attack-speed at the cost of randomising your attack-trajectory, as you'll want to be able to aim.
-'Too big', 'sensitive', 'wealthy', 'power struggle' and 'gluttonous' are the floors you want to go for, especially 'gluttonous' if you took any of the levels that increase your health or damage when you use one. 'Pitchdark' is a pain to navigate unless you have the right items.
-Attack speed is better than move speed.
-The furniture destroying gale item is great for clearing floors.
-The potato-forcefield makes dealing with a screen filled with projectiles a lot easier.
-Slow-down does not work on bosses.
-Increase dodge whenever possible.
-Follow the ghost-guy.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I tried it out not long after it showed up but it left my computer gasping after running just a few floors. I seem to recall hearing something about the dev insanely encrypting all the stats in the game in an effort to make cheating more difficult.

 

[Lucky]

I had the same problem, but the game has been optimised a lot since then and now runs fine on my lappy. Doesn't get too hot and only some really minor slowdown during a few moments of absurd projectile-spam. It's a fairly new lappy, though, so I'm not sure how it would run if you have an old PC.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Had same performance problem, as well as some bug preventing me from saving between levels (?). I'll check it out again, thanks for the heads up.