#absolum

Siblings in Arms

Absolum dropped quietly in October this year. I’ve seen it called ‘hades for people who like beat em ups’ and that’s really not wrong. It also just scratches the surface.

You know the slightly melancholic feeling when you find a gem of a game with hand drawn art in all the promos and clips only to realize the gameplay is in at least partial 3D? That doesn’t happen here because Absolum is completely hand drawn.

How about when an otherwise solid concept has lacking mechanical depth or tedious loops? Again not a problem. Absolum is deep. Don’t be fooled by how easy it is to pick up the systems. They’re just that well designed. Every effort went to creating a densely branching roguelite meta progression.

Oh yeah it’s a roguelite. A pretty perfectly designed one at that. With four playable characters you can swap between, two to start and two you unlock in quests, not only does the gameplay loop work thematically and narratively, it allows you to explore each character perspective-integrated mechanically-in full. This also creates incredibly fun variety in gameplay. With four base builds and four characters to explore distinct per-run builds, the loop is endlessly fun.

Absolum feels like a tribute to the robust but straightforward gaming experiences of the 90s, just with none of the jank and infinitely better art design. There’s no pandering here, no cheap nostalgia or inferior imitations of better games. It’s what revisiting an older ‘genre’ should be. It loves those old games, but it knows how to do things they never could. A fully fleshed out classic fantasy world that understands its roots, gorgeous animations and soundscape, and a really great score round it all out.