Absolum, like so many of its roguelike peers, is a game about experimentation. Four heroes set out on a quest to defeat a mad tyrant and save their realm, but they are all but destined to fail on their first attempt. The only path to victory is through change, mixing and matching magic spells to more effectively cut through rooms full of soldiers, lizards, and suicidal mushrooms. Even their route to the big bad can’t remain static, as being bold enough to venture down new paths will lead them to new spells and secrets. You don’t win a war without shaking up your tactics every now and again.
On a meta level, that’s seemingly the design philosophy of Absolum itself. The new 2D action game from Streets of Rage 4 collaborators Dotemu, Guard Crush, and Supamonks is an original retro beat-’em-up that calls back to the good old days of arcade brawling. But rather than presenting it as your usual two-hour fist fight gauntlet, the studios transform an old formula by mixing in ideas from modern roguelikes. It’s an act of buildcrafting in itself, a mixing and matching of genres to reinvent a winning formula rather than trying the same trick again. While that’s a noble effort, Absolum’s overeager genre fusion shows that some of gaming’s most battle-tested ideas are timeless for good reason.
Inspired by Capcom’s Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara, Absolum is a high-fantasy beat-’em-up that can either be played entirely solo or with up to two players in co-op. It’s set in a place called Talamh, an original fantasy world that is ruled by the evil Sun King, Azra. On first glance, it looks like your standard arcade game. In my first run, I took control of Galandra, a blue-skinned elf with a giant sword, and began cutting through screen after screen of monsters en route to a beefy boss equipped with a massive shield. It’s elegantly retro, tempting me to chain together basic attacks and spell uses and rack up massive combo chains. The combat is deceptively rich too, with punish attacks (hits during an enemy’s attack recovery) and aerial maneuvers that make it feel like a fighting game when executed at a high level. And all of that happens as I pass through illustrative biomes that make Absolum feel like a fantasy comic book come to life.
It comes as no surprise that Dotemu and company nail the fundamentals of brawling. This is a publisher that has made its name on honoring one of gaming’s most foundational genres, and it’s a treat to see it inventing its own original game in that great lineage rather than reviving another classic series.
Absolum is brimming with creative energy. The level designers make the most of their 2D spaces to make Talamh feel like a sprawling realm, one that spans a handful of diverse continents and islands. There’s a full internal logic for how magic works in the world, one that gives you a sense of a spiritual undercurrent that you’re tapping into every time you unlock a new power. The ragtag quartet of heroes make for fun leads too. Each plays with fantasy archetypes without sticking too close to your default Dungeons and Dragons character in look and feel. The best of the bunch is Brome, a frog wizard who lashes foes with his tongue.
That spirit is just as present in the format of the game itself. While it looks like a traditional beat-’em-up, Absolum is a roguelite through and through. My quest to hunt down the Sun King goes through runs where I’m expected to fail, get some meta progression rewards for my efforts, and try again. It’s a smart fusion of old and new in theory. In an old-school arcade game, you are expected to lose and start again over and over (unless you have enough quarters). That flow logically connects to a modern run-based game. If you’re going to start from scratch every 20 minutes, why not make each new attempt feel meaningful?
The end result of that approach is inconsistent, but occasionally ingenious too. The most immediate hurdle of this kind of genre hybridization is that it’s not conducive to variability. The illustrated 2D levels are visually inflexible, so Dotemu can’t lean on procedural generation to make runs feel different. To solve for that, each biome is filled with criss-crossing routes — some hidden in plain sight — that change the scenery each run. In the first area, I can choose a northern path and end up on a beach. I could also make my way south and wind up in a dreary mine full of evil mushrooms, or break into a ghostly manor. Experimenting with where I go eventually leads me to quests that require me to hunt for a specific path on a subsequent run. While seeing the exact same screens a few too many times can wear thin in the first biome, Absolum gives you enough reason to try new routes and hunt down every secret space you can.
There’s an art to giving players new rewards without making it feel like they’re just playing a two-hour action game arbitrarily stretched out by forced blockades.
What’s less compelling is the meat and potatoes of it all. Like most games in its genres, each run has you picking up spells and augments that slowly change your character’s play style. The bulk of the powers revolve around elemental magic sets that are unlocked as you discover them in set points of the world. Each one feels a bit one-dimensional early on. Fire magic imbues my strikes with scorching powers, lightning sends sparks to nearby enemies, wind spawns small tornadoes, etc. Few of them change anything about my actual play style so much as they augment my moves.
The build potential is limited for a good stretch of Absolum. The baseline powers don’t mix and match in any exciting way, and I’m often picking up the same passive trinkets that buff my attack power, defense, and health by percentage points that mean little to me. I can at least change things up by choosing a different character and equipping them with one of a few special abilities, but battles can feel fairly static.
The synergies do come eventually, but it takes a long time due to Absolum’s over-reliance on piecemeal progression. Each run, I amass several currencies that widen out what I can do gradually. I’m not just buffing my max health or giving myself revives, but also unlocking new twists to my magic kits and creating a higher chance of getting rare trinkets.
Though the constant trickle of progression gave me reason to keep playing, Absolum can feel like it takes eight hours just to gain access to the best version of the game. I only began to feel like there was more I could do beyond punching as I finally got close to the Sun King. By then, I had enough unlocked that I could craft a build that relied on me spawning throwable thorns via turrets that I could keep casting thanks to a fast mana-regenerating build. That allowed me to create one hell of a cheese where I practically juggled the end boss in the air for a few minutes without giving him the ability to fight back. It was a gratifying moment, but it feels like one that’s only possible after hours of grinding.
Roguelites are a tricky genre to crack. There’s an art to giving players new rewards without making it feel like they’re just playing a two-hour action game arbitrarily stretched out by forced blockades. Absolum runs into the same problems as Evil Empire’s recent The Rogue Prince of Persia in that it feels like victory is gated behind a certain number of failures. I never had the hope that I’d crack a winning run early on, especially because it took me hours to ever even see the kind of rare trinket that opens the door for actual builds.
It’s a funny quirk because players used to have no trouble putting hours into old beat-’em-ups without chasing carrots. In the arcade era, there was a simple joy in dying and trying again. Every session was an excuse to sharpen your skills and get enemy attack patterns down pat. Perfection was the reward, as beating a brawler in one-go was an accomplishment on par with besting the most difficult Dark Souls boss. Today’s retro developers, even the ones like Dotemu who wear their love of the past on their sleeves, don’t feel as confident that today’s players will keep coming back to that experience. Just look at this year’s Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, which needlessly shoehorns a Metroidvania element to an otherwise excellent retro 2D game. The hope is that players will get more time out of it by going back into levels to grab the collectibles they couldn’t get on their first go. It’s an artificial incentive, whereas the chase for a higher score is tangible. You could see the fruits of your efforts on display as you climbed the leaderboards more and more. Mastery was reward enough.
The tiresome progression doesn’t wipe away the core thrill of Absolum. I eventually tuned all the shiny bits out as I hyper-focused on becoming a beast with Brome. I learned every combo, figuring out how to most efficiently chain together my tongue lashes and staff hits. Some of my proudest moments weren’t late in runs where I was loaded with powerful upgrades, but in the early moments where I had almost nothing. It was just me stitching together 100-hit combos or melting down a boss’ health bar by confidently pressing my attack. That skill could only bring me so far as I waited for more perks to unlock, a small betrayal of the genre, but I know that I would have kept playing with or without them. It’s not like I beat any of my favorite arcade brawlers as a kid either. Sometimes defeating a game isn’t the ultimate goal; there’s just as much pleasure in the sparring sessions.
Absolum is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Dotemu. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
