This article is part of Run, Die, Repeat, Polygon’s week-long series exploring roguelikes.
Try to picture this hypothetical game. You’re controlling a character bashing their way through a 2D world. You clear out room after room of enemies, paying close attention to your limited health bar, until you reach a big boss at the end. You come out victorious and move on to a new biome. The bad guys get beefier and eventually overwhelm your frail hero. When you die, you don’t spawn at a friendly checkpoint; you’re sent right back to the start with nothing but the knowledge of attack patterns you’ve gained — and hopefully a bit more skill.
What kind of game comes to mind when you hear that description? Depending on what era of gaming you grew up in, you might have a very different idea than someone else reading this. A modern player might picture a roguelike along the lines of Rogue Legacy 2. An older player who grew up with beat-em-ups might find themselves back in a mall arcade, losing countless quarters to an X-Men cabinet.
Those two genres may sound distant in today’s gaming landscape, but they’re more closely linked than they seem at a surface glance. And it’s something that the developers behind Streets of Rage 4 see as clear as day.
For their follow-up to 2020’s hit retro revival, the duo of Dotemu and Guard Crush (alongside animation studio Supamonks) are expanding their approach to genre with Absolum. The upcoming 2D side-scroller, which is currently targeting a 2025 launch on PC, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch, is both a classic beat-em-up and a modern roguelike in the same breath. It’s a mash-up that unearths a natural link in gaming’s evolutionary chain, and one that pushed a team of arcade experts to deconstruct its retro formula.
After finding success with Streets of Rage 4, the teams at Dotemu and Guard Crush knew they wanted to collaborate again. As they began thinking about what’s next, a few constraints came up, according to Absolum lead game designer Gauthier Brunet in a video interview over Zoom with Polygon. One was that the studios wanted to make something entirely new rather than reviving another retro franchise. The more crucial one was finding a way to reach new players.
“We had to create a new IP and we thought, how can we expand the beat-em-up [audience]?” Brunet told Polygon. “Because we know how many players were interested in Streets of Rage 4. But we wanted to bring the mechanics we were proud of to more players. The solution we decided for this was to try and bring some rogue inside it.”
The genre twist didn’t come out of thin air. The team tested how it could infuse roguelike DNA into one of its games with Streets of Rage 4’s survival mode, packaged into its Mr. X Nightmare DLC. That bonus mode had players clearing out arenas full of enemies and picking a power-up after each fight. The experiment got the teams thinking about where the two genres intersected.
“In some ways, a roguelike is very similar to Streets of Rage 4. You have a very natural link between an arcade game and a roguelike. The structure, how when you die you have to start again from the beginning, the length of the overall experience, all this kind of stuff,” Brunet said.
“You must have this moment where you choose an upgrade wisely because it might make or break the run.”
The brainstorming period would eventually lead to Absolum, a genre fusion set in an original fantasy universe. The side-scroller has all the markings of the kind of 2D brawler Dotemu is known for, but with added rogue DNA. There are “runs” where players try to make it through a stretch of biomes while grabbing power-ups as a reward for clearing combat screens. Death takes players back to a hub, where new characters and passive powers can be unlocked. There’s buildcrafting potential in each attempt, separating it from the pure skill-based nature of your standard arcade side-scroller.
When I first played a build of Absolum earlier this year ahead of its reveal in April, I was both surprised it worked so well and shocked that a game like it hadn’t been done to death already. Beat-em-ups with a rogue structure do exist, but Absolum is one of the few I’ve tried that’s confident in drawing a line back to 2D arcade classics. It posits that clearing a room of enemies in Hades isn’t all that far off from pummeling bad guys on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles screen. Maybe the only difference is what you start with when you put in another quarter.
The team would draw direct inspiration from games like Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara and Golden Axe for the beat-em-up side, and draw from its love of games like Dead Cells for the roguelike one. Though they found common links between those games, working in an adjacent genre took some adjustment for a team that had locked down the Streets of Rage formula.
“It was natural at first, but when we had to go in-depth and create specific mechanics, we understood that we had a lot to learn contrary to the beat-em-up,” Brunet said. “We had an expertise on it that came from many years of doing beat-em-ups on our team. For a roguelike, we knew the genre and had played all the games, but when we’re working and saying ‘how can we make the progression very fluid?’ We had to iterate a lot. It was a real change for us.”
That’s where the nuances began to add up. As similar as the genres are on paper, it’s the details that set them apart. When the team wanted to add mounts to the game, for instance, they’d now have to consider how that tool could become part of a potential build. It wasn’t enough for something to just be a reliable attack that you learn and master.
“The beat-em-up is a very skill-based game where you have to learn how to play and improve,” Brunet said. “It’s a linear experience, while roguelikes are an exponential experience. You have this build layer which is very important in the rogue and we wanted to put it in our game, but it means having a synergy, building power. You must have this moment with a game-breaking build. You must have this moment where you choose an upgrade wisely because it might make or break the run.”
It’s through that thought process that you can see why genres matter to developers even when they feel pedantic to your average player. I get it — sometimes I roll my eyes when I hear someone use the term “Metroidvania” instead of just describing something as an adventure game. Even “beat-em-up” can come across as a needlessly complicated way to say “action.” It’s an alienating lexicon that makes it hard for a layperson player to parse what a game is – especially once genre purists begin splitting hairs over subgenres within genres. For some people, Dead Cells and Streets of Rage are the same kind of game. I don’t think they’re wrong from a wide angle.
But it’s those little complexities of genre that make projects like Absolum, or hybrids like it, so appealing. They force you to think about how genres are connected. What is the intersecting point between a deckbuilder and a roguelike? What pillars do those experiences share and how can you create a game that emphasizes them? That’s how you wind up with something like Balatro, which so cleverly saw the connection between crafting a poker hand and creating a build.
That’s the essence of a roguelike on some level too; you keep mixing and matching power ups together until you discover that game-changing synergy. Maybe that’s what Dotemu and Guard Crush understand with Absolum. It’s a work of buildcrafting in itself.
