Absolum blends unique genres together in a surprisingly harmonious experience
I used to scribble goblins and dragons and knights and dwarves in the margins of my notebooks in junior high school. If we were discussing math or history, or taking notes in English class or science, you would find the spiral bound pages on my desk being furiously filled with scenes straight out of an Eighties cartoon. Sorry to all of my teachers, I swear I was still paying attention.
Back then the big gaming genre of arcades was beat’em ups. Giant sprites, brutal brawling action, and a constant scroll to the right of the screen. At home it was a different story, as RPGs were becoming kings of consoles. There was a line between engaging characters and deep narratives, and combos and muscles.
It’s 2025 now, decades later, and Absolum has managed to ram those genres together into a facepalmingly obvious concept that, with the help of rogue-lite flavoring, works so, so well.
The game is a beat’em up at its mechanical core. We select a character (out of two at first, more later) kick the asses of any enemies that we come across using swords, fists and magic. One layer above that gives us lite RPG elements with an engaging narrative, characters, and vibrant, persistent map. And the layer above that gives us the modern rogue-lite points that we’ve grown to accept and hopefully love.
The world of Absolum has sort of been broken apart; different factions are at war and magic has been forbidden by the omnious Sun King. We’re a rebel, we can use magic, and we’re aligned with Uchawi, a goddess that is fighting to save the world — so it’s up to us to do the grunt work. Using Uchawi’s domain as a sort of hub, we go out and brawl, build up our strength, get further into the map, and then die. That’s when she resurrects us and kicks in that rogue-lite loop.
The action side of things is terrific. Galandra, our Elf Knight, wields a giant sword, and through upgrades we can attain an explosive swipe and wind attacks that wreck shit up. Karl the Dwarf is neat, too, because he has a big dwarven gun. There are different attacks that we can use, like any brawler, and we can grow and adjust them. We can dodge and parry, deflect projectiles, slide across the screen, run, jump, and combine all of that into some wicked combos.
The story itself is a little bland, but only because we’ve exprienced similar in the vein of D&D for the last 40 years. But the world and its design is great, more than making up for it. We move along a map that’s slowly exposed, much like rogue-lites do, but because it’s a fully featured world it’s persistent; we see a lot of the same stuff early on, over and over as we develop our builds, but I can appreciate that I’m not having to re-learn every path when I take on a run. Like those classic RPGs of the the Eighties & Nineties Absolum includes main quests and sub quests, a vibrant world, a lot of deeply developed locations, and a ton of characters to meet — it’s a great way to keep us engaged and exploring.
Oh, and that hand-drawn style is wonderful. It really does remind me of my notebook scribbles. The intentionally low frames per second on the character animations makes it feel like watching shows after school.
Absolum is really enjoyable. It’s lengthy, but the persistence of plot and design means that our runs always feel meaningful, even if they are a bit repetitive when going down the same path again and again. Its hybrid genre design channels nostalgia as well as modern touches. And, well, it keeps my mind off of math and civics for a few more hours.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for October 15, 2025.
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