They say “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but if I believed that, I wouldn’t play video games – and I certainly wouldn’t be playing roguelikes. They are, by definition, doing a lot of the same things over and over again and expecting that this time, this time, Steve, shall be different. This time, I am going to bash my head against that boss until that mother goes down. This time, I’m going to make it to the end of the run, and I’m going to look fabulous doing it. This time will be different. Those are the things I tell myself as I die for the umpteenth time in Absolum, a roguelite beat ‘em up that’s fun enough to convince myself it just might be true every single time.
There is, of course, the undeniable possibility that I’ve gone ‘round the bend, full on cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, lock-me-in-a-padded-room, Looney-Tunes-finger-on-lips bonkers. I’ll leave that up to you. The point, reader, is that if you’d put a gun to my head five hours into Absolum and demanded that I score it on the spot, it’d be a lot lower than the score you see on the bottom of this page. But I’m a professional, and you don’t turn the movie off halfway through. There are large parts of Absolum’s fusion of genres that don’t work, and those growing pains are most obvious early on. But if you push through that weak start and get to the point where you’ve got some permanent rewards, have opened up the map, and runs end with you operating with a full kit and making good progress, it comes together quite nicely, even if it’s still never quite the game I wanted it to be.
“Roguelite beat ‘em up” is a combination of words that I never expected to see, much less put in a sentence, but here we are. Because it’s a roguelite, you need a reason to die, and a reason to come back. The reason to die is simple: the land of Talamh, broken by a magical cataclysm (bro, what is it with mages and magical cataclysms? Why can’t they ever bumble their way into magical utopias?), has been taken over by Sun King Azra. Wizards are enslaved, and the general populace, still a bit miffed by the whole “breaking the world” thing, are understandably not super upset about it. You play as one of the rebels using that forbidden magic in an attempt to bring him down. That’s the “how you’ll die” part.
The “why you’ll come back” part is because you’re working for Uchawi, the last of the Root Sisters, and as you bite it, she swoops in and saves your ass from being condemned to a permanent end. Live, die, get saved by Uchawi, repeat. The Sun King must die. And you gotta kill him.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a good ol’ fashioned “somebody done somebody/a lot of somebodies/society/the world at large wrong and now that somebody gotta die” story as much as the next guy, but Absolum’s problem is that the story isn’t that interesting for a good chunk of its runtime, especially early on. Yeah, there are some compelling character moments, the general history of the world is cool, and some conversations enticingly imply more questions than they answer. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, but a lot of it is couched in a fairly generic fantasy setting. Dwarves live underground, they delved too greedily and too deep (figuratively), bad things happened; elves have a mythical, lost land; the strong rule in many places so you can gain entrance by beating up The Current Big Boss, blah blah blah. The story does go to some cool places eventually (and, like Hades, you really gotta play it to completion multiple times to see everything), but man does it take a while to get there.
It’s good, then, that the playing part of Absolum rules. In a lot of ways, it’s a standard beat ‘em up with four different characters to pick from (though you only start with the first two listed here): Karl, the bruiser dwarf with a gun; Galandra, the elven knight with a massive sword; Cider, a nimble thief who is almost more machine than woman; and Brome, the frog-shaped spellcaster. Each character has a standard combo, a throw, a strike unique to that character – Galandra uses her sword, Cider pulls herself to enemies, and so on – a couple of unique special attacks tied to a meter, and an Ultimate Attack.
The real sicko stuff comes when you combine everything to form long combos, bounce enemies off walls or each other, and chain moves together in a symphonic beatdown that would make the deepest action game aficionado blush. Absolum was made by the teams behind Streets of Rage 4, and, as you’d expect, it absolutely has the sauce. I particularly loved the way so many moves paid homage to the greats: Cider’s Gyro Drop is essentially Ryu Hayabusa’s Izuna Drop, many of Galandra’s moves recall Devil May Cry’s Dante, and so on. If you know, you know. If you don’t, they’re just cool moves.
The big thing separating Absolum from its beat ‘em up brethren, aside from the whole “man, can you get lost in this sauce and it tastes good” combo-mad gameplay, is its focus on defense. You can dodge, which is pretty normal for a modern beat ’em up, but if you dodge toward an enemy at the right time, you can deflect their attacks, potentially opening them up. If you’re feeling particularly spicy, though, you can time your strikes with an enemy’s attack to cause a clash and stun them for a hot second, allowing you to lay into them with a sweet, sweet punish combo. This is harder, but the payoff is huge. And it feels great when you land it against a boss who was kicking the crap out of you and then the timing clicks and they can’t hit you no more. On a moment to moment gameplay level, Absolum’s bona fides are unimpeachable.
Its problems instead stem from its structure as a roguelite. Unlocking new rituals that power up your attacks, deflects, clashes, dodges, and so on each run is fine. I particularly like the ones that spawn throwable knives and allow you to extend combos by locking dudes into a bubble or hitting them with chain lighting. Finding a mount to help you out? Awesome. Buying or finding some trinkets to boost your stats or hiring a mercenary (or finding a chicken) to follow you around and help out in combat? That stuff is great.
What sucks is that parts of each character’s kit have clearly been chopped up and segmented into upgrades called Inspirations for you to temporarily acquire during your runs. Galandra’s dive kick? Amazing. Life-changing. The same is true of her three-hit sword combo. She should always have it. She doesn’t only because this is a roguelite and we have to have something to upgrade, a reason to choose that path that you know will end in an Inspiration. When you go from that one hit sword attack to the three-hit combo, it’s like being struck by lightning. The same is true of Cider’s Legally Distinct Izuna Drop or her ability to dash through enemies. “Oh,” I said, after getting them once. “This is how it should always be.” These are core parts of these characters’ identities and kits. They shouldn’t all be locked behind random upgrades. Like, give me something here that I don’t have to unlock besides my strikes and special attacks, y’all. Just a little bit of fun, as a treat. Admittedly, once you learn what paths lead to upgrades (Absolum is a roguelike, but its map does not change), you’ll quickly learn what the optimal path is, and likely never deviate from it.
The other problem is the persistent progression. Absolum isn’t a game you’re meant to beat on the first run. You’re supposed to die – a lot – while you build up the currency needed to acquire permanent upgrades (and find new paths full of rewards) to get you through future runs. Yeah, sure, if you’re really good at Absolum, you might be able to progress faster, but the margin of error early on is very, very small. In both solo and co-op, I often felt like I was dying because my numbers just weren’t high enough. It doesn’t help that Absolum is pretty stingy on health pickups. This structure might work in a game like Hades, but there’s very little narrative meat to chew on between runs, and in a beat ‘em up – a genre where you’re traditionally able to get by on sheer skill – it feels bad to be a slave to the Evil God of Numbers. I genuinely hate it when RPG elements get in the way of my action game, and that happens a lot in Absolum’s early hours.
At the beginning, runs feel like you’re going through the motions. You always start at the same place, and you have very limited paths to choose from. That means seeing the same enemies, environments, and bosses over and over and over again with very little room for change. Yes, there are quests, and exciting new things do pop up from time to time – I’ll never forget the first time I went to [redacted] (trust me, you’ll know when it happens) – but there is a lot of repetition here, and Absolum doesn’t handle it the way the best roguelikes, like FTL, for example, do. In the early hours, I often felt like a broken record, testing that definition of insanity. Even the joy of finding a secret chest is dulled by the fact that it’s always there, in the same place, every time. While the stuff you’ll get changes and new things do get added, the map itself never fundamentally changes. There’s not enough Rogue to this roguelite. It can’t just be a progression system. It has to be everything around that, too, and implementing that clashes with the way beat ‘em ups work.
It does eventually click; around 8 hours in, my mastery and Having Enough Numbers dovetailed, and I started to make more and more progress on each run. The jump was pretty substantial, and once that happened, I began to enjoy myself a lot more. On the one hand, yay, less repetition! On the other hand, I think there’s something to be said for games using mechanics and structure to reinforce their narrative. Dying over and over again while you work to take down a tyrant would suck! It would wear on you! I think that decision helps Absolum’s story, but I don’t think that story is strong enough, especially initially, to earn that. It doesn’t feel intentional; instead, it feels like padding out a runtime that could (and should) be much shorter.
And it sucks to feel that way, because so much of Absolum is so good. When it hits, it hits, kids. It’s beautiful, the soundtrack is wonderful, the combat has the sauce, there are cool build opportunities, and on and on it goes. But man could I have gone without the repetition. There’s a better version of this game somewhere that’s about half of the 20 or so hours it took me to see the conclusion of the main story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we got, and if I wasn’t reviewing Absolum, I probably would have bowed out before it ever clicked. My co-op partner did, and I can’t blame him for it.
