## 2025-10-11 I cannot stop playing this damn game. **Absolum** is a beat-em-up crossed with a roguelike from the creators of **Streets of Rage 4**. It’s the kind of thing that makes so much sense when you hear about it that you’re shocked it hasn’t existed up to this point. The beat-em-up is the perfect genre to place within the structure of a roguelike. Both styles of game are about playing them over and over again, trying to get better and better with each run. Playing it just feels right, in this sense. It helps that the game controls like absolute butter and has [[Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain|goop]] for days. Guard Crush, the studio behind this game, has perfected the art of beating up a skeleton with a giant sword. Every hit, throw and special move has the perfect amount of hit-stop and weight. When you’re really getting into the swing of things you’ll find yourself nodding with satisfaction as you extend combos with one of the game’s four, equally engaging playable characters. A beat-em-up doesn’t have much in the way of mechanical complexity, and **Absolum** is no exception: you have a strike button, a heavy attack button, a dash/parry, throws, two special moves, and an ultimate attack. This is where the roguelike part of the game comes into play. As you progress through levels you’ll pick up Relics and accessories, [[Hades II|Hades]]-style, that influence the way you use a character in a run. One session might have you burning enemies with your parries, another might have you focusing on air combos thanks to an accessory that increases damage in the air. Maybe you get a Relic that spawns throwables during an attack string, which you can pair with an accessory that increases the damage of said throwables. Picking different elements for your Relics will spawn Twin Relics that make them synergize, adding another layer of build-crafting. This helps keep runs feeling interesting, despite the fact that the levels in **Absolum** themselves aren’t randomly generated. But even that’s a bit offset by the fact that there are multiple routes through the four areas you can travel through in the game. Depending on the build I’ve been picking up, I might want to take a route to fight a specific mini-boss, or grab a few extra Relics. This is further complicated by the various quests that will pop up across the world map, and persist through each run. That — and a few other spoiler-y reasons — has helped me keep things less stale. If there’s one potential “con” that **Absolum** might have, it’s that it’s quite beholden to its meta-progression, so it takes a little bit to get the wheels spinning. The upgrades you get between expeditions are *extremely* important, so it wasn’t until around the four-hour mark before I felt like I was truly making progress. The game then *really* opens up after your first successful defeat of the Final Boss, which took me about 9 or so hours. For me it wasn’t a big deal — I cannot overstate how good this game feels, and that carried me through the slow start — but others may find that pill a bit harder to swallow. I’ve been waiting for **Absolum** since it was first announced, however, and it didn’t disappoint. Even writing this I feel my hands twitching, the itch to jump back in hard to resist. Highly recommended as one of the best games I’ve played this year. ![[Frog's Dead.mp4]]