Absolum is the brainchild of Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, and Supamonks, collaborators largely responsible for bringing about the renaissance of the scrolling beat 'em up with Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

Dotemu’s first original IP, Absolum is a 'rogue 'em up' inspired by Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons arcade games, Dead Cells, Golden Axe, and, most prominently, Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown. Set in the world of Talamh, you're out to thwart the tyrannical reign of Sun King Azra.

You begin with a choice of two warriors, Galandra the Elf and Karl the Dwarf, who are killed in the prologue and revived in The Hearth, a sanctuary that acts as your starting point and hub for character levelling. The story is subtly implemented, much of it dictated during play through brief exchanges, points of interest, and narration. An action game, ultimately, combat is at the forefront of all you do.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

In The Grandery, the first of four lands, your goal is to defeat the Underking, but unless done so early by some fascinating feat of skill, this objective takes time. Initially, there are only two paths - either along the seafront or through the forest, and at the start of each run you equip an Arcana (super attack) from those you’ve unlocked. During your journey, new map points and alternate routes open up, tied to various sub-mission opportunities.

Absolum is a game where you make some headway, die in battle, and repeat from scratch incrementally strengthened. It requires you to travel its paths over and over again, accruing gemstones and points to be spent in The Hearth on upgrades. Before long, assassin Cider joins the party, and then Brome, a staff-wielding warrior frog. Each character has a unique style: sword-wielding Galandra is slow but balanced; the powerful dwarf fielding a ranged special; Cider, weaker but deadly fast; and Brome with aerial capabilities.

Each is finely balanced to allow you to get the most out of them, and you can choose to focus on one or all to work out the pros and cons. Your entire group benefits from permanent upgrades like increased power, health, special move stocks, and additional Arcana attacks.

To increase your chances in each run, you collect Rituals, Trinkets, and Inspirations - randomised pickups that grant effects and boost your character's strength. Rituals bolster combat with fiery rings, electric charges, or damaging waves; Trinkets offer physical advantages like reduced damage and improved speed; and Inspirations can grant entirely new combat manoeuvres, normally appearing after a boss fight. When you die, all of these bonuses are wiped, but the quality of Rituals improve with progress, increasing in power, rarity, and function from the outset.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Combat-wise, Absolum is as smooth and enjoyable as one would expect, further evolving a genre that was once thought played-out. The battling is furious, combo-rich fun, and full of variety. Breakable and throwable objects are scattered all over the place, from arcing axes to hefty grenades, and Golden Axe-style beasts can be ridden into crowds or positioned to spit fireballs.

Cash, too, plays a part, allowing you to buy Trinkets from vendors in towns. You can't store any usable or consumable items in a menu, ridding the action of pauses; this, however, makes the discovery of food in scattered book mounds or leafy bushels all-important, increasing the challenge somewhat.

In terms of mechanics, you can dash and engage with light and hard combo mix-ups, jump in to start a volley or lead with a knee, juggling enemies effortlessly. There’s a dodge that can be timed to create a knockback, and a Clash, which requires a timed strike to repel. Both leave the enemy open to punishment, but can be tricky to pull off in the heat of battle. Nailing the timing against bosses is risky but can create huge advantages, especially if the repel effect is tied to a Ritual that produces a damaging secondary property. It's worth noting that some characters have a better window for pulling off Clashes than others, but their combat motions are slower overall.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Absolum is extremely well-defined. It’s a project where the combat processes and progression were clearly structured long before the first code was written. It may not be as immediately accessible as Shredder's Revenge, but it's twice as clever and — by design — far more replayable. The roguelite elements offer subtle background randomisations and rearranged enemy formations, and a one-eyed rabbit in the background denotes hidden areas to find, usually revealing treasure.

The Grandery feels initially restrictive - a grinding area where you learn combat, levelling, secrets, map expansions, and the functions of the game’s myriad passive power-ups. Yet, levelling up your team and acquiring increasingly interesting combat augmentations fosters encouraging, addictive momentum, even after countless runs. Exploring the map is enjoyable despite the repetition, mostly thanks to the superb combat, and by the time you fell the Underking and cross the sea to the swamplands of Jaroba, it suddenly starts to fly - in some cases so quickly the pacing can feel slightly lopsided.

While the difficulty does scale with progression throughout, it's always just enough behind your levelling that it's more a test of skill than an impediment, and eventually you will have all you need to one-life clear the campaign and defeat Azra. For those who do, a surprise awaits.

The developer’s greatest success here is in taking the existing framework of several titles and honing it into something wonderfully graceful. Fighting is fun, levelling is rewarding, and incremental progress is encouraging. The most dazzling aspect, though, is the broadness of its Rituals and Trinkets and how these pickups shape a run. You can go all fire, all the time, or splice electric properties with those of water. Rituals can bolster Arcana with secondary attacks or off the back of successful dodges. Trinkets, too, can be stacked in power, allowing you to fortify your defence so you barely take damage, or make even the slowest characters blazing fast. In one run, after collecting Trinkets that tripled any throwable, and then boosting their power several times, The Underking was almost completely destroyed by a collection of lobbed rocks.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

It’s this kind of malleability and unpredictability that makes Absolum so interesting to return to, and far deeper and more varied than the likes of Dragon's Crown. A single run in The Grandery is approximately 15 minutes, and you can reach the Underking quickly and lose just as fast. By the time you’re in Jeroba’s fearsome Arena or the hidden mists of Yeldrim, this run-time is more than doubled, and a total playthrough takes around an hour.

Raw combat skill won’t always grant a victory until you’ve sufficiently levelled up, and, unlike the beastly lairs, vampiric castles, and set-piece events of Dragon's Crown, Absolum’s world is more general, joined together through familiar paths and backdrops that stay fast to their theme. Depending on your mileage, this is either a plus or a minus.

Absolum is a great game in single-player, allowing you to pay to recruit help along the way and giving you plenty to see and do, while the multiplayer experience (either local or online) really excels. Finely tuned with rollback net code and allowing you to configure your own frame delays from the options, joining up with another person is quite the adventure.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

One thing that's difficult to fathom, though, is why there isn't a four-player option. There are points when you can recruit multiple hired hands into a busy arena, the screen ablaze with sprites, and the processing is completely unfussed.

Graphically, it’s beautiful end to end, with a distinct, bold cartoon style and a stable 60fps frame rate. It's clean in its visual nature, opting for picture-book-flat over shaded fantasy grit, but this works well in busy screens with multiple battling sprites. Its clash effects, critical hit slowdown, and magical elements all look great, too.

Musically, it’s very impressive, with a Ye-Olde-English-style set of flute-backed motifs scored by Mick Gordon of DOOM fame. It swells nicely at boss encounters and is very cinematic, seamlessly building from the soothing to the thunderous.

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Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

One of the only things that irks is the voice acting. It’s all English, all the time, in keeping with elements of medieval fantasy. Some, like the Dwarf and certain NPCs are all acceptable, but other primary characters seem lacking in professionalism. It could be that, being an Englishman myself, I’m more prone to nitpicking, but Cider occasionally drops lines like a bored receptionist that had me mocking them out loud, and the odd American character and principal NPC give it all the effort of an unwilling teacher roped into reciting lines for the school play.

This isn’t a major issue, just one that could have benefited from more direction. While some character actors are working to fit within the medieval period, others are delivering dialogue like it’s a present-day exchange over a coffee.

Conclusion

Absolum is an on-par experience to Dragon’s Crown, but a superior game in terms of its key metrics. Its combat, collectible augmentations, and planning are exceptionally well-formulated, ensuring no run is ever quite the same and its strategic options and play-styles are ever-deepening. It’s incredibly impressive in its reconstitution of arcade, role-playing, and roguelike formats, evolving them into something fresh and exciting.

To that end, it’s one of the best of its kind, whatever that kind may be. If you don’t enjoy the idea of repetition and grind, you may not fall in love with its initial five hours, but the momentum for one-more-go becomes so compelling after a while that it’s impossible to relinquish the pad.

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