Absolum

For a decade, Dotemu has been the industry’s most reliable necromancer. Streets of Rage 4, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, the Windjammers revival — the studio built its name resurrecting other people’s franchises with reverence and craft. Absolum is the moment Dotemu stops tending other people’s gardens and plants its own. It’s the studio’s first original IP, and the stakes are written all over it.

The pedigree is absurd. Guard Crush Games, the combat architects behind Streets of Rage 4, handle the fighting. Animation house Supamonks supplies the hand-drawn spectacle. And the design brief is deceptively ambitious: fuse the classic side-scrolling brawler with the run-based, permadeath-adjacent loop of the modern roguelite. Dotemu calls it a “rogue ‘em up,” which is marketing shorthand, but the description is honest. This isn’t a beat ‘em up with roguelite garnish. The two genres are load-bearing for each other.

The setup is functional fantasy. The world of Talamh groans under Sun King Azra, a tyrant who has hoarded magic for himself. You play one of a roster of outcast heroes — the sword-and-board veteran Galandra, the brawler Karl, and the more esoteric Brome and Cider — each a genuinely distinct combat archetype rather than a reskin. You fight left to right, you die, you learn, you upgrade, you go again.

Market positioning is where this gets interesting. Absolum arrived October 9, 2025 at $24.99 into a genre most publishers had written off as nostalgia bait. A Metacritic score of 87 suggests Dotemu found something the analytics missed: a large, underserved audience that wants arcade combat with the depth and replayability of a 2025 release. On that count, mission accomplished — mostly.

• “Rogue ‘em up” structure: Branching paths, randomized encounters, upgradeable skills, and persistent meta-progression stack on top of a traditional brawler, so no two runs unspool the same way.
• Guard Crush combat system: Deep combos, dodges, parries, and magic — the same tactile, weighty fighting engine behind Streets of Rage 4, now with build variety layered on top.
• Distinct hero roster: Galandra, Karl, Brome, and Cider each carry unique weapons, movesets, and abilities, meaningfully changing how a run plays rather than just how it looks.
• Full cross-play co-op: Two-player couch or online co-op with cross-play across Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam — a genuine rarity, and one of the game’s quiet triumphs.
• Supamonks hand-drawn art: Fully hand-animated characters and backgrounds in a painterly fantasy style that recalls Dragon’s Crown without imitating it.

The Gameplay Loop

The strength of Absolum is that the roguelite and the brawler don’t fight each other for oxygen. In lesser hybrids, the roguelite meta-layer becomes a grind tax you pay to make the “real” game easier. Here, the run is the game, and the combat is built to carry the weight.

Each run is a sequence of side-scrolling arenas connected by branching paths. You choose your route — a fork toward more loot, a fork toward a tougher fight with a better reward — and the encounters shuffle enough that pattern-memorization only gets you so far. Between fights you spend currency and pick up upgrades, sculpting a build on the fly. Lean into raw damage? Parry-and-counter defense? Magic burst? The build variety is where the roguelite pays real dividends, and it’s the engine behind the “one more run” pull.

Then there’s the combat itself, which is the whole ballgame. Guard Crush understands something most brawler developers forget: weight. Every hit is designed to land with impact. The parry window is tight but readable, and a perfect deflection into a counter is the kind of small, repeatable thrill that separates great action games from merely competent ones. Dodges have i-frames that read as earned, not generous. Magic gives you a resource to manage and a rhythm to break. The combat has a ceiling, and climbing toward it is the point.

Where the Loop Frays

Absolum is not without friction, and the friction is real. The most common criticism — and it’s valid on the design’s own terms — is difficulty balance. The game spikes. Certain enemy compositions and boss encounters demand a mastery the meta-progression hasn’t yet earned you, and the line between “get better” and “this run was dealt an unfair hand” blurs more often than it should. Roguelites live and die on the fairness of their randomness. Absolum mostly gets it right, but its worst runs are structured to feel less like a challenge and more like a shakedown.

The second issue is run-to-run repetition. For all the branching and randomization, the pool of encounters and environments isn’t infinite, and dedicated players will eventually see the seams. This is the eternal roguelite problem — content is consumed faster than any studio can produce it — but Absolum’s arcade DNA makes the repetition more visible than in a systems-heavy roguelite like Hades, where dialogue and narrative churn paper over the cracks.

Finally, the meta-progression pacing wobbles. Some persistent upgrades look transformative; others look like busywork gating power you’d rather earn through skill. The economy could use a tuning pass. None of this is fatal. All of it is the difference between a very good game and a great one.

Supamonks did not come to play. The hand-drawn animation is the kind of work that justifies the whole “brawlers as an art form” argument. Characters have squash, stretch, and personality in every frame. Backgrounds are painterly without being noisy, and — crucially for a combat game — the visual language stays legible even when the screen fills with enemies and effects. You can always read the fight. That’s harder than it looks, and plenty of prettier games fail it.

The comparison points Dotemu invites — Dragon’s Crown, Capcom’s D&D arcade cabinets, Golden Axe — are earned rather than aspirational. This sits comfortably in that lineage while looking unmistakably modern.

Technically, this is a 2D hand-drawn game of modest scope, and the art style is inherently light on hardware — a sensible match for a genre where a single dropped frame can cost you a parry.

On Steam, Absolum has the strongest case on paper: beat ‘em ups are timing games, and a controller plugged into a capable PC offers the cleanest conditions for reading the parry window. This is the version for players chasing the skill ceiling.

On Nintendo Switch, the calculus shifts. The hand-drawn art scales down gracefully — this style was practically built for handheld — and the pick-up-and-play, couch co-op nature of the genre is a natural fit for the platform. The tradeoff is the usual Switch tax: resolution concessions are likely, and timing-sensitive players may notice the difference on the hardest content. For most players, undocked couch co-op on Switch looks like the cozy, intended way to enjoy this. For the parry purists, it’s Steam.

The headline, though, is cross-play. Full cross-platform co-op across Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam means the friend on the other ecosystem is no longer an excuse. In 2025 this should be table stakes. It still isn’t, and Absolum deserves credit for treating it as a baseline feature rather than a luxury.

Dotemu had everything to prove and it proved most of it. Absolum is the studio announcing that it can create, not just curate — and it did so by trusting the one thing it knows better than anyone: how a great brawler should feel. The combat is excellent. The art is a genuine achievement. The cross-play co-op is the future the whole industry keeps promising and rarely delivering.

What keeps it out of the top tier is polish, not vision. The difficulty needs a scalpel, the run variety needs more depth, and the meta-progression needs a re-balance. Fix those with patches — and Dotemu has the track record to do exactly that — and Absolum graduates from “excellent” to “essential.” As it stands at launch, it’s a strong recommendation for anyone with a controller and a friend.