That one month I spent playing Absolum every day till I finished it.

24 Feb, 2026

This was first posted in my Patreon back in January. So if you would like to see posts like this and support me at the same time why not join my Patreon? Right here.

Before I start, let me explain what this is. For 2026 I want to blog more, and I think the best way to do this is by creating a routine around it so for that I will try to make one blog post a month. In theory they will all be on games I played and finished. These aren’t reviews nor critiques because I am not a reviewer or an academic to know how to critique stuff. These are just my thoughts on games I like, games I didn’t really like but kinda of appreciate a thing or two about them and etc.

I want to make twelve of these this year, one per month. So let’s see how it goes. This will be available exclusively on Patreon for a month before I post it on my blog.

I don’t call myself a fan of roguelikes, I like some. Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne. I didn’t like Wizard of Legend nor Hades. I want to try the roguelike mode in Prey. But you know one I kinda of liked?

The one in Streets of Rage 4.

Being honest with you, I liked the idea, Beat ‘em Up combined with Roguelike? Call me in.

So when Guard Crush Games – one of the developers behind Streets of Rage 4 – announced their new game Absolum and that it was a Beat ‘em Up Roguelike I was not excited but hoping it was good.

Then I played the Demo.

Fuck that was a good Demo.

But what is Absolum?

As I said, the game is a Beat ‘em Up Roguelike set in a Sword and Sorcery setting of Talamh where the SUN KING AZRA rules with an iron fist! He has outlawed magic and declared that any wizard or magical creature must be genocided. And I don’t use that word lightly, there’s an entire race that’s in that process, they are being hunted down. The player characters are wizards that are fighting against Azra. Their plan is to destroy his army, the Crimson Order, and then kill the big man himself in his throne room. It might seem impossible, the Crimson Order is huge, they have many people, but the protagonists have an ace in their sleeve. Their leader, the Root Mother Uchawi who can bring them back from death, so they can fight another day.

That’s quite the set up, and one thing that helps is one of the co-developers of the game, the animation studio Supamonks. Their artists there were able to bring in such a cool look for the setting, it feels straight out of a French comic. Talamh and its four different regions feel distinct, yes it’s a very typical fantasy setting with dwarfs, elves, humans but it has personality. Each region with its inhabitants, its bosses, its mounts all feel very distinct.

Visually it’s all very good.

But the visuals are not why I was interested in Absolum so much. I knew what I wanted from the Demo. I needed to know.

Did it play good?

Bruh.

It so did.

If you played Streets of Rage 4 you will find a lot similar to Absolum, so keep that in mind.

Once you start playing you need to pick a character. There’s Galandra the Warrior, Karl the Alchemist, Cinder the Thief and Brome the Wizard. There’s a few differences between each of them, it’s not just visuals.

What the characters also have are magical attacks. Now these are special attacks exclusive for each character, they aren’t just cool they actually add in your combos and do some good damage. They can’t be used often as they require you to have enough mana to cast them, but as you go along in your runs you are able to get a bigger mana bar.

The best example of how good magical attacks are is with Brome. His default magical attack, Wrath Beam is a horizontal magical beam that hits anything in its path and does quite a lot of damage, it’s a great crowd control tool and a pretty good way to finish off some stronger enemies after beating them down with normal moves.

The last attack move the characters have is their star moves, these are the strongest moves they have. Most of the cast, and by that I mean Galandra, Karl and Cinder have damage moves, Brome on the other hand clones himself. So any move he does his clones do too, normals, dash attacks, jump attacks, magical attacks. This turns Brome into a damage machine, trust me, the guy is strong.

All of these moves help contribute to the combo system of the game where repeating the same move over and over doesn’t work, enemies get overpressured and become invincible for a few seconds. What you need to do to extend your combos is to vary your moves, normals into dash attacks into jump attacks into strong attacks, into specials you understand. But why do that? What matters? You see the game has a combo counter that helps increase your score, the bigger the combo is the bigger will be your reward. This score is your XP that leads you into the meta progression of the game.

Gems or crystals: That can also be gained through runs, they are used to buy passive upgrades such as recovering more health at checkpoints, high critical damage, more health for mounts and allies. You can also use Gems in the secret room where all the items you found are stored, that way you can start runs with these items. Each item grants some bonus, like more damage in aerial attacks, or faster mana recovery.

Seeds: That are used to buy new magic moves.

And Heart flowers that are used to upgrade the elemental passives you get during your runs.

You use these currencies in your base before every run so you are stronger. Once you have upgraded something, or maybe even changed character you start a new run. Once you are about to start you can pick a new magic attack to use, and one of them will give you a bonus of 25% EXP.

Then head out and start the run.

These aren’t your only rewards, as I said before you can also get passive items that will add nice bonuses to your damage, your skills, and your mana regeneration. And then you have the rewards you get by defeating bosses. Every boss gives you an upgrade, these can go from changing Galandra’s strong attack into a three hit combo, to allowing Cinder to throw multiple items at the same time, to Brome’s spells doing more damage at a mana cost increase.

It’s all great stuff, it makes experimenting and trying new things in game very interesting. It’s like finding new items in The Bidding of Isaac and seeing what new things happens, sometimes they mix well, sometimes they don’t. In Absolum you try to find the same sort of magical passive, and then the items that give you the most bonuses you want and try to make the most broken character. It’s fun.

But as much as it’s fun to break the game, having a particularly strong set of passives doesn't replace skill. No, I’m not going to say this is a case of “get good”, but Absolum is totally a game where practice and understanding of how to deal with different enemies and situations help. I’m not only talking about combat here, yes, knowing how the combat works, some good combo routes, is good and it helps but so does knowing what paths to take, what items work for what you are doing or not, what passives have synergy and things like that. There’s only so much that a broken build can do, and with Absolum asking you to 1CC the game you will need to learn.

And that’s the awesome part, because learning how the game worked was really damn cool! It all started with learning some combo routes with Cinder, Galandra and Brome, then it came to learn some bosses patterns, then learning the paths with most resources, the areas that are easier for me, some combo route for the bosses and which bosses I can do better at, how the magic passives work and which characters work better for them – Cinder with Brambles is pretty strong – how to utilize the characters magical moves, all of that was pretty cool. It made me play Absolum for a month non stop, from the day it was released to the day I felt I was done with it, I was doing one or two runs every day and I could see myself getting closer and closer, it was a blast!

With each run I was learning more and more about the game I could see myself getting it, there were lore revelations, fun character moments and interactions and some surprises that just made it better for me. I don’t want to spoil them, play the game and find out just trust me that this is some real good Sword and Sorcery stuff.

-- Hey. Tangled here. The update already came, patch 1.1, and boy. What a doozy. I won't go into detail because the update is a rework of the post game but here's what you'll see. You will get Ordeals, these are challenges that increase the game's difficulty in some way. For example the Legion Ordeal adds more enemies to each room in the game but they have less health. This might sound easy but try to fight several copies of those shielded enemies and then come talk to me. Another addition is the Corrupted areas, basically these are areas that will have elite enemies and enemies from different areas all together. The difficult is high but the rewards are increased.

This adds a new layer of difficulty to the game but one that still requires the player to know what challenges and what paths to take. I think this patch has been great and I really want to see Guard Crush games to do a big DLC expansion for the game with a couple new characters and a new zone just to make Absolum the best game possible. Anyway, back to the me from the past.--

I would really like to play a character that takes stuff from the Crimson Brigade, like someone that took the kool aid was betrayed, realized that all of this is fucked and joined the Wizards. Another I would like is a spoiler so play the game, talk to me and you’ll see the vision.

But yeah, I think that’s where I’ll end things though, I don’t want to spoil much and I want these to be short reads.

And that final boss. Fuck.

I thought Azra was cool but the final boss? Damn.

Great game.

#Tangled's blog