Until now I couldn't figure out why Hades, a game with 275,000 positive reviews piled up on Steam, didn't grab me. Turns out it's something fairly trivial: I dislike controlling a tiny character in an action game.
Absolum takes the "die, retry" format of Hades—its own subgenre of roguelike at this point—and blends it with the DNA of beat-'em-ups, including those generous 2D sprites we know from the '90s. French developers Guard Crush are the same people who revived Streets of Rage in 2020, but somehow this project exudes even more love than that one, probably because it's an original world they created from scratch.
