Absolver hides its depth and beauty amid obtuse design

Absolver is a game that wants to be very, very many things. I'm just not sure all of those things mesh together very well.

At times, Absolver is a numbers-and-technique-heavy martial arts game. Other times, it's a serendipitous multiplayer get-together, like Journey. At others still, Absolver is an obtuse single-player adventure in the vein of Dark Souls—complete with loose lore teased out by item descriptions and transient NPCs.

It starts with your custom-created character receiving a mask from a... ghost, or something? Then you start hitting people. To be fair, Absolver bills itself as a multiplayer game first and a single-player game second. It's just jarring to be dropped into the complex game with so very little instruction.

Combat isn't that complicated, superficially. One button slings light love taps while another lays out a big smack, with a block button rounding out a trio practically as old as video games. Absolver doesn't muddy the flow of combat much beyond that: there's just some stamina management and a light timing element to throwing the perfect punches.

The most difficult combo is in the menus...

Actually, the meat of the game’s most interesting mechanics is nestled behind menus. That's where Absolver's warring nature as an interactive tone poem and hardcore hit-em-up rubs me the worst. The game is chock full of numbers, symbols, icons, and color-coded feedback, almost none of it laid out plainly.

That’s a problem, because Absolver has a lot more combat depth than its two-attack-button setup would imply. There are dozens of different strikes, all with different attack animations and damage values, and these are often layered with one of a handful of status effects to boot. The onus is on the player to string the hits together across different stances—most of which bleed into another layer of moves that can continue the cycle.

You set these strings of moves and stances up ahead of time via coded "Combat Decks" of cards, and arranging them will be a joy for anyone who has spent hours theory-crafting the best potential combinations in Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone. If you think the enemy's going to absorb your blows with a powerful block, bring in a strong downward kick that breaks right through it. After that, you can make sure the next layer of your Combat Deck follows that up with a quick, reliable three-hit combo. Some attacks automatically counter high, low, or medium blows. Some let you power through opposing attacks without getting stunned, like Super Armor in more traditional fighting games.

How do you know what's the best move for the right situation? Well, there's the rub. I only learned all of this by digging through the aforementioned menus and individually examining each skill card. Then I tested out the skills against an admittedly useful practice dummy to see how the skills and status effects were telegraphed in real time.

Absolver has almost nothing in the way of real tutorials. What seems like vital information—like how weapons work and the difference between damage types—is hidden in a "tips" section beneath a mountain of menus. To find it, you need to hit the main menu, go to "Meditation," select your Combat Deck, and enter practice mode. Then, once you're in the discrete mode, you hit the menu button again—as if you were trying to exit—only to bring up a third menu with "Tips" listed as an option.

Magic and martial arts

That much just seems like bad user interface design. When you start to navigate the large, pseudo-open-world, however, Absolver seems willfully obscure. Some basics are explained at the start (find the "Marked Ones"), but mostly the fantastical post-apocalyptic world is so laconic and mournful that I barely even knew where to go next, much less what to do when I got there.

Case in point: I hunted down most of the half-dozen Marked Ones—named mini-bosses scattered across about as many interconnected zones—for about 90 minutes. I spent about 90 more minutes just finding the last one. I knew I was in approximately the right location, thanks to an abstract map that appears whenever you rest at healing altars (think the bonfires from Dark Souls). I just couldn't figure out how to get down to the blocked alley where I needed to be.

It turns out there's a small sort of crawlspace beneath a staircase I had looped past a hundred times. To get to where I needed to be, I had to dip through it and drop down into the alley from above. When I did that, I was promptly beaten to death.

On my next attempt, I brought some friends, and by “friends” I mean “total strangers.” Absolver automatically partners online players together in each of its zones, with no way to communicate except with a wheel of emotes, their fists, and feet. There is a bit of that Journey-like magic to this automatic, wordless matchmaking that makes you feel like you’re sharing a highly personal story with another soul.

You can fight each other, of course, but so far I've seen a lot more profit in working together in these designated "story areas." Teamwork is especially important, since the game likes to spawn NPC enemies in groups. One-on-more-than-one combat is tricky, since Absolver automatically locks your camera onto whatever foe you happen to be fighting. Flipping between targets isn't very fluid, either, so it's best to just have pals for crowd control.

When my 90-minute search for the last Marked One ended, it was pretty crushing to see they had two buddies backing them up. I spent all that time searching, just to hit another hurdle. I was immediately able to nudge my two new buds toward the out-of-sight entrance. The three-on-three climax—with me facing my marked nemesis and my pals trading blows in the background—felt like the final act of a micro kung-fu epic. It all occurred naturally, too, in a way that was probably unique to our trio.

Hard-hitting reality

But the magic of that moment wasn't couched in a 90-minute martial arts flick. Instead, it came after tedious searching and fumbling through ill-explained mechanics. It's a shame that Absolver hides those snippets of natural-born excitement amid a very confusing and unclear mess.

The game isn't simply a mechanical failure and an aesthetic triumph. I'd prefer more joy or energy in the game's tone, rather than the vaguely depressing narrative. There are some rough presentational edges, too—one of the game's very, very few cutscenes had the characters refer to me as "he," for instance, despite my avatar being a woman.

On the fighting front, Combat Decks are still a fascinating idea. The concept lets you impart your own play style on the different combos, especially once you start unlocking more cards and attack options. The hits themselves, meanwhile, fire off with the rush of air and smack of meat that signifies the intangible "weighty" feeling you want from high-impact duels.

It sounds good. It feels good. And if you just want to get into the nitty-gritty of leveling up, building new decks, and testing their efficacy against similarly inclined individuals, you can always just dive into first-to-three bouts against humans. These are a good source of XP and loot, too, assuming you don't get shellacked by people who are already way better than you before the game is even out. (Note: I got shellacked by people who are way better than me before the game was even out. Repeatedly.)

That's just the problem. Absolver's skill ceiling seems high enough that, if the game is any kind of success, I can already see it spawning YouTube tutorials and frame-by-frame breakdowns of the best attack animations. That's not the kind of thing I have time for in my life right now. Maybe if the game was better at explaining itself up front or if I was better at learning by "feel," it would be different. Right now, though, I'm not sure if the game's magical moments are enough to drag me through its learning curve.

The Good

• Hefty hit-to-hit combos feel and sound great
• Game is pocked with "Journey moments" in randomized multiplayer encounters
• Combat Decks are a bottomless well of tactical customization

The Bad

• Terribly underwhelming tutorials for a very complex game
• Tackling groups can be tough without a semi-random squad
• Obtuse world design makes getting around harder than it needs to be

The Ugly

• Getting matched against a level 60 player, at level 14, before you know your "cut damage" from your "charge attacks"

Verdict: Absolver trades in tutorials for mystique, but if you think you can climb the learning curve, you should try it.