When it came time to choose my personal pick in our 2025 Game of the Year awards, one game jumped right out at me. Absolum is a brilliantly clever hybrid of classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up combat with a roguelike framework, and I'm not sure it ever quite got the buzz it deserved.
It seems like it found an audience, at least, with 500,000 players, a 94% positive rating on Steam and apparently enough success to fuel a new free update.
Arriving on February 12, the 1.1 patch will make further tweaks and fixes, but more importantly add a raft of new content to give the experience even more replayability.
"Mystic Ordeals" are customisable modifiers you can apply to runs after you've beaten the final boss, so you can keep testing your skills. And across all runs, there will now be corrupted regions on the map that you can choose to pass through, facing harder enemies but earning stronger rewards in the process.
The update's also adding elite mounts—rarer versions with upgraded attacks—as well as new emotes for co-op play and unlockable character skins.
Not an enormous expansion by the sound of it, but for the low price of free it seems like a good set of new excuses to go back for more. The sheer variety of each run is already Absolum's big strength, hugely enhancing the usual ritual of replaying a beat-'em-up over and over until it's mastered. A couple of extra layers on top of that to stretch it even further is very welcome.
And if the game flew under your radar in 2025, this is your sign to give it a go. It still has a demo on Steam, so you can crack a few goblin skulls for free and see for yourself how great it feels ahead of February 12.
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