Absolum isn't just the best demo on Steam, it's one of my favorite things I've played in 2025

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...