Arcade brawler Absolom combines fantasy action with a roguelike’s repetitive cycle for a fresh twist on the beat ’em up genre.

When you die in Absolom, you are literally reborn from the glowing womb of a giant pregnant lady. This is not how beat ’em ups normally go. The newly announced left-to-right puncher from the developers of Streets Of Rage 4 plans to inject a bunch of roguelike fungus into the bulging musculature of the classic arcade brawler, then dress it in a big fantasy frog suit that’s been handcrafted by a traditional animation studio. It’s a tight squeeze, but having played an hour of a preview build, it certainly looks the part. Although I order you never to use the term “rogue ’em up” to describe it, an explosively upsetting term publisher Dotemu has cheekily tried to invent.

You play a quartet of cartoony adventurers, a bit inspired by the heroics of old Dungeons and Dragons arcade games like Shadows Over Mystara. They’re off to kill a red-masked dictator called Azra who has taken over the land and made magic illegal (he seems to have trouble policing that rule). A froggy mage and a nippy grapple-hookist are planned to appear, but I only got to play as two of the planned fightfolk – a blunderbuss-toting dwarf named Karl and warrior Galandra, who fulfills another fantasy archetype: killer with a sword as big as her own body.

They both have vanilla punch ‘n’ kicks, but also an “arcana” attack that does extra damage (provided you have the mana to cast it). I only saw one of Karl’s special gunblasts, but did unlock three of Galandra’s superwhacks: a spinning air attack, a screen-crossing wave of magic, and her default flashy upward slice. While I forgot to use them as much as I should have for keeping up pressure, they were at least effective crowd control panic buttons.

It handles for the most part as a beat ‘em up might. You clear the screen of enemies (goblins, hermit crabs, spearmen) and waltz ever rightward, occasionally getting face-stomped by a boss, such as a giant goblin champion or the skeleton of an accursed dwarven “Underking”. At which point its back to meet mama and try again from the start (although I’m not sure how death will work in the four-player co-op – we didn’t get to try it).

But in terms of moveset, it feels more nimble than the likes of Mother Russia Bleeds or Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Frequent dodges put a spring in your step, and it has not one but two methods of parrying attacks. You can dodge right into an oncoming strike to “deflect” the hit, or you can attack with your own power move at the precise moment an incoming hit impacts to trigger a “clash”, which leaves the enemy in a stunned state. I’ll be honest, this doubling of deflection techniques confused me at first. But after consulting with the orc woman who acts as a tutorial trainer in a very Firelinky hub zone, I did eventually figure it out.

My favourite small-yet-smashing touch in combat is the simple ability to sidestep attacks (eg. dodge into the screen) after which you can hit the attack button to slide right back in front of the enemy you just dodged. I haven’t played every beat ‘em up out there, but I haven’t seen such a simple and elegant way to get the player back onto the correct “plane” of combat they desire. So much of the beat ‘em up is about momentary depth perception, and it feels gratifying to instantly realign to a place where you can clobber who you wanna clobber. There might be those who think such agility goes beyond the trad stiffness of the arcade brawler. To them I say: stop hitting yourself.

Anyway, thats all the “’em up” parts of this questionably named genre blend addressed. What about the “rogue” bit? It’s all quickly apparent. Swappable character abilities, multiple paths, back-to-the-start respawns, the gradual collecting of crystalbits to unlock new powers. Every few screens you get a choice between a couple of perks or items. I died a lot (fucking goblin champ) but in my heap of runs with swordswoman Galandra I got:

• dangerous divekick
• ring wot increases your mana
• goodness gracious great trail of fire when you dodge an attack

There were a bunch more, but my favourite was a basic flamey supplement that set baddies aflame whenever I deflected an attack. You can see how this might go together with the blazing trail – the startings of a toasty fire-based build.

Then there are the dribs and drabs of lore that trickle forth from your magical mama’s mouth with each rebirth. Her name is Uchawi, a fertility god who (along with her “root sisters”) is having none of this recent mage crackdown. There’s a dryness to the lore-heavy chatter, perhaps a case of following the cryptic world-building trends as popularised by Souls games. I kinda want to pat the characters on the shoulder and tell them to lighten up. Not least because it clashes somewhat with the colourful and expressive art direction.

That artwork is courtesy of French animation studio Supamonks, who normally stick to making trailers (eg. this one for Endless Dungeon). Until now they haven’t worked directly on a game as developers. It’s been rewarding, they say, if challenging. It takes some readjusting to get used to the beat ’em ups ever-awkward use of perspective, for example (exactly which bushes can be punched?). And they were mildly dismayed after an early build saw a lot of their original work on the main character “put in the trash” because of changes in the game’s design. Turns out game development demands a kind of quick-footedness that isn’t ordinary for a traditional animation studio.

“The world of animation and video games are not working the same way,” says lead artist Maxime Mary. “Video games is very organic, you have to test what you’re going to do – sometimes it doesn’t work. In animation you have to stick to: first step, the script, then storyboarding. Everything is very linear. “

So they’ve had to pump a lot of skillpoints into agility, it seems, with a lot more back and forth between themselves and the designers at Guard Crush. And maybe they learned something in all that ducking and diving. Because it’s the animators who’ve pushed the game in its nippier direction. They didn’t want to be shackled by the groundedness of something like Streets Of Rage 4.

“We proposed as animators to explode that,” says Mary. “Can we run? Can we dash? Can we jump? The references were… outside the beat ’em up. We looked at Dead Cells and the rest. We pushed the explosivity of the poses, the fluidity of the animation, just to make sure the final look… and the movement of the gameplay was a step up compared to the classic beat ’em up.”

What can you say? They’re animators. They like when things go whoosh. I appreciate this decision, not least because it is a direct answer to every complaint I had about the otherwise sturdy Streets Of Rage 4. I liked that game for its hardy co-op bruising, but also felt it was an ultimately unambitious reheating of the arcade turkey leg. In dashing, even gingerly, upon roguelike sands, Absolom offers something that feels at least a little different in form. You can argue all you like about the roguelike steering us into a kind of video games homogeneity. But I’m glad the designers of Absolom listened to their animators. I guess if you hire an entire professional art studio to do all the combat poses for your game, you should get your money’s worth of dropkicks.

On the one hand, it’s not a foolproof idea, to smoosh together the grounded and sometimes hit-detection fussy beat ’em ups to a genre that is often about mobility, speed, and dextrous exploration. There are a lot of ways this could just feel wrong in your hands. Graham also tells me there have been mash-ups of RPG and beat ’em up in the past, notably the hideous caricatures of 2013’s Dragon’s Crown. Which is, um, quite different in art style from what Dotemu are going for. Still, the publisher is confident Absolom fits its own niche. Even if they’re still struggling to come up with a soundbite worthy way of explaining it.

“The lines between genre are getting blurry,” says Micke Moïsa, a producer at Dotemu. “We were thinking of how to name this genre. We thought of ‘rogue ’em up’ and things like that because it’s a mix of a lot of different things. Beat ’em up has been here for ages, people know how a beat ’em up works… so what can we take from other game genres, put it into the beat ’em up, and create something new? Something we don’t really have a name for yet.”

Whatever we call it, I refuse to utilise the suggestion of “rogue ‘em up” , which is a car crash of a moniker. There would be something batshittedly rococo about labelling it a “roguelike ‘em up” but, please, let’s not use this either, not even as a joke. Sadly, for everyone involved, the name Streets Of Rogue is already taken.

It’s fine. Probably “roguelike beat ’em up” is good enough. We’ll have time to find other words to describe the arcade-departing roguebiffs of Absolom anyway. It’s not due out until sometime later this year. I’ll take another gander when it arrives, my beat ‘em up muscles having atrophied enough to welcome this prospect, a thorough power-hosing of the genre.