Absolum Devs on Why Beat ‘em Ups and Roguelikes are a Match Made in Heaven

Beat ‘em ups are a genre that flourished in the heyday of arcades, when players scrounged and pinched every quarter they could to see those credits roll. But as video games advanced and moved more into home consoles the genre quietly faded away – until recent years when a new wave of developers pushed to give beat ‘em ups a new renaissance.

Leading that charge is Guard Crush Games, the studio behind the comeback of a classic Sega series with Streets of Rage 4. Now, the studio is looking to really push the envelope with a new original fantasy beat ‘em up that doesn’t just capture the spirit of arcade cabinet classics, but redefines the genre at large by fusing it with the increasingly popular roguelite.

“Beat ‘em ups are a genre from the arcade where when you die you restart from the beginning, it’s the original ‘rogue’ experience,” says Absolum lead game designer Jordi Asensio, “The roots were already there in the genre.”

Absolum is unlike any beat ‘em up you’ve ever seen, a game that looks at the innovations brought by SuperGiant Games’ Hades and tries to apply that to an entirely different style of game. With the reveal of Absolum, Inverse had the chance to talk to Asensio, art director Maxime Mary, and Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert – diving into the studio’s ambitions to redefine a resurging genre.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

With this being Dotemu’s first original IP, how did this project come together? Why was this the one?

Asensio: Many reasons. We wanted to capitalize on the beat ‘em up experience. So we thought about doing another game with Sega, and thought if negotiations fail we should be thinking about something else.

So I was pitching to Cyrille Imbert (head of Dotemu) some ideas, and he had this idea to bring professional animators from TV to step up the graphics. So we tried to search for an art director, and after several meetings, we found Maxim. And just like that everybody was on the same page about doing something bigger than Streets of Rage 4, in terms of ambition and scope.

Imbert: Absolum builds on the knowledge gained from our previous beat ‘em up collaboration with Guard Crush Games and our publishing work on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, as well as a lifelong passion we share with Guard Crush Games for classic and modern beat 'em up titles. Our ultimate goal is to fundamentally evolve the genre’s potential in a way that’s unique from the traditional brawlers we’ve all come to love, and I knew the team was well suited to accomplish this from the first time I played Absolum.

Absolum has a pretty striking art style, with a mix of high-fantasy and steampunk. What kind of inspirations did you draw from?

Mary: The references didn't come from video games. It was more about comics and animation. I tried to not look at video games and stick to my references from French comics from my childhood, and American comics too. This is my first job for video games. I’m from animation and working for features on TV shows.

I wanted to avoid a lot of tools that we use in video games, like everything that is generated from the software like rim lights, the sparkles, the smoke. Everything is made by hand with animators, I wanted to stick with that as much as I could.

How do you feel that art style supports the gameplay? Was there any difficulty implementing that animation style into a beat ‘em up?

Asensio: Yes, it's a challenge, but like with Streets of Rage 4 we decided to not go for pixel art. And it was, I think, something we could step up – getting into details, more HD graphics, and I think the art style of Maxime fits the dynamic we want in a beat ‘em up. The traits and the looks of the characters, are they dynamic on their own?

Mary: The animation adds a lot of fluidity to the movement, and we had to find the right spot between the number of frames that we can use for a movement versus how we used to animate when we came from animation. So there's a lot of frames, and there is a start, an end of the animation. And we had to adapt to the needs of the video game and what Jordi wanted for the feeling of the fights. That was a back-and-forth between what we wanted to achieve in terms of fluidity with the animators and what the game needed.

One of the most surprising elements of Absolum is the combination of beat ‘em ups and roguelites. How did you go about fusing those two styles into one game?

Asensio: I’m a big fan of Guardian Heroes and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara, beat ‘em ups that have RPG elements. So at the time, because they are very old games, they were popular, but not that much. And I always felt that they didn't achieve their full potential. So I wanted to make a game like this.

With the perspective from now, we see that the roguelite brings that character-building, so one way or another there would be some rogue elements. After all, beat ‘em ups are a genre from the arcade where when you die, you restart from the beginning. It’s the original “rogue” experience. So the roots were already there in the genre. And with these games, you already had the RPG fusion.

With Streets of Rage 4 we focused on core gameplay mechanics because we had that legacy-driven approach, so we could have the mechanics of a beat ‘em up locked and understood. Now we’re ready to add some funkiness to the mix. But we have no references to look at, that was the hardest part. There are several roguelites, but not many beat ‘em ups. So that was the hard part, to find the right elements of the gameplay that we want to impact with these systems.

Tying that back to art design, with roguelites, a big thing that's done with this game too, is having these very different kinds of zones. How much variation is there between environments?

Mary: There are a lot of different environments, and it was important for us to have a variety of fantasy worlds that you can find in the game. At the beginning, we had a very classic approach of beat ‘em ups, so there are very long backgrounds from left to right, and you just have to walk on the long background. At some point, we just cut it into tiny pieces. The more we worked like this, the more we found we could put assets into the background, and make levels based on them.

My first intention was to give the player this feeling of classic fantasy. You have the forest, the village, the goblins, the mines. This is very Dungeon & Dragons and Lord of the Rings, and it was easy to produce those elements. But after that, we tried something a bit more original.

Asensio

Gameplay is on par with that. You start with some classic fantasy setting, and maybe it looks like Golden Axe with Streets of Rage mechanics. Then you go further into the game, and you see more original environments, and also you have more possibilities gameplay-wise. You have that classic hook and then it spreads into something unique.

With roguelites, a very important element is progression. How did you make sure progression felt satisfying and meaningful?

Asensio: It was about iterating on the gameplay. We focused on having some skilled-based gameplay. What's hard is you have different kinds of players who will get more skilled at the game, and eventually master all the systems, and those who will drop the game if it’s that more classic arcade feeling. With the progression element, we tried to do it so less skilled players could live the adventure we propose in the game – and skilled players could go crazy about the mechanics. So it merges the trajectories of both player types.

Absolum seems quite different from anything Guard Crush has made before. What has this game taught you in terms of making beat ‘em ups, or your design process as a studio?

Asensio: We wanted to, you know, extend the beat ‘em genre. With Streets of Rage, we wanted to restore the golden age. And then, because it's a genre I love, build on that foundation and expand it.

Many studios are making the mistake of thinking it’s a simple genre, because you have a lot of problems. I mean, even the perspective is strange. So it's like 3D but in 2D – you go into the background but the character stays the same size. So technically it’s hard. It's hard to draw, and it's hard to design.

Now that we had that foundation, we figured we could extend that. We had a lot of ideas, and I think it’s the first step of even more crazy ideas. The core word we had during this project is “adventure.” To have this unique feeling of getting to a game, and the more you discover the game – the more you want to discover it.

Mary: One difference in this game compared to other beat ‘em ups, is how fast it is. Characters can run, jump, and dash, and I think this implies new mechanics and a new overall rhythm to the game. This is something we learned to work with, it’s faster and we had to adjust a lot of the classic beat ‘em up elements based on this.

Asensio: It's like, you have Street Fighter and then you have Guilty Gear. They are both fighting games, but they’re both their own thing? So maybe Absolum is the Guilty Gear of beat ‘em ups. It's more in that branch than Streets of Rage.

Absolum launches later in 2025 on PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.