Absolum - Full Game Clear, No Deaths (Cider)

Absolum is a brand new beat 'em up from DotEmu, Guard Crush, and Supamonks - the studios that brought us the incredible Streets of Rage 4 back in 2020. It's not easy following one of the all time great games, but I'm happy to say they've created a worthy successor! ...Although it is quite a bit different.

I posted more extensive thoughts on the game in my clear with Garland, which you can read here if you're interested:    • Absolum - Full Game Clear, No Deaths (Gala...  

This time I played with Cider, who's the more combo-centric/speed oriented character. She has a whip arm that works a little like a Devil May Cry's Devil Bringer - pressing Y sends her arm out and latches on to an enemy, either launching you towards it, or dragging it towards you if you hold the button down. You can use it while in the air to reset your combo, so doing full 'overpressure' combos on the tanky enemies isn't too hard with her. (Although you may end up with the 'repetitive' combo debuff that reduces your damage output).

Cider might be my favorite character to use, although I do really like Garland too. It's hard to pick between the two. The one thing about this game though is that when you start a run, you can choose one of six different skills to use as your special attack. One skill is randomly chosen each time to get a +25% radiance (score) buff, and while I don't care too much about score in this game, I still always pick the highlighted skill. For Cider, I think by far her best skill is the drill kick, which I thankfully had at the start of this run. Her dagger throw and boomerang (?) are good too, but I'd rather not use the other ones. The drill kick is super good though, both as a combo ender and as an easy way to counter/parry enemy attacks. I'd pick it every single time, all things being equal.

I'll take a different path through the game in each run as well, although I wonder if there's one route that's harder (and maybe higher scoring?) than the rest. I feel like a path that fights one of the hidden bosses might offer a bit more than one of the straightforward routes. I'm not sure yet.

This run glitched out at the end. Azra is supposed to have another phase where he refills a bit of his health and activates echo followups to his attacks, but he just flopped over and died in this run. The time effect didn't disappear until the game loaded in the next stage too. I was worried it would crash and not spawn the last boss, but it worked out, thankfully...

One note about this video: it says "no deaths", but you HAVE to die in order to fight Absolum. So it's more like, no unnecessary deaths... (Using invincibility to avoid Absolum's instant-death attack prevents him from spawning, and locks the game up, by the way.)

Absolum is available now on Steam, Switch, and PlayStation 4/5. If you're going to play on PC, I'd appreciate it you'd use my affiliate link to buy from Fanatical, which has it on sale for $19.99 (20% off) right now: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/abs...

0:00 Intro
2:10 Grandery
20:26 Yeldrim
42:26 Asterios
59:12 Azra, the Sun King
54:29 Absolum

Garland playthrough:    • Absolum - Full Game Clear, No Deaths (Gala...  
Karl playthrough:    • Absolum - Full Game Clear, No Deaths (Karl)  
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Beat 'em Ups (e.g. Final Fight):    • Beat 'em Ups  
2D Action (e.g. Metal Slug):    • 2D Action  
STG/Shmups (e.g. Dodonpachi):    • STG Replays