Absolver hides its depth and beauty amid obtuse design

Enlarge / Even how to progress from one place to the next isn't well explained...

Absolver is a game that wants to be very, very many things. I'm just not sure all of those things mesh together very well.

At times, Absolver is a numbers-and-technique-heavy martial arts game. Other times, it's a serendipitous multiplayer get-together, like Journey. At others still, Absolver is an obtuse single-player adventure in the vein of Dark Souls-complete with loose lore teased out by item descriptions and transient NPCs.

It starts with your custom-created character receiving a mask from a... ghost, or something? Then you start hitting people. To be fair, Absolver bills itself as a multiplayer game first and a single-player game second. It's just jarring to be dropped into the complex game with so very little instruction.

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