Absolver

The pitch: a martial-arts RPG where you learn to fight by fighting

Absolver is Sloclap's debut game, released worldwide on 29 August 2017 with no Early Access period and published by Devolver Digital. You play a masked Prospect exploring a ruined, semi-open world under the control of enigmatic Guides, and the game's entire identity rests on one genuinely original system: rather than picking moves from a fixed skill tree, you learn combat techniques by fighting — other players, AI enemies, or sparring partners — and then assemble the ones you like into a personal "deck" of stances and strikes. No two players end up with quite the same toolkit, and reading an opponent's unfamiliar combination becomes as much a part of combat as reflexes are. Nearly nine years later, across roughly 11,500 Steam reviews, it sits at Mostly Positive (about 74% positive) — a number that undersells how consistently, across both recommend and don't-recommend reviews alike, the actual combat system draws praise. One critical review still rates it "9.5/10" for combat alone, calling it "the real meat of the game."

What almost nobody disputes: the fighting is genuinely good

It's worth stating plainly, because it's the rare point of near-universal agreement in Absolver's review page: the combat holds up. Reviewers compare it favourably to For Honor's more mechanical fighting system, to Jade Empire's martial-arts framing, and more recently to Sloclap's own Sifu, usually to say Absolver's PvP depth hasn't really been matched even by its spiritual successor. The character customisation compounds that depth — outfit, stance, and move-deck choices are all independent axes, so build variety in PvP is real rather than cosmetic. That's the foundation every other complaint in this review sits on top of: nobody is arguing Absolver plays badly. The argument is entirely about what happened to it after launch.

The complaint that dominates recent reviews: the population, and the developer, moved on

Read reviews from 2021 onward and one grievance recurs with unusual consistency, phrased almost the same way by unrelated players years apart: Absolver's population has thinned to the point that matchmaking, the entire reason the game's world is built the way it is, doesn't reliably work anymore. "Nobody plays the game other than people that have pretty much mastered their fighting classes," one review from 2021 puts it, "and this makes the matchmaking system basically useless for beginners." A 2022 review is blunter still: "the developers killed it then buried its corpse just to unbury it and spit on its face." And the phrase that recurs most often, across multiple independent 2023-2024 reviews almost verbatim, ties the decline directly to Sloclap's next project: "Absolver walked so Sifu could run" — a backhanded compliment that credits Absolver's design ideas while explicitly blaming Sloclap for abandoning the game that originated them once Sifu became the studio's focus.

That reading is corroborated by a second, related complaint: the campaign itself was always short by design — most reviewers report finishing the story content in two to five hours — because it was built as a structured introduction to PvP rather than a stand-alone destination. With the PvP population diminished, a meaningful share of the audience is left with exactly the part of the game Sloclap designed to be its shortest. A handful of more recent reviews (2023-2025) also report ongoing server and connection reliability problems, and at least one 2025 review specifically warns Linux and Steam Deck players about compatibility issues on a title that only lists official Windows support.

What the DLC, price and co-op modes actually offer

Absolver's post-launch content is modest by design rather than by neglect in the strict sense: two optional paid DLC releases exist, a small area-and-cosmetics pack and a soundtrack, and neither reviewers nor the store page frame them as content withheld from the base game. At NZ$43.59 with no discount active at the time of writing, the honest value case rests almost entirely on how much you value the combat system itself, since the campaign length and thinning PvP population both work against a straightforward hours-per-dollar argument. Reviewers who still recommend the game consistently point to the same fallback: solo play against AI and the online co-op mode let you experience the moveset-building and combat feel without needing a live opponent at all, which is also the honest way to think about buying it today — as a genuinely well-designed single-player combat toy with PvP as a bonus if you happen to catch the population at the right hour, rather than the always-on competitive scene it launched promising.

It's also worth separating the population complaint from a design failure. Several reviewers, including some of the most detailed and highly-upvoted ones, are explicit that Absolver's combat mechanics were never the problem — the "deckbuilding" comparison one long review draws is meant as praise for the customisation depth, even while arguing the balance between certain move combinations was never fully resolved. That's a genuinely different criticism from "the game is dead," and it's worth taking both seriously rather than collapsing them into a single verdict: the population problem is about Sloclap's post-launch choices, while the balance concern is about design decisions made well before anyone stopped playing.

Verdict

Absolver's reputation rests on a genuinely rare thing: a combat system original enough that reviewers still reach for it as a point of comparison against games released years later, including its own developer's follow-up. That the game is still worth recommending at all, nine years on and with its population diminished, is a real testament to how well that system was designed. But the recommendation has to come with the review page's own consistent caveat attached: you're buying a short campaign built to funnel you into PvP against a community Sloclap stopped meaningfully supporting once Sifu became the studio's priority. Go in at a discount, with AI and co-op modes as your fallback rather than your afterthought, and the combat system is still worth the price of admission.