Absolver isn't a Dark Souls game. It seems wise to state that up front, because for its first few hours Absolver manages a very good impression of a Dark Souls game, albeit one that has traded its Covenants for martial art schools, its "jolly cooperation" for Jeet Kune Do. There's the world, to begin with - the crumpled remains of a splendid civilisation, flickering eerily between timeframes and dimensions, where masked Prospects do pilgrimage in the hope of attaining the mantle of an Absolver. There are the altars that, like Dark Souls' legendary bonfires, peg down exploration of that world - geysers of glowing stone where you can meditate to access equipment and ability inventories together with arena PvP.
There's the mildly punitive level-up system, whereby you only keep the XP from each punch-up if you survive it, and that taste for couching backstory in the form of cursory item descriptions. There's the persistent online, with other players dropped into your session ad hoc as you roam, and above all else, there's the importance of stamina, which is used for attacks, evasive manoeuvres and blocking. Let the bar burn all the way down and the next strike that connects will knock your guard wide open.
To think of Absolver as a Dark Souls game, however, is to cramp its style. If six-head Parisian developer Slocap has borrowed a few structural motifs from the Souls games, it has set its sights on something much leaner and possibly, even more arduous - a spartan yet beautifully involved melee fighting game that only resembles a Soulslike from afar. The landscape, for one thing, isn't as vast and knotty as it appears. The vistas are incredible, each twist of the road exposing yet another heap of ruined architecture - temples ground together like teeth, staircases choked by vegetation, towers carved in half to reveal storerooms and observatories. The game's lightly textured art style does a fine job of conveying the material and social strata of a long-departed culture. This is, amongst other things, one of the few games that makes precious metal look genuinely precious, gleaming hypnotically amid the dust of a royal library.
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