We're living in the new golden age of 2D beat-'em-ups—but the best one released this year had one foot in a different genre entirely
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
One of my bigger disappointments this year in gaming was reviewing Marvel Cosmic Invasion. In many ways, it's a great game—a throwback to the arcade beat-'em-up era that proves how fun and satisfying that classic formula can still be. But at the same time, it feels like that devotion to nostalgia holds it back, with a short campaign and few incentives to replay.
I thought it was going to be the defining beat-'em-up of the year, but the more I played it, the more I found my mind drifting back to a different game I'd played only a month before: Absolum.
In a lot of ways, they're very similar. They're both side-scrolling beat-'em-ups with an emphasis on honing your skills, they're both brought to life with gorgeous 2D animation, and they even both have the same publisher: Dotemu. But where Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a throwback to the past, Absolum is a fascinating swing at a possible future for the genre.
The core conceit is that the game combines a beat-'em-up with the structure of a roguelike. On the face of it, that's an obvious move—after all, we live in the era where anything and everything is a roguelike, from poker to Breakout to stock trading. But these are two flavours that taste fantastically good together, and Absolum combines them with real elegance and, importantly, restraint.
The core problem of the beat-'em-up genre in 2025 is content. They're games designed to be beatable in two or three hours. Once upon a time, especially in the arcade era, their longevity came in being brutally difficult. You were expected to replay them over and over, mastering their nuances over time.
In the modern era, that can feel like a half-formed hook. Mastery is fun, but we expect more structure—progression and variation.
Roguelike mechanics bring that to the table in spades. On the surface, a run in Absolum is like a classic arcade mode playthrough—you walk onto a screen full of bad guys, beat them all up, and then move on to the next screen, with bosses sprinkled in along the way. But every time there are different upgrades to try, quests to pursue, and secrets to discover—and even failure earns boons back at camp and moves the story forward.
The more you play, the more Absolum's world grows and changes. Your actions during runs can unlock new alternate routes through the different zones, or change your relationship with certain NPCs and factions, and it's full of unexpected events and encounters. There's more than a little Hades to it—keeping a repetitive experience fresh by making the world acknowledge and react to your attempts to beat it, rather than simply being a static and impassive adversary.
But importantly, the elements of progression are never allowed to take over. Getting further and improving is always about skill and mastery of the combat system rather than simply grinding for improved stats. Meta-upgrades unlocked at your base are more about giving you more options than simply making you better, and loot discovered out in the field is only ever as powerful as your ability to deploy it.
It's still, at its core, a game about the simple pleasure of getting really good at punching—and even layers in mechanics inspired by other action genres, such as a brilliantly satisfying parry and counter system, to give you even more to dig into.
Instead of eclipsing the game's beat-'em-up roots, the roguelike structure only gives you more ways and reasons to engage with them, gently leading you into different challenges, fighting styles, and discoveries that expose the nuances of what might at first seem like a simple button-masher.
That's what makes me say this might be the future of the genre—because by layering in something new, Absolum provides the perfect platform for showing off what is still so compelling and interesting about a formula that stretches back four decades.
Between games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, the River City Girls series, and the upcoming Scott Pilgrim EX, beat-'em-up fans are already living in a modern golden age for a genre that not that long ago felt dead for good. But I think Absolum offers a possible path forward, opening the genre up to entirely new audiences. I can't wait to see what Dotemu and developers Guard Crush Games and Supamonk do next.