Absolum was one of my favourite games of 2025, a gorgeous side-scrolling roguelite beat ‘em up I spent over 60 hours with across multiple platforms. At the time, I couldn’t get enough of Talamh, and when I wasn’t pestering anyone who would listen to play it, I was going back in for another lengthy run and banging my head against the ridiculously hard final boss.
I ended up seeing and doing everything that Absolum had to offer, but I was admittedly a little burnt out by it all by the end. It’s still one of the best beat ‘em ups of all time, but I didn’t expect to nor did I think I’d want to return to it so soon. That quickly changed when the Threads of Fate update was announced.
Considering it’s the game’s first update (and a free one at that), Threads of Fate is an impressive showing, even if it’s mostly composed of tweaks to end-and-post-game content to give hardcore players more reasons to keep on running with a higher level of challenge than ever before. But more Absolum is never a bad thing, and it didn’t take me long to shake off the familiarity and quickly fall back in love with Brome and the gang.
Absolum’s Frustrating Portals Have Seen An Interesting Shakeup
The first big change Threads of Fate makes to Absolum is an adjustment to how the post-game portals work. In the original game, reaching Sun King Azrah for the first time resulted in multidimensional portals popping up during runs that could drop higher-level and late-game enemies into any area of the map.
At first, this was a good way to add some variety and challenge when you’d already completed a playthrough and proven your skills, but it quickly grew overwhelming and made runs slightly too long. These portals could be turned off at any point, and I’d wager that most players ended up doing so when crystal rewards stopped being necessary for progression.
In Threads of Fate, that option has been removed entirely since portals have been reworked. Instead of randomly popping up at any point in a run, these portals are now exclusively found in randomised “corrupted” areas of the map, adding a permanent layer of risk versus reward and keeping you on your toes in every run since you can’t rely on the same paths every time.
You’ll be able to tell where corrupted areas are on the map, mostly giving you a chance to dodge them unless there’s no way around.
As someone who turned these portals off and forgot they existed, I was initially a little wary of them now being a constant force in Absolum. While these areas are even tougher than before and can be total run-ruiners, they fit in much better as optional zones with high-level rewards and add much-needed variety for anyone like me who has min-maxed their routes already.
Absolum Review – An Absolute Game-Changer For Beat ‘Em Ups
Absolum isn’t for the weak-hearted, but its excellent beat ‘em up mechanics and unique roguelite structure make it one of the genre’s best games.
Mystic Ordeals Provide Some Unique, But Brutal Challenges
The second major inclusion in Threads of Fate is the new Mystic Ordeals, which are the true post-game challenge. You can’t even access them until you properly beat Absolum. These pre-made challenges add certain conditions to runs, like giving the player permanent lifesteal, increasing the number of enemies tenfold, and making punish attacks the only properly damaging move in your arsenal.
Each of these Mystic Ordeals has its own set of badges to encourage completion using multiple characters, and with certain restrictions like not recruiting companions. There’s a lot to them, and most of the challenges are surprisingly unique too, letting you stretch Absolum’s wild builds to their absolute limits. Mystic Ordeals are a great post-game addition that make a lot of sense, even if they can feel a little too tailored to the experts.
While some of the early Ordeals aren’t that challenging, all of the ones I unlocked still expected me to make it all the way to Absolum, and nearly always with conditions that work against you. Getting to and beating the true final boss was already a brutal and somewhat drawn-out affair on a normal run, so I’d have liked to see more of them that are quicker to get through or less focused on difficulty.
Absolum’s Post-Game Finally Feels More Fleshed Out
Even if it’s going to take some time and a lot of guts to get through all of the Mystic Ordeals, they do succeed in giving Absolum’s endgame a lot more to it. That ties into some of the new unlockables in the Soul Tree, which show up as you complete more and more Ordeals. Some of them are just more stat upgrades to make these post-game challenges a bit more bearable, while others are new cosmetics like skins and emotes.
Threads of Fate also adds enhanced mounts and some smaller quality-of-life changes, like the addition of damage numbers and reworked UI.
One of the few gripes I had with Absolum was that it was pretty easy to unlock everything with enough grinding and then have nothing to spend your hard-earned Crystals on. That’s no longer the case, and while I have no idea how many new unlocks have been added just yet, it’s more than enough to tide over anyone returning to Talamh.
Threads of Fate doesn’t change the core of Absolum, but it never needed to. What was here at launch was already so close to perfect. Instead, it gives the loyal community some long-requested additions and finally gives a game that I already struggled to put down a proper set of endgame challenges. Not bad for free.
Absolum
- Released
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October 9, 2025
- ESRB
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Everyone 10+ / Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Use of Tobacco
- Developer(s)
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Guard Crush Games, Supamonks, Dotemu
- Publisher(s)
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Dotemu, Gamera Games
- Multiplayer
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Online Co-Op, Local Co-Op
- Number of Players
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1-2 players
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