Absolver

Absolver is an action role-playing game based on martial arts fighting, featuring a seamless open world with shortcuts and free-roaming, and merging single, cooperative and competitive play in the same campaign, which is played from a third-person perspective. Players build custom combinations of strikes, parries, and feints to fight other players and computer-controlled characters. Players control warrior characters known as Prospects who travel the fictional land of Adal to fight other players and prove their worth to become one of the Absolver peacekeepers. Players progress through the game to unlock new armor and equipment, combat styles, and weapons, usually as "loot" dropped by defeated enemies.

The game has minor massively multiplayer online game elements, including the feature of fighting alongside other players on quests and of directly fighting other players in player versus player match-ups. Players can also spar with others to teach their characters skills.

Sloclap, a Parisian indie game studio composed of former Ubisoft Paris employees, began to develop its first game in May 2015. The team had previously worked on games including Watch Dogs and the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series. They began with the idea that combat should be "fluid" and "dynamic", like a personal choreography. Sloclap expressed this core concept through three internal taglines in their development: "combat is a dance", "movement is your weapon", and "make a move".

Pierre Tarno, the game's creative director, liked how players could experiment with the combat deck to find a set that works best for them. Sloclap planned to closely monitor the game balance issues of creating overpowered move sets during online play, and planned to monitor this with playtesting. Absolver is built in the Unreal Engine 4 game engine. Absolver was first announced on May 26, 2016, and debuted at the June 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo with Devolver Digital as its publisher.

Critics who previewed the game compared its gameplay to that of Dark Souls and Street Fighter. In particular, Sam Prell (GamesRadar) found the Souls games and Absolver to share difficult melee fights that emphasize stamina management, and seamless multiplayer that adds both allies and enemies. Critics also noted how the game's simple controls quickly became complex, credited in particular to the game's combat deck concept. Kris Graft (Gamasutra) wrote that the fighting game was "a promising start" and one of the most interesting he has played.

Absolver unexpectedly astonished Griffin McElroy (Polygon)—it was his "biggest surprise" of the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Sam Prell (GamesRadar) was also surprised by the depth of the combat system, and Andrew Tarantola (Engadget) noted the game's deviance from the traditional massively multiplayer online game for its lack of guns, and Brad Borque (Digital Trends) added that Absolver was quiet compared to other battle-focused games. Borque also complimented Absolver's palette and thought of its art style as a welcome break from the hyperrealism of recent games. Games journalists listed the game among the best in show at the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo where its other accolades included GamesRadar's "Best Indie Game of E3" and GamesBeat's "Killer App Killer" for "compelling and/or intuitive gameplay" in an Unreal Engine game.