We asked a handful of our contributors to put together a list of their three favourite games from 2017. Their picks are running across the week while the rest of RPS slumbers.>

I’ve been thinking about time a lot recently – how we create and manipulate histories and the present in video games and in general – so you’ll forgive me if my end-of-year choices are a bit Back to the Futurey. (more…)

Let us podcast, lest we forget. The squad of the Electronic Wireless Show chat about some of the most overlooked and underappreciated games of this year. Katharine thinks head-in-a-sack trip to the underworld Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice might qualify, while Adam praises the unsettling tales of Stories Untold. Brendan just wants more people to slap in skinny-person biffing game Absolver. But we’ve also been playing some other good ‘uns, including the magical realist family chronicle What Remains of Edith Finch and naval tactical battler Mare Nostrvm. (more…)

My career in Street Fighter was a painfully short-lived experience. For a long time, I d been trying to find a fighting game to really get into and to help me understand a genre I d always been quietly interested in but entirely apart from. After being gifted Ultra Street Fighter 4 back in 2014, I was quickly hooked on the technical mastery and quick action – a few runs of Arcade, and I was even starting to feel competent. But getting good at Street Fighter, or any traditional fighting game, requires a strong level of commitment: lonely hours spent mastering frame data, grinding against opponents and the local competition. After a disastrous showing at a Dundee tournament, I was out.

Fighting games, I figured, just weren t for me – until Absolver came around.

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Absolver, the martial arts fighting game that you’re not very good at, now has a prestige system that lets high-level players redistribute their skill points. Its latest update also brings Halloween masks, new cloaks, a means of obtaining more loot for post-level 60 players, and a way to turn duplicate pieces of gear into salvage, letting you sew up the holes in your natty old trousers. As someone who’s been bashing and jabbing since the game’s release, usually at fighters far superior to himself, I can confirm this is Absolver s biggest update so far, and it offers some of the most sensible and in-demand features for the game s audience of skinny biffers. (more…)

Skinny weirdos in masks have been beating me up all month in martial arts biff-em-up Absolver [official site]. They re called Absolvers because they grant absolution to my face with an endless barrage of kicks and slaps. Perhaps, with this latest update, I can finally treat an opponent to a sin-cleansing uppercut of my own. Patch 1.06 is mainly a bug-fixing effort, but it also disempowers the fastest attacks and tweaks absorbing guards. There s also a handout of six masks based on other games by publisher Devolver, like a Hotline Miami chicken mask. (more…)

Pow! Whack! Absolve! The martial arts biffing game Absolver [official site] is my hot cup of videogames at the moment. But like its slap-happy characters, it s a bit on the skinny side. Once you ve completed the story, there s little remaining for the PvP-averse. And even online fighters might find themselves at a loss after mastering all the moves. So I asked creators Sloclap what s in their fightpipes. The sad part is that new attacks, bosses and PvE areas are all at the back of the queue. The good news is there are a lot of small improvements coming, including a way to redistribute your character’s skill points, and pigments for changing the colour of your raggedy trousers. (more…)

The martial arts brawler Absolver [official site] is a beautiful arena for skinny people who are both very polite and incredulously angry. It s a great bruiser but isn t without serious flaws. The sometimes-insufferable lag, for one thing, is killing the 1v1 dueling mode for many. A small patch has recently been added, bringing cross-region support and some improvements to server connection , say developers Sloclap, with more fixes and improvements incoming. But a lot of players, myself included, are still encountering teleporty punches, stuttering kicks, disconnections and unstable matchmaking. That means toothless frowns all round. (more…)

Martial arts fighting game Absolver [official site] is keeping me and many others happy with its fluid recreation of both fisticuffs and feeticuffs. But the move that has the brawling community most excited isn t a whip-fast spinning kick or a sharp elbow to the top of the head it s a simple, shame-inducing slap to the face. Now, the most disrespectful thing you could do to another fighter is to get them down to their last sliver of health, then finish them with a single slap. (more…)

Who owns those odd voices? It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show and guess what – we’re all in the same room, with our actual bodies>. Unprecedented. And> there’s a special guest this week too. Chris Bratt of Eurogamer joins us to talk about the alien-murdering of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It’s a Brattcast! While Pip has been playing teen angst drama-llama Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and I’m still trying to discover an impossibly powerful attack in Absolver. Come listen.

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Our review has now been updated with post-release impressions. Read them below!>

I stumbled into Raslan like a newborn foal, aimless and on wobbly legs. Absolver [official site] and its labyrinthine city are not gentle with Prospects, the masked warriors who make up the game’s players and AI-controlled enemies, but I assume that ritualistic combat trials aren t typically easy-going affairs. Regardless, for the last week I have persevered, fighting my way from lowly Prospect to the coveted position of Absolver. I remain absolutely lost.

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