“You Just Do Language.” Lauren Groff on Craft, Reading, and Her New Collection
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The worst things never wait for sunrise. They always come in the chilly dark, when you’re smallest and most alone.
— Lauren Groff, Brawler: Stories (Riverhead Books, February 24, 2026)
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Grace is a gift undeserved, yet given anyway. I didn’t understand this until I was old enough to stop trying to earn it.
— Lauren Groff, Brawler: Stories (Riverhead Books, February 24, 2026)
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At the top she was a pinprick in nothing, a speck against the blue, and then she fell and the world shattered into a billion bright and jagged shards.
— Lauren Groff, Brawler: Stories (Riverhead Books, February 24, 2026)
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Scott Pilgrim EX Demo Delivers Classic Brawler Action
ALTScott Pilgrim EX demo has officially landed, bringing a bold new 2D brawler adventure game to Linux and Windows PC. Thanks to the unstoppable creativity at Tribute Games Inc., this adventure feels handcrafted. Which you can now try for Free on Steam.
Winter games usually mean clearing a backlog. This year, it means picking up a controller and throwing down in Toronto. The Scott Pilgrim EX demo just dropped on Steam, and it feels like that rare moment when a franchise comes back loud, confident, and somehow more personal than ever.
I loaded it up “just to check it out.”
Two quests later, I was still grinning.
A Mid-Winter Trip Worth Taking
Tribute knows exactly what it’s doing here. The studio behind TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and MARVEL Cosmic Invasion is inviting us into a snowy, pixel-perfect Toronto, dong so with the first-ever public demo of Scott Pilgrim EX and it hits immediately.
The demo is live right now on Steam, and if you somehow miss it this week, it’s also rolling straight into Steam Next Fest from Feb. 23 to March 2. No excuses.
This isn’t a teaser that ends before the fun starts. You get the first two full quests, playable solo or co-op, while offering enough depth to understand why this release matters.
Toronto Is Weird Again (In the Best Way)
Scott Pilgrim’s version of Toronto has always been strange. EX leans into that hard. You’re brawling through streets that feel familiar and surreal at the same time, punching robots, demons, and yes, vegans, like it’s second nature.
The Scott Pilgrim EX demo lets you play as Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Lucas Lee, and Roxy Richter, pulled from a seven-character roster in the full launch. Each one feels distinct. Different rhythm, weight, and reasons to replay the demo again instead of uninstalling.
Since this isn’t button-mashing nostalgia. It is a modern 2D brawler adventure with intent.
Scott Pilgrim EX - Demo Trailer
New Story. Same Soul.
Here’s the part that sold me.
The story is brand new, co-written by Bryan Lee O’Malley himself alongside Tribute Games. It certainly doesn’t feel like a remix or a greatest-hits album. It feels like the next chapter.
And the music?
Yeah. That hits too.
Anamanaguchi is back with all-new tracks, so the energy is unreal. Headphones on, volume up, combo counter climbing, it’s that kind of vibe.
Linux Players, This One’s for You
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a “Linux later” situation.
Scott Pilgrim EX launches March 3 for Linux and Windows PC, the demo is just a taste. But expect native support. Day one. No footnotes.
For performance-focused players and open-source fans, that certainly matters. A lot.
Why This Scott Pilgrim EX Demo Matters
The Scott Pilgrim EX demo isn’t just playable. It’s confident. It also knows its audience. It respects your time and rewards your curiosity. If you like tight combat, co-op chaos, expressive pixel art, and 2D brawler adventure that feels made by people who actually play them, this is your sign.
Download the demo on Steam.
Call a friend.
Punch something pixelated.
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Toaplan’s Arcade Brawler, Knuckle Bash, Suffered a Count Out in Only a Year
The other day I was sorting through some countdown articles on games to get an idea of the next arcade game I wanted to do a playthrough of. That is when I came across a list of five arcade games that quickly vanished from arcades in the 1990’s.
After reading the article I was in agreement with the author on the games. Now as a disclaimer from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s I could often be…
Toaplan’s Arcade Brawler, Knuckle Bash, Suffered a Count Out in Only a Year
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Samson is an upcoming roguelite with hybrid combat between brawling and vehicular. I think it looks incredible.
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Marvel Cosmic Invasion
Developer: Tribute Games Publisher: Dotemu Release: 12/01/25 Genre: Beat em up Also on: Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series
The Avengers arcade game in 1992 was decent for its time. As fan service with its multitude of cameos it excelled. But as a game it was average at best. That did not stop me from pumping it full of quarters…
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Street brawler with brass knuckles on his gloves and a thick long bandholz beard
Street brawler with brass knuckles on his gloves and a thick long bandholz beard
Made by me Theodoros Mpahoumas
#painting#paintings#art#brawler#brawlers#streetbrawler#streetbrawlers#streetlife#street#streets#brassknuckles#beard#beards#thickbeard#thickbeards#beardstyle#beardstyles#bandholzbeard#bandholzbeards
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Comix Zone
Developer: Sega Technical Institute Publisher: Sega Release: 1995 Genre: Beat em up
By the end of the 16-bit era the side scrolling beat em up was starting to get stale. Despite the presence of monsters in the arcade like Alien vs. Predator and Denjin Makai too many generic brawlers were flooding the market and drowning out the classics. Unlike shooters that would undergo a renaissance in…
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055: Absolum brings the arcade spirit of its fantasy inspirations roaring into the modern age
CANON FIRE is made possible by the contributions of generous readers like you. Thank you! You can support more writing like this on Patreon.
This piece contains minor mechanical and plot spoilers.
The latest from Guard Crush Games, one of the main developers on Streets of Rage 4, Absolum takes plenty from their work on SEGA’s brawler. The skeleton of the game can be seen in their experiments with Mr. X Nightmare, SOR4’s roguelike mode. The abilities, status effects, items and alternative movesets all appear in a less developed form there. Absolum builds an original RPG world around those same ideas, complete with equipment and magic systems, and a detailed history of its many fantastical factions.
Fantasy conjures the image of a sprawling adventure, but where Streets of Rage 4 was built primarily on SEGA’s console series origins, Absolum takes to the arcades for its inspirations. Absolum’s action takes place in runs of an hour or less, using the familiar modern structure of roguelikes to resurrect an arcade playstyle that’s fallen out of favor in the mainstream. Death means starting from stage one, and while you can grind your way into a few more chances, clearing the game will require you to fight your way from the start at least twice, with the conditions around these winning runs further demanding you get into that arcade mindset.
To synthesize its setting and structure, Absolum builds on the legacy of Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups. Capcom’s Tower of Doom and Shadows over Mystara earned a reputation as some of the most complex arcade games, with diverse character classes, branching paths, a detailed stats and equipment system, and real time inventory management. Each was designed to recreate the feeling of a tabletop RPG session, with each run having the potential to grow into a new adventure.
Absolum’s drawn comparisons to Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown, and that’s for a good reason, since Dragon’s Crown draws on the same legacy, with director George Kamitani even serving as director on Tower of Doom. But while Dragon’s Crown leans heavily into the DnD’s party based RPG elements, Absolum builds on the arcade mentality, and redesigns Capcom’s systems to streamline all the moments of downtime and push its speed and momentum.
The slow inventory management has been replaced with a single item slot, with item limits and frequent drops encouraging liberal use of them, and incorporating them into combos. Loose gold is hoovered up, rewards are always spawned with enough choices for both players, to prevent arguing and item theft. The branching paths play a major part of the journey, splitting and converging, with more areas and questlines revealing themselves on subsequent runs. Camps appear on different parts of the map, giving you downtime to heal, buy equipment, and hear more about the world.
Layered upon this is a free flowing combat system that builds on the technical complexities of its predecessors, but arms each character with a toolkit that opens up the creative possibilities. Absolum’s universe moveset includes light, heavy, special and super attacks, paired with varied movement and defensive options. If Streets of Rage was Street Fighter, then Absolum is Darkstalkers.
Every character can dash, sidestep, and parry, rapidly able to change their positioning and cancel into defense at a moment’s notice. Even the dedicated bruisers can travel fullscreen in a second, and build air combos that keep enemies in a prolonged juggle state. Absolum’s basic combo system builds on Guard Crush’s work on Streets of Rage 4, allowing you to extend combos even further by pushing enemies to the edge of the screen, or attacking them while downed.
With so many options to continue a combo, a hard limit has been imposed to prevent infinites and tedious exploits, in the form of the Overpressure system. As you continue a combo, Pressure builds up, eventually putting enemies into an Overpressure state, where the next hit nets bonus damage and ejects the enemy into a hard knockdown where they can’t be hit until they recover.
Repeating moves incurs a penalty and ends a combo sooner, discouraging looping the same attacks, but the limit can be intentionally exploited in your favor. For example, a common beat-em-up loop is the jab reset, where you do the first few hits of your combo, then wait to reset back to the first part of the chain, keeping enemies perpetually in hitstun.
Absolum allows three loops of this resets (or similar ones done by resetting the chain with dodge attacks) before it triggers Overpressure and ejects the opponent. But since the goal of the jab loop is generally to keep an enemy out of the fight and unable to retaliate, the hard knockdown from Overpressure achieves a similar effect, with less tedium. Eventually, you can even find items that extend, or remove these combo limits, or incorporate Overpressure tactics to inflict some special state.
Absolum’s combat is full of nuances like this, and the unlockable movesets only give you more to consider. Long after I beat the game I was finding new details that changed how I play. Cider, the dedicated combo machine, can pull themselves or the enemies closer depending on if you tap or hold the special button. Karl, the dwarf grappler and gunner, has a reload ability that can not only juggle with its startup and recovery, but can also be used as an active reload to cancel the recovery of some special moves and gain half a bar in the process. Brome’s air combo can be used to both pull and push enemies depending on how many hits you do, allowing you to choose between extending damage or creating distance.
The juggle system from Streets of Rage 4 returns, allowing you to wall bounce enemies against the edges of the screen to continue the combo, and any move can be used to hit knocked down enemies, creating many combo routes.
Elite enemies and bosses will tank your initial hits, preventing you from freely comboing them, and forcing you to learn their patterns and defend appropriately. Reacting appropriately will set up a punish combo, allowing you to rack as much damage as you can before they enter a hard knockdown and recover. Even the final boss can be comboed like this, allowing combo fiends to wreck a boss within a few good openings if they’ve got tight defenses. It’s a familiar rhythm for fighting game fans, and it allows boss fights with a noticeable bump in difficulty from standard enemies, without invalidating the skills and expression built up in the rest of the game.
The same meticulous care has been put into its developing Absolum’s world. The story begins in media res, introducing you to the stakes and players within a few minutes, implying a long history between its characters and world, without any lore dumps or long winded scene setting. We get the ideas of who the characters are in short snippets of commentary and dialogue, optional descriptions of vistas, and fireside chats between runs. Every character and faction has a history with the world, even if they only show you a fraction of it.
The environments are illustrated in an almost ligne claire style, with bold colors and sharp lines, but with deep shadows and small touches of movement and parallax to maintain visual clarity.
Secret areas open and close between runs, encouraging you to pay attention to the environment and test which parts of it are interactive. There have been so many points where I attempted something out of curiosity and was surprised that it worked. Many secrets are hidden in plain sight, with only experimentation or community knowledge making them obvious. The very first screen of the game has a secret, easy to miss on the initial runs. Discovering the expansive number of secrets is a community effort, and I found myself constantly exchanging notes and trading information with friends. It lends a sense of world much bigger than the fighting grounds you travel through.
Like the Dungeons and Dragons games it pulls from, Absolum is packed with detail that pulls from an eclectic set of sources. Dungeons and Dragons is now seen as a bog standard medieval fantasy, but I can imagine that at the time of Capcom’s arcade games the Forgotten Realms still had plenty to capture the imagination, with hybrid creatures such as the Gnoll and Owlbears, monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Beholder that provided new takes on classical beasts, and the incorporation of cosmic horror in the bestiary, it’s hard not to see why it drew players in, and inspired works like Record of Lodoss War.
Absolum aims for that same fresh perspective on fantasy, remixing the familiar for the modern age. Absolume borrows hybrids like the Gnoll–human-hyenea hybrids–and adds its own, like the axolotl-human hybrids and mushroom trolls. Typical power structures and roles are revisited: goblins are now the tree dwelling race, spiritually connected to the forest they’re birthed from, with an insect-like lifespan that prioritizes their community over individual lives.
Elves have become a sort of hybrid with dark elves, worshipping death and building a lavish capital near the gateway to the underworld, growing into a holy site for pilgrims to journey to. Their spiritual practices build on the memories of the deceased, with their knights channeling energy from the underworld, and strengthening themselves with those memories.
The dwarves are not born of flesh and blood, but forged by a patriarchal figure known as the Underking, guided to create the most advanced civilization, then driven to near extinction when the Underking succumbed to madness.
Cider and Brome give insight into the fantastical view of identity, something modern fantasy finds itself experimenting with as awareness of real life gender identities expands. Cider is initially presented with a confused identity, referred to with gender neutral pronouns, and interchanging between using “I” and “we”, while referring to themselves. Through later conversations we learn that this is a literal “we”, as Cider was once a master thief who dived into the afterlife to retrieve her soul, but came out with a second one, both occupying a clockwork cyborg body.
Cider occasionally makes reference to missing body parts, has visible prosthetics, and their disability is reflected in talk of their frailty and having the lowest health values. Their body ironically makes them the most mobile, with a high run speed and the ability to traverse distances with their grappling arm, not unlike Devil May Cry’s Nero, who also prominently features a prosthetic arm.
Brome’s situation is a bit more mixed for me, as the details of his story are awkwardly revealed by Karl straight up asking “weren’t you a female?” before Brome praises him for being able to tell, and confirms it. Brome’s transition turns out to be one of desperate survival, laying eggs then changing to a male form in order to fertilize them, out of fear that he was the only surviving member of his race, and that it would die out with him.
Brome’s identity is tied to the state of the world itself, with his people being born of the world’s magic, and his relatively recent birth meaning he was born into a world that had already been systematically eliminating his people before he was alive. His change to a masculine identity comes with a desire to protect, and an unbridled hatred for his oppressors, reflected in his dialogue and the naming of each of his special attacks. It also reflects the real world physiology of frogs, with some species able to change their gender.
It’s a clear effort to represent a diverse crew of characters, even within a fantasy setting, and while many of the details add a charming wrinkle to the usual presentation, it sometimes feels like a gotcha to pre-empt the inevitable arguments. Cider isn’t non-binary or plural–they are literally two people. Brome is transmasc, but that’s because it’s biologically accurate. It’s messy, but at the very least, Absolum isn’t taking a safe approach, and isn’t scared to commit to a complicated worldview.
That complex approach extends to the structure of the game. Initial forays have a familiar roguelike structure, unlocking more tools, areas, abilities and upgrades to create more variety and make it easier to survive. By the time I completed the game, I had most of the upgrade paths maxed, not because they’re strictly necessary, but because I relied on those tools to bail me out due to my lack of knowledge of enemy patterns and defensive mechanics. These upgrades expand the margin of error, giving you multiple changes to fail before ending your run.
This is where the second loop comes in.
After beating Azra, the oppressor forcing his tyrannical rule on the world, he rewinds time, revealing Absolum, the true final boss–a cosmic horror gestating and ready to be born. To challenge Absolum, you’ll need to complete another run–remixed and more oppressive–and if you don’t make it with an extra life to spare, your run will end when Absolum opens the fight with an unavoidable, instant kill attack.
Reaching the final area has a merchant warning you of this opening attack, and offering you the chance to buy an additional life, albeit at a higher cost than any other item in the game. Meaning if you haven’t saved some gold during your run you might be out of luck.
These requirements initially seem brutal, but they reflect a more lenient take on the “second loop” and “true final boss” concepts seen in many arcade games. To reward skilled players for reaching the end of the game, some arcade games will loop, allowing you to restart from the beginning of the game, often at a higher difficulty.
Some games will even hide a second final boss behind this second loop, requiring a tremendous display of skill to even see them. Hibachi from the DoDonPachi series is a notorious one, having strict requirements for accessing the second loop, and being difficult to defeat in a series that is already known for its high difficulty. Absolum’s instant kill attack can even be seen as an homage to Shadow Over Mystara’s final boss, Synn. For comparison, Synn has three difficult to avoid instant kill attacks that occur during the start of each phase, with little warning or time to get to safety.
Defeating Absolum will require you to alter your playstyle. You’ll need to learn proper defense, and start balancing equipment purchases with the opportunity to earn an extra life. To make things harder, the world changes after you first beat Azra, opening up new events, and creating portals within stages that bring in enemies from other areas, as well as new bosses, drastically altering the enemy formations you can expect to see. To balance this you’ll also have the chance to use Azra’s time magic, with several powerful new abilities.
Beating Azra is difficult, but the ability to extend your lifebar and earn the ability to start with two extra lives gives you an ever increasing margin of error. The second loop ratchets up the stakes and squeezes down on those margins, asking you to prove that you’ve been paying attention.
I admit, I was kind of being carried during that first loop. I was able to beat Azra on the first try, taking some big losses, but able to get through thanks to the generous clash frames on Galandra’s special attacks, and landing some extended combos. But even the simple change of putting late game enemies into the early stages, before I had built up my character with equipment and abilities, revealed how much I relied on outpacing my enemies with damage to survive.
Having an extra life effectively subtracted from me, without any other considerations, put enough pressure on me that I became aware of my remaining health, and engaged in actively defending myself, learning enemy patterns, and routing my journey with consideration for the difficulty and rewards of each path.
The second loop successfully plays into expectations of both the arcade and roguelike mindsets. Roguelike players generally expect to do multiple runs in order to see everything, and arcade players often make clearing the game without continuing their goal. The roguelike genre has been responsible for repopularizing the idea of a run based game, and Absolum uses this to push the player towards the arcade ideal of a one credit clear.
Dedicated arcade gamers often mark the completion of a game not by seeing the end, but by doing so without continuing. Initial runs are considered data for this goal, scouting enemies and bosses, and planning routes for proper attempts to clear the game.
Because arcade games were designed around the economy of player time and money, many would allow you to see the end by simply feeding credits into the machine, without properly learning the game. That made seeing the ending trivial, if expensive. Home ports and emulation further trivialized the difficulty of clearing an arcade game, since the penalty for failing was effectively removed. And as the arcade style structure fell out of popularity in favor of longer play times, the idea of the one credit clear became something only die hard players chased after.
By presenting itself as a roguelike, Absolum takes the expectation of death resetting progress, softens it by slowly giving you more leeway and variety, then challenges you to demonstrate your mastery after your initial victory. The room for error is still relatively large, but it sets up similar stakes.
Even the stages are designed with this goal in mind. Level layouts are largely static aside from a few detours and the order you see them, and you can reliably expect a certain formation of enemies or set of items when traversing the same area. It gives you a set of obstacles that you can prepare for. Absolum’s overall roguelike philosophy is to be predictable to change your approach, but dynamic enough that you’ll constantly be changing your approach.
But the world of Absolum isn’t static. As the story progresses parts of the world will change, causing new routes to open up, new characters to arrive and quests to reveal themselves. It’s a world that persists through death, and reacts to it, framed in a narrative of two great powers–a maternal immortal whose philosophy is built around natural chaos, and a paternal authoritarian who rewinds time to put things back in their place when disrupted. Characters are trapped in a cycle, but that doesn’t prevent them from growing and changing.
Absolum’s deep consideration of the inspirations it draws from and the world that justifies it all, comes together in a perfectly tuned synthesis of modern and arcade sensibilities.
I’ve said before that action games are like pieces of music, defined by their rhythms, breaks, and the instrumentation they play with. And if the arcade brawler’s thumping rhythms mirror rock, and the modern roguelike mirrors the improvisational grooves of jazz, then Absolum is a pitch perfect jazz fusion album. A double LP in a beautifully illustrated record sleeve, with a world of beautiful details that reveal themselves on repeat plays.
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gonna be playing daggerheart tomorrow and here’s my little guy, toma zhelaskov
he is an 8ft tall boxer-turned-sailor of the high skies who’s looking for his lost brother :)
he’s actually a total sweetheart and very social, i just havent drawn him smiling yet - frown is more funny