Absinthia

Brace yourself for Absinthia: where battles are more dramatic than reality TV and puzzles trickier than assembling IKEA furniture.
Abinthia, a turn-based RPG, tells the story about the Knight Freya and her apprentice Sera. They face challenges of loss, betrayal, and acceptance while protecting their town, Katti, from a mysterious enemy.
Storyline
Absinthia's story is a mix of emotions, challenges, and discoveries, in a world full of mystery and danger. It revolves around Freya, a once-scorned knight, and her apprentice Sera, as they set off on a journey of self-discovery and resilience.
The story begins in the peaceful town of Katti, threatened by an enemy. Freya steps in as an unlikely hero, and Sera, along with friends Jake and Thomas, joins her to protect their home and the Ambrose Isles.
Things take a sad turn with a loss, and Sera has to face both external enemies and inner struggles. Themes of loss, betrayal, and acceptance are part of the story, creating an emotional experience. However, I have one concern about the story focus, sometimes the supposed main character feels overshadowed.
Gameplay
The gameplay is like a classic turn-based RPG, with familiar elements. Exploring optional dungeons and solving puzzles. While the combat is strategic, it may not be as innovative as in some newer RPGs. The game includes LGBTQIA+ elements.
Graphics & Sound
The game has good graphics and sound that work well for the game. The visuals are well-done, with detailed environments and character animations. While not revolutionary, the graphics set the stage for the game's story. The sound, including a fitting soundtrack and appropriate effects, adds to the atmosphere without being standout.
Final Verdict
Absinthia offers a mixed gaming experience that might be liked by some but could leave others wanting more. The game is a classic turn-based RPG with decent graphics and sound, forming a good base for an amazing adventure. While the story tackles interesting themes and includes LGBTQIA+ elements, its execution can feel a bit lacking depth at times. The gameplay, with rewarding exploration and puzzles, could appeal to genre fans, but the overall experience might not stand out significantly. Absinthia offers a decent gaming experience without standing out, making it a good choice for those who prefer a familiar RPG adventure over a groundbreaking one.
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Absinthia is a JPRG (otherwise, turn-based) developed by Joshua Keith and Team Bewitched and published by Team Bewitched. You take on the role of Sera, a young woman from the Katti Town. Katti Town is being continually attacked by Lilith although her reasons are unknown. Fortunately, the town is under the protection of Freya, a former knight captain from the city of Halonia. Freya has taken on Sera and her two friends, Jake and Thomas, to train them to protect Katti Town and fight Lilith. This is how life is for the party until one fateful night, a tragedy occurs in the village. It affects Sera so much that she vows to deal justice to Lilith, and so she, Jake, Thomas, and Freya set off on a journey across the Ambrose Isles. I'll end my story synopsis here to avoid spoilers and all that.
As for the gameplay, Absinthia has turn-based combat. Initially, you play as Sera (warrior), Jake (thief), and Thomas (sorcerer), with Freya (knight) later joining the party. There are battles with enemies that you encounter as the party travels on the world map. The battles are pretty self-explanatory. You have the option to attack, use a skill, use an item, or flee (unless it's a mandatory boss battle). Each party member has initial skills, with additional skills obtained as he or she levels up or learned through various cutscenes. Skills use up MP, while party members have a certain amount of HP (health). Of course, if a member's HP is zero, they're out of the battle although certain items can revive them. Items vary from HP and MP replenishing items to various gems that deal elemental damage. In regards to the enemies, they deal regular and special damage. Special damage includes cursing and poisoning party members. As the party travels to various towns and whatnot, they have the chance to go to inns to replenish their HP and MP as well as to go to shops to purchase items, like the ones I mentioned. Also, shops provide weapons and armor for party members, which are essential for giving them more offensive party and better protection. Of course, there's the main quest in which the party must find and defeat Lilith, but there are plenty of side quests and optional things to do in the game as well. In addition, there are plenty of Steam achievements although they won't count towards a user's global total until the game is out of "profile features limited".
Now that I've gone over the story and gameplay, I'll move onto my critique. Every once in a while, I like to play a good RPG, and Absinthia caught my attention. I like turn-based combat and the story premise itself caught my interest. I like how the story starts off as we're introduced to Sera and her life living in Katti Town. However, the story doesn't linger too long, as we're then moved right into the gameplay. Although the main story itself, with a tragedy affecting Sera, isn't the most original, there are plots and twists that are totally unexpected. I won't say what they are here, but be prepared for them. There are some romances as well. For example, Jake and Thomas are in a relationship, and Freya was once in a relationship with a woman, but because Ruthea, the woman she was with, supposedly leaked her secret that she was transgender, Freya felt scared and left Halonia for Katti Town. The story took care to tackle on LGBTQ+ issues and acceptance occasionally, which I liked. Getting back to the main story, the ending might be a bit predictable, but it wraps up all the events and such nicely, and I enjoyed it.
As for the gameplay, there's plenty of content, especially if you include the side quests. In the early part of the game, the party members will have to follow the main story, but once they obtain a pirate ship later, then they can explore more of the world, and that's where the side quests come in. I especially enjoyed the quests in which Ruthea appears and she helps out Sera and the others. After getting through the beginning part of the game, you can customize your difficulty. Thus, you can choose from one of four difficulty modes: story mode, easy, normal, or hard. You can change your difficulty level anytime in the main menu, which I liked. Now, to unlock master mode, you need to have beaten the game once (doesn't matter the difficulty level). As for the battles themselves, I was able to complete them fairly well on normal mode on a first playthrough. Now, I am a 100% achievement completionist (or I try to be), so I went through another playthrough to get the master difficulty achievement. Battles on master difficulty are definitely harder and you may need to be careful with what skills and/or items to use, but they're still doable. They may require a couple of retries, though. In addition, there are a good number of puzzles, mainly where the party needs to move color blocks to their respective tiles to unlock certain paths. The puzzles require a bit of thinking but quite doable. All the achievements unlocked for me with no issues, and as I mentioned, there are plenty of them, so there's definitely lots to do.
In regards to the art, it's in the pixelated style that's like from the old school RPGs. Personally, I like this style, as I grew up playing RPGs from before 3D was a thing. The art is beautifully done, and I liked the world map and the character sprites. As for the music, the tracks are beautiful to listen to. They depict that fantasy theme, and the tracks vary from exploring the world to battle engagement.
Overall, would I recommend Absinthia? If you enjoy turn-based RPGs with a plenty of strong female characters (and a fairly good mix of male characters, mainly Jake and Thomas) and don't mind a bit of challenging gameplay, then Absinthia is worth taking a look. For the asking price, I'd say it's worth it, as it took me around 17 hours to finish a first playthrough. (It took me less time to finish a second playthrough on master difficulty, as I knew my way around the world.) Of course, you can wait to get it on sale, and it's in a couple of Steam bundles.
Finally, I want to give a major thanks to the developer for the curator copy. What an exciting, fun journey it was for me to play Absinthia from start to finish. ^^
Flying free and writing reviews solely for The Introverted Gamer.

Tl;dr:
The game is kind of short and doesn't have that much replay value, but the story it tells is great and the battle mechanics are decent. Would recommend if you are looking for an RPG game with familiar game mechanics, but a fresh story.
Overview / The Good
Absinthia is 2D RPG that reminds me of the flash RPG era: pop culture references and anachronisms abound (DnD and Star Wars come to mind immediately) while it tries to tell a serious story of love and betrayal: it reminds me a bit of MARDEK Chapter 2 in that regard. You may find that this cheapens some of the more serious moments, or that it adds to the charm; both of these are fair assessments.
Combat is turn-based: you select commands for each character from left to right, and the round immediately starts at your final selection. There are options to turn off battle animations and speed up combat: doing so means that a round will end in approximately 3 seconds. This is useful for grinding, but grinding is almost unnecessary in this game (at least on Normal). All encounters are in the overworld (i.e. no random encounters). There are the typical stats and elements that you will find in any RPG (strength, speed, intelligence, etc.), which all increase on level up, except for your MP (which appears to be fixed, or only increases at specific points). Most skills come from level up, but upgrades to those skills (essentially team attacks) are tied to story events, and upgraded skills only work under certain conditions (that both people involved in the team attack are alive and not under certain negative statuses). I'd say that the limited MP growth keeps combat from going too much in the player's favor (you can really only use a skill about 2-3 times before the meter is depleted and you have to use the “restore MP” command). All of the enemies fall into 4 camps: weak to magic, weak to physical, weak to a specific element, and “I use self-destruct when I die”. Each enemy group tends to have that last one at least once in their group in the mid-to-late game. All in all, I'd say the combat is decent, but not groundbreaking.
The main story is great though, and what you play this game for. I went into this game relatively blind and was pleasantly surprised by its content. Three out of the 4 main characters have really fleshed out arcs. The 4th is mostly comic relief, but even he has a few moments of growth/seriousness. Some sidequests even get callbacks later in the story (I assume that completing them is a requirement to see the dialogue). At the end of it all, I still wanted so see more, but I was satisfied with what I had seen.
The Bad
Now, for the negatives (in relative order of importance): this game is somewhat short. I played through it relatively slow and got about 95% of all unlocks and half of the secrets in about 15 hours with grinding. You could probably blaze through this game's main story in about 10. The screen flash effects on some of the special abilities can be a bit intense, worse if you are playing fast (I honestly think that the effects should be auto disabled on fast speeds). There are a couple of solely color-based puzzles (sliding blocks) where you need to place the blocks in their correct positions based on their color. Coromon had an option to add numbers to their color puzzles, which helped immensely; I would copy that functionality. The epilogue is about 10 minutes long and saves are disabled. I understand why this was done story-wise, but I feel like it would have worked better if something was added to go back before the final battle after seeing the epilogue (like Breath of the Wild).

I'll keep this short and sweet.
One of my favourite RPGs ever. If it hadn't been for Trails to Azure this would be my GOTY, now it's most likely going to have to be stuck as number 2.
Why do I love it?
- Exploration is rewarded. Basically every (or maybe actually every) dungeon has a Secret Area that the game keeps track of that has loads of goodies to be found.
- Several dungeons are optional, some with side quests and some that are just there for exploring.
- The puzzles are good.
- The story is great.
- The characters feel mostly realistic in their actions and dialogue.
- The dialogue is funny when it needs to be and knows when to rein it back.
- It cowers several sensitive topics but handles them really well.
- And I'm always going to give a slight nudge to any game that dares to be LGBTQIA+ inclusive. Which this does really well.
I'm giving it a 9/10 and the only reason it's not a perfect 10 is that it doesn't always feel like it's Seras story despite her being the main character.
Still, this is a must play for anyone who enjoys classic turn-based RPGs.

Tons of charm and there's a "fresh" feeling in the narrative so far. Characters are full of life and I've become very interested in their growth. IMO this is the PERFECT rpg to lay down in the bed and play on your steam deck if you have one. Great job dev

Freya Should've Swiped Left
Story
Unlike me, you should probably play Knight Bewitched 1, 2, and Celestial Hearts first so that you'll fully understand the story. I still enjoyed the story, but there were some plot details that I didn't have enough context for. Additionally, Absinthia is better written than the previous games, so it's easier to appreciate how far the writers have come if you play in the proper order.
Although Sera is the protagonist, it feels like Freya gets more story significance in the long run due to her connection to the game's main antagonist. This is most likely intentional in order to turn Freya's background and intentions into a plot twist, though the twist was kind of obvious from the start.
Compared to previous games, Absinthia focuses less on the trope of attacking and dethroning God and more about Freya's struggle to recover from a previous failed relationship and her escape from her current toxic relationship. Her relationships are definitely more complex and have more conflict than Ruth and Gwen's relationship, which makes for more interesting storytelling. At the same time, her ex and her new girlfriend are shown to have redeeming qualities, since the former wants to atone for hurting Freya (though she needs more screentime IMO) while the latter starts growing a conscience at the end of the game due to her coming to terms with her own newfound humanity. Freya herself ends up in her ex's shoes due to unintentionally hurting her new friends, which shows that people can hurt others in their pursuit of happiness or to escape their own pain.
Edit: In the 5/20/2023 update, the guest character gets a new sidequest to shine, and I really liked how the party members learned combination attacks with her. I hope she returns as a playable character in the next game in Timeline 2.
Gameplay
IMO, the game is a step up in difficulty compared to previous games, even on equivalent difficulty settings. The game overhauled the MP system so that everyone's base MP is fixed at 200 with no chance for growth, and all skills' MP costs are balanced around that. This means the player will have to guard a lot in order to save on potions, but at the same time, each character's guard action comes with other buffs that can be used strategically. Additionally, I feel like enemies in this game are more fond of using DOT effects, which means they can circumvent guard spamming to some extent. However, due to how quickly MP runs out, DPS check bosses can be a lot harder to deal with than usual, though they are still manageable depending on how well you prepared the party. That said, barriers are much easier to deal with than before and enemies can't spam them as often, making it easier to make visible progress in battle.
The game also features combination attacks, but they don't function quite like other RPG Maker games. Instead of consuming both characters' turns, these skills only consume one character's turn while requiring the other character to be in a state where they can use skills. This incentivizes the player to keep all characters alive and free of ailments in order to make the most of the party's skills.
The world maps looks nice, but there is one oddity about it. The game is supposed to take place in only one region of the series' overall setting, as shown by how Halonia cannot be found on the world map. Despite that, the world map also wraps as if it was a globe. While wrapping is convenient for the sake of travel, it still feels a bit immersion breaking if we're wrapping on only a region of the overall planet without having access to the entire planet.
Verdict
9/10
The game is short, but it feels like mostly an improvement compared to its predecessors while still having balanced gameplay.

Knight Bewitched is still my favourite in this series - because the central romance was so charming - but I'm liking this one so far.