Absorber

The premise of Absorber is the food chain, weaponised. You kill an enemy, and its strength becomes yours: its abilities, its stats, its everything. Alexander Wick's idle RPG, released in July 2023, is built entirely on that one appetising rule, and then it adds a twist most idlers never dare: raw stats are not enough, because the order in which you eat the menu decides whether you survive it.

It launched free on itch.io and now also sells for three dollars on Steam, which is the modern indie incremental story in miniature: web game first, community second, Steam page once the numbers justified it.

What the loop feels like

You kill a slime, and its gelatinous powers are now your gelatinous powers. The absorption system permanently alters your stat block with each defeat, and the tier list of prey climbs from featureless blobs to named things that demand respect. That's Absorber.

Then the sequencing matters. The queue of enemies you arrange becomes a puzzle chain, where the early fights must grant exactly the mitigation and stats the later, deadlier fights require, and one wrong placement leaves you against an unpassable wall. That's Absorber.

The systems doing the work

The absorption system is the engine: defeating a monster grants a piece of its essence, and many enemies are double-edged, granting massive offensive buffs while actively lowering speed or max health. The sequencing queue is the brain: you manually arrange the order of foes you face, and managing that queue correctly transforms impossible encounters into wins. Early on, certain mobs force your character to rest between fights, but farm a tier to forty or fifty kills and the resting penalty phases out, smoothing that bracket into idle farming.

Community wisdom shapes the routing. Speed is king, the absolute first stat to max, because being locked out of turns loses runs. High-threat mobs like the Assassin, which executes at low health thresholds, belong early in your chain while you still have full control. And negative-modifier enemies that slash your speed but grant vital health go at the very end of the kill order, after the tier's final boss, so their debuffs never poison your mid-chain math. Reset loops remember your drag-and-drop orders, so every subsequent run starts from configuration rather than scratch.

A playthrough of the opening hours.

Where it stumbles

Honesty note: our community criticism research pass misidentified this title with a different game entirely, so its output was discarded, and this section leans on the mechanics research and recorded player discussion rather than a broad criticism survey. What the design itself admits: wrong sequencing creates walls that look like grind but are actually puzzles, and the game does not always distinguish the two for you. The double-edged absorption trade-offs can feel punishing when a vital buff drags a core stat down. And the early resting gates mean the first hours are more active than the idle promise suggests.

Playing it today

The itch.io page hosts the free web version and is the canonical home now; the game's old standalone web domain is dead, its DNS record simply gone. The Steam release is the paid desktop edition from the same developer, Alexander Wick. No mobile versions surfaced in our checks.

The verdict

A modern idle RPG with a one-sentence hook and real progression depth behind it, and the rare incremental where thinking about your kill order is the actual game. Kill the slime. Become the slime. The slime, as it turns out, was the power fantasy all along.