Project Absentia (v1.7.3)

Abby’s prison break turns into a loud, airborne rescue mission built around speed, attitude, and improvised destruction. Project Absentia is a retro-styled first-person shooter that draws its visual energy from the internet animation and sprite-comic culture of the 2000s and early 2010s, while delivering a more mobile FPS than its chunky presentation first suggests. After the Orkan Corporation captures Abby alongside her girlfriend Aurora and best friend Orion, she escapes with a Tommy Gun and a clear objective: fight through the company’s sprawling territory and bring them home. The tone is colorful, defiant, and deliberately strange, with an angelic heroine who answers corporate imprisonment by taking the high ground and opening fire.

Movement is central to every encounter. Abby jumps, glides, and attacks from above, using vertical space to evade gunfire, find better angles, and turn arenas into aerial playgrounds rather than flat shooting galleries. Levels range across grounded, recognizable spaces such as mines, apartments, castles, entertainment zones, and abandoned ships, giving the campaign a lived-in sense of place instead of relying on anonymous corridors. Weapons appear generously throughout the environments, encouraging frequent experimentation with freeze effects, explosive launchers, a health-draining carnivorous plant, close-range double barrels, and the vividly named Rainbowitzer. Environmental details also invite detours: smash glass, mess with vending machines and water coolers, or pause for a round of mini-golf between firefights.

Its strongest feature is the commitment to playful interaction and expressive traversal rather than pure nostalgia. Project Absentia looks back to an era of rough-edged Flash creativity, but its large spaces and gliding mechanics give it a livelier rhythm than a straightforward throwback shooter. Full voice acting helps sell the eccentric cast, while subtitles, colorblind settings, adjustable field of view, and speech controls make the experience more accommodating than many indie FPS releases. Players who enjoy the mobility of arena shooters, the weapon chaos of old-school FPS games, and the offbeat personality of cult internet animation should find plenty to like, especially if they prefer momentum and experimentation over military realism.