My guide through the world of Absolver begins with a hand outstretched, four fingers bending once, twice. Think Neo in The Matrix. It's a moment that feels choreographed. Our avatars, two women in flowing tunics and ritualistic masks, circle each other, dodging in exploratory rings, feinting and striking tentatively. A meadow in painterly, wet greens surrounds us like a makeshift arena.

Then, we fight.

Developed by Paris-based indie team Sloclap and published by Devolver Digital, Absolver is trying to bring some Wuxia fantasy to online action games. It's built around the mystique of hand-to-hand combat, emphasizing grace and fluidity: the beautiful dance of the fight. It doesn't come out until next year at the earliest (it's slated for PC and consoles, though specifics haven't been announced), but WIRED recently got to spend some time with a very early build of the game. What we saw was promising.

While the developer said that the final game would have a layered, explorable world, the early demo it showed featured only the most basic navigation: go forward, fight the bad guys, keep going. At one point, we unlocked a shortcut to an earlier checkpoint, suggesting level design that borrows from titles like Dark Souls, with levels that double back on themselves, rewarding careful attention and minimizing the need for backtracking.

Other players are automatically connected into and out of conjoined worlds, sparring or collaborating as they choose. While my guide directed me through the world and taught me the controls, I realized I could target him like any other enemy. Any ally might become an enemy might become an ally again. There's even a command to offer an enemy you just knocked down a helping hand.

This feeds directly into the flowing combat at Absolver's center. It's clearly meant to encourage a chaotic, twisting playstyle. If every friend is a potential enemy, you'd better learn how to hold your own.

The combat looks simple at first; your standard Street Fighter setup with heavy attacks, light attacks, blocking and dodging. That plain veneer belies an impressive amount of complexity, though. Each player can fight in four stances, and within each of these you can customize any individual move, building combos out of winding punches or knife point strikes.

Each strike is like a bit of ammunition, slotted into place to create the weapon of each stance. Another wrinkle: different strikes move you between different stances. Maybe that swinging haymaker you slotted into the end of your high-right combo ends you in low-left position, setting you up to move seamlessly into another angle of attack entirely.

It's a system that should allow you to build a fighting style from scratch. If it pans out, it could be something special indeed, a multiplayer-oriented martial arts fantasy generator, all Wuxia flair and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon flashbacks. And no stunt wires.