Avowed feels like a comfort food you have after a long, hard day at work. It’s beautiful to look at and delicious to eat. While you can gobble it in a bite or two, taking your time with it and savoring its many flavor notes would yield a more fulfilling experience than you might have anticipated.
It’s a sentiment I couldn’t shake off the entirety of the 40-50 hours I spent exploring dilapidated towers, fighting blighted bears, and thrashing civilians by choosing the most unhinged Obsidian-esque dialogue options in the beautiful and vibrant locales of The Living Lands.
Avowed feels refreshing after something like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It’s whimsical, compact, and easy to get into. It’s surprisingly ambitious in the sense it balances exploration, combat, and the narrative side of things.
However, this division of priority greatly affects Avowed’s storytelling, which, while engrossing, isn’t as aggressively reactive as you might have come to expect from an Obsidian game.
Avowed’s world is fascinating to explore
Avowed takes place in Eora, the fantasy world of Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity games.
As someone who hasn’t played POE 1&2 and is not familiar with its lore, I felt a bit overwhelmed by Avowed’s consistent use of shrewd keywords like Godlike and Animancy in the early hours.
However, that overwhelming feeling quickly turned into curiosity, which became an ecstatic fascination as I devoured every codex entry, exhausted all dialogue options, and expanded my knowledge about this unique fantasy universe.
Avowed doesn’t shy away from delving head-first into Eora’s rich history, referencing events and characters from the Pillars of Eternity games and highlighting its religious and cultural beliefs with meaningful expositions, engaging conversations, and stunning architectural landscapes.
In that sense, it’s a very fascinating game to explore. Avowed rewards curiosity not just in the form of loot chests (there are hundreds of these), which are often full of crafting materials and unique gear, but also lore books and journal entries that you can find tucked away in the most unexpected places, sometimes even behind a waterfall.
All of it would have been for nothing if this world wasn’t so interesting to begin with. Plenty is going in Avowed outside of the main narrative where you, a Godlike with gifted abilities, are tasked with stopping an ever-spreading blight called the Dreamscourge.
A brewing civil war between the Empire’s militant faction and the local rebels has everyone on edge. Rogue Scholars have gone haywire and are practicing a forbidden soul-transferring technique called Animancy.
Caught between these bigger conflicts are more personal issues of the locals of the Living Lands, which Avowed diligently tackles with its many (but not overwhelming) story-rich side quests that often lead back to the main questline (more on this later.)
Avowed continuously satiated my fascination with its world, not just with its thoughtful lore entries and sprawling side quests but also through visual cues, unique architectures, and vibrant environments.
It’s easily the best-looking Obsidian game to date, with colors popping up everywhere, paired with stunning draw-distance and crisp lighting and shadow effects that vividly bring this world to life.
I was slacked-jawed the entirety of the first night I spent camping outside the city of Paradis, admiring the purple haze radiating from a distant lighthouse and the blue sky full of glistening stars, as well as soaking in the primordial silence of the campfire.
Simply staring into the horizon is soul-stirring in its own right, and Avowed’s art team has done a phenomenal job of hiding a whirlwind of emotions in every scenery. I can’t recall the last time I was so tempted to explore a game’s world at the blue hour as much as I was at the golden hour.
I only wish the devs had put a similar amount of effort into creating Avowed’s many NPCs, many of which look like the fantastical replicas of The Outer Worlds’ characters.
It’s not something that bothered me immensely, especially given that Avowed isn’t a full-fledged AAA title. Still, it’s hard not to feel distracted by the sheer night and day difference between the quality of its character models and environments.
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Contrary to popular belief, Avowed’s combat is fun
I didn’t enjoy the combat in Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. The gunplay felt ineffective, and there weren’t many combat-centric build options that would encourage taking more aggressive routes in dialogues.
Thankfully, Avowed isn’t anything like that. It features a seamless and satisfying blend of Skyrim’s hybrid first and third-person combat system that…just works.
Combat in Avowed is snappy and responsive, and there’s enough variety in weapon types and skills that makes this side of gameplay fairly potent.
Ranged weapons and abilities like Bows and Wands take center stage, but I was surprised at how satisfying it is to use one-handed Swords and Axes.
Melee attacks feel just the right amount of floaty and perfectly blend Skyrim’s nostalgia with modern-day refinements.
There is a wide array of active and passive abilities to suit your playstyle and Avowed strongly encourages hybrid builds by letting you mix and match long-ranged icy wizard with a close-ranged fiery sword and shield warrior.
To spice things up, you can use Godlike abilities. These are powerful active and passive skills that further amplify Avowed’s power fantasy.
My only complaint about Avowed’s gameplay is that I wish progression felt more natural, like Skyrim.
The availability of a wide array of weapon types and unique skills means, in theory, you can switch your build at any time. However, in reality, there are plenty of systems working against it.
For one, skill points are hard to come by, so if you invest all your points in Ranger or Wizard abilities, you would have to start from scratch if you want to switch to a close-ranged Fighter build or even mix it with a ranged one.
You can always respec your skills, and fortunately, it’s not incredibly costly to do that. But a Skyrim-like system where using melee weapons would unlock associated abilities and ranged abilities would unlock their skills would have given more agency in how you build a hybrid character over the long run.
Right now, creating a custom build in Avowed feels more like wiping out your progress on one side and replacing it with another.
Fortunately, Avowed is a relatively smaller game with limited abilities to choose from, so resetting skills doesn’t feel massively inconvenient. Still, it’s something I felt was worth pointing out.
Obsidian complements Avowed’s robust combat system with aggressive level-gated enemies and a tier-based gear system.
I found the combat in The Outer Worlds relatively easy, so I appreciated the bump in the challenge in Avowed. There are plenty of opportunities to get into a fight, whether it’s hunting bounty targets, raiding bandit camps, or surviving Xaurips (lizard-like creatures) ambushes in the wild.
These encounters are plentiful, but they never feel overbearing, mainly because Avowed’s combat is fundamentally robust. Furthermore, having a tier-based gear system means there are plenty of Uniques (legendaries) to find and experiment with.
While these Uniques aren’t as elaborate as something you would find in a looter-shooter or an ARPG, their perks are serviceable enough to make combat fresh and exciting until you find something else to suit your build.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find out how visually distinct these Uniques are, each with detailed engravings and texture work that are easy to miss. It all adds to the immersion.
It’s worth pointing out that level-gated enemies and quests mean you can’t rush through the main quest line. If you are the sort of person who likes to tackle the main story first, you may find Avowed a bit infuriating to play through.
However, as someone who likes to do all the side content in the area before moving towards the golden path, I didn’t find it a hassle.
That said, there are also narrative reasons why Avowed encourages exploring its open zones and completing side quests before hunkering down on the main quest (more on that later.)
Overall, Avowed’s combat is fundamentally robust and is backed up by enough systems that make it fun to interact with.
Avowed’s narrative is both authoritative and introspective but lacks the reactivity of Obsidian’s best RPGs
On the surface, Avowed may seem like another fantasy RPG where you investigate a mysterious ever-spreading plague and stop it from consuming civilization — a fairly common trope in traditional and modern fantasy RPGs.
While Avowed delivers on that front with some solid high-octane encounters, it shines mostly during its quieter, introspective moments where it subtly breaks the fourth wall and asks you – the player – some uncomfortable questions that are synonymous with some of the sociopolitical issues of the real world.
For instance, early on in Avowed, a voice asks you in the dream, “Is the instinct to conquer innate?” Right before this moment, you have an intense encounter with the local militant faction whose tyrannical leader is hellbent on colonizing untamed regions of Enora in the precincts of bringing peace and order.
These moments are heightened by Avowed’s excellent writing that seeps into its various diplomatic dialogue choices and further fleshes out its overarching theme.
They also add more personal stakes to Avowed’s story, something that Dragon Age Veilguard attempted with its narrative but fell short because of its juvenile writing and lackluster worldbuilding.
But as much as Avowed excels at immersing you into its world and asking you these difficult questions, it fails to make any notable difference because the game doesn’t necessarily react to your choices.
Like most modern RPGs, Avowed provides the illusion of choices. Your character may choose the most evil or sarcastic dialogue option (which is fun in its own right), but the scenario would more or less end up in the way it was supposed to.
Don’t get me wrong. Your choices have consequences in this game, but mostly on the macro level.
An NPC you spare in a side quest might remember and aid you in another. Sometimes, a decision you took on a side quest could be referenced by an NPC in the main quest line.
Other times, an NPC you helped in a side quest might pave the way for you in the main story.
These moments reminded me that Avowed is in an actual RPG, but one that’s a far cry from what I have come to expect from an Obsidian one.
There is nothing here like The Outer Worlds’ Flaws system that allows you to accept or reject a flaw in exchange for a perk point if you perform certain actions repeatedly. Or something like the Fallout: New Vegas’ infamous Karma system that adds more weight to every decision you make.
For the most part, I was okay with Avowed not having a highly reactive world like those games because it makes up by making exploration and combat so fun.
However, by stripping away the core pillars of what makes a good Obsidian RPG, Avowed may have taken the first step in the direction that Bethesda Game Studios stepped years ago after Skyrim and Bioware followed after the launch of Mass Effect 2 and that’s a scary prospect for any hardcore Obsidian fan, to say the least.
Disclaimer: The code for Avowed was provided to me by Xbox / Obsidian.
