Avowed Review

On the heels of an insect-filled survival game and a 2D detective story straight out of the 16th century that were pleasantly surprising departures from what developer Obsidian does best, Avowed is a return to that traditional action RPG comfort food we know and love. Set in the fantasy universe of Pillars of Eternity, this is a game that’s filled with all my favorite RPG cliches, like standing around a campfire with my party members to exchange dark backstories and unresolved traumas, and looting every single slain enemy before their corpse has even begun to cool. Per Obsidian’s pedigree, the writing, world-building, and open-world maps are all quite good, and running around lobbing deadly spells at reanimated skeletons and violent lizard folk to claim shiny new gear is as entertaining as you might expect, if not exactly breaking new ground. That’s a bit of a trend, actually: Avowed draws so much from the Skyrims and Dragon Ages of the past that it ends up an overall unsurprising adventure that has few distinctive ideas to call its own.

As both a chosen Godlike imbued with magical powers and the Envoy of the Emperor your character is granted a downright irresponsible amount of authority to do whatever you please, and you’re dispatched to the wild continent of the Living Lands to put an end to a mysterious plague of madness called the Dreamscourge while also finding the time to aid any person on the street who asks you for help with whatever personal problem they might have. You’ll spend your days delving into ruined yet beautiful caves, sewers, and forgotten places in search of loot and XP, while taking every opportunity to whale on beasts and ne’er-do-wells with swords, bows, and spells. Yes, this is basically the premise of every western RPG from the past several decades, but that’s because it’s a formula that works reliably. Avowed executes almost every aspect of it quite well.

This is especially true of the dialogue and story, which is without question the thing Avowed does best. Unraveling the mystery of the fungal Dreamscourge and the otherworldly forces at play is a journey well worth seeing to its conclusion, especially since your decisions can have a profound impact on how things end up – the ending I got hinted at loads of things that could have gone much differently and my fingerprints were all over the ultimate fate of the Living Lands, which could make it worth another playthrough to see how things might have gone differently. And although you usually don’t make major world-changing decisions until you’re just about to move on to the next zone, there are a few times where the consequences of my choices were immediately and keenly felt, like the time I decided to cast a spell so powerful it randomly killed a substantial percentage of the population, Thanos-style, and everyone hated me thereafter. Granted, most of the twists and turns that Avowed’s plot sets up become pretty apparent well before your character and their companions become aware of them, which is a bit disappointing given the Pillars of Eternity series’ track record for wild revelations that took me by surprise. Even so, the story kept the adventure running full steam the whole time, especially with interesting choices to make to keep you company along the way.

Bantering alongside your four companions, each of whom brings their own opinions, personal problems for you to untangle, and cool combat and puzzle-solving abilities to rely upon while exploring the Living Lands is especially delightful. Just like in sister Obsidian RPG The Outer Worlds, you can bring two of these rapscallions with you at a time, which allows you to experiment with different pairings for mechanical purposes or just to hear them trash talk your decisions. Hanging out with Kai, the sarcastic reptilian mercenary with a fondness for woodworking is rarely dull, and bringing the furry, catlike, and relentlessly horny mage Yatzli along will almost guarantee you won’t have to go very long without some choice innuendos. Sadly, she’s just a tease: you can’t actually romance any of them, and the social links you can develop are fairly shallow. That seems like a fairly big miss since it’s otherwise great at building camaraderie with your eclectic found family, and even a fade-to-black sexytime scene can give you something to remember an RPG playthrough by.

Leaning into Obsidian’s substantial worldbuilding chops, Avowed is absolutely brimming with lore that builds upon the world the Pillars of Eternity games established, and it’s easy to lose hours just reading books and scrolls or discussing politics with the locals of every major region. Better still, even if you aren’t an expert on the world of Eora, there’s an extremely handy reference guide that populates with key places, factions, people, and concepts unique to the world whenever a character brings it up in a conversation, similar to the active time lore feature in Final Fantasy XVI. So before you make that really important decision that might well carry dire consequences, you can quickly toggle over to make sure you understand what they heck they’re talking about before proceeding. That makes Avowed’s typical fantasy setting that’s filled with what can quickly become too many made-up words and foreign concepts a whole heck of a lot easier to navigate.

When you aren’t chatting up the locals, you’ll probably be sending them back to The Wheel for reincarnation via Avowed’s tumultuous combat. You’ll face off against the usual baddies, from typical fantasy creatures and animals to anthropomorphic mushrooms and people driven to madness by the Dreamscourge. Fighting with melee weapons and magic feels smoother and more competent than it does in many similar fantasy RPGs, but evading dozens of enemies as they charge through sickly marshes and barren deserts isn’t as easy as it looks. I spent most of my time playing as a squishy wizard who had little in the way of protection and had to do my best to keep my distance, quick-dodge like a champ, and rain down as many high-powered spells as I could to keep them at bay. I’m especially fond of one that opens a black hole that lifts enemies helplessly into the air, and another that fills the area with a deadly lightning storm. Alternatively, there are more martial character build options that require more blocking, stabbing, and making use of power attacks to break the enemy’s guard, and each of these has their own skill trees that let you do neat things like smack enemies onto their backs with a powerful ramming attack. As someone who insists on playing on the hardest difficulty on my first run, I definitely found myself knocked on my butt more than a few times, and accidentally stumbling into an area that I wasn’t properly leveled for was quite humbling. But it was never insurmountable.

My biggest issue with combat is in the variety of opponents: for the vast majority of my 50-hour completionist run (you could easily beat it in less than half that time if you breeze past some side quests and play on normal difficulty) I found myself fighting the same handful of enemy types everywhere I ventured, and almost none of them are interesting or unique in their behaviors to begin with. There’s, of course, skeletons in need of re-killing, oversized spiders that spit gunk at you, and bears (oh my). And by God, are there so many bears in this world! Even when it doesn’t really make any sense for them to be here, they throw a few bears into the mix. A bandit camp with half a dozen ruffians sitting around a campfire? Why not add two pet bears to the party?

After a few hours the novelty of fighting these humdrum fantasy baddies, and my interest in squaring off against them, diminished. Every once in a while something big, scary, and unexpected would arrive and make me remember how to defeat a non-bear opponent, but these welcome surprises are too few and far between.

Thankfully there’s plenty more to do and see while exploring each of Avowed’s four substantial open-world hubs, each filled with side quests to complete, minor puzzles to solve, hidden chests to loot, and people to talk smack to. You’ll go from a forested port town to a creepy, corrupted countryside, then to a perilous desert and an ashen wasteland with an active volcano spewing lava every which way. It’s a structure that resembles The Outer Worlds’ separate planets: None of the maps are especially big, but they make great use of the space they have, and they’re all delightfully colorful and brimming with personality that’s a welcome change from the sometimes drab and dull places we end up exploring in other RPGs.

Those maps are great to explore the first time you go through them, though they don’t give you many reasons to stick around or run through again since enemies never respawn. This is a blessing insofar as you don’t have to retread the same areas to fight monsters (and bears) that have arbitrarily reappeared, but this also means any backtracking is completely devoid of life. They’re empty to the point where I felt extremely pressured to move onto the next zone as soon as possible because it felt as if the clean-up crew was going to show up to break down the set and remove the furniture at any moment.

One unique aspect of Avowed’s exploration is just how much it wants you to engage with its parkour system: it gives you ample opportunities to leap from ledge to ledge, mantling over this and that as you search for hidden treasure chests and avoid traps. This is an emphasis on mobility that’s fairly unusual for the genre, and it adds an activity that’s a welcome change from the routine to focus on in between (or sometimes during) combat. You won’t be doing wall-running or anything quite so fancy as what you’d find in Dying Light 2, but it’s still an interesting extra dimension to break up the conventional dungeon delving.

While there aren’t a lot of big new ideas that set Avowed apart, there are some nice smaller ones that I’d love to see every RPG hereafter learn from. For example, although there’s a stamina system during combat whereby you can exhaust yourself and lose the ability to fight back for a short time, running never drains it, whether you’re in or out of combat. So I appreciated that Avowed never inflicted the all-too-familiar annoyance of constantly running out of energy every 15 seconds when sprinting around the world. Similarly, you have encumbrance limits when looting items, but it’s quite generous with the space it gives you, even if you’re a wimpy wizard with a relatively small capacity like myself. What’s more, only larger items like weapons and armor count towards your carrying capacity, while consumables, materials, and other small items are weightless, ammo for guns and arrows for bows are unlimited, and larger items can be dismantled on the spot to turn them into valuable (and weightless) materials. There’s even an option to just hit a “send to camp” button anywhere in the world to instantly transport loot to your stash. These little details might not be genre-shifting refinements, but as someone who is easily infuriated by meaningless limitations that start to feel terrible after dozens of hours, they were seriously a godsend and I appreciate Obsidian’s thoughtful approach to removing some traditional RPG friction.

Yet if there’s one thing that impressed me the most about Avowed, it’s the fact that across my 50+ hours with it on Xbox Series X, I encountered almost no glitches or technical issues worth mentioning. There was one time where I unwittingly killed an optional boss before accepting the quest to hunt it down, another where my compass wouldn’t tell me where to go for the next part of the main story, and sometimes I’d see odd polygons pop in and out while exploring the world. But I can count the number of times these things happened on one hand, and I didn’t experience a single crash even once during my entire time playing. That’s all but unprecedented for this genre, and an extremely welcome surprise.