What if the world doesn’t need saving? Well, tough rocks, the Living Lands of Avowed still need you to rescue them, but they’re at their best when you’re exploring, meeting dudes, and lighting the occasional villain on fire with a flaming sword. And honestly, that’s kind of beautiful.
Introduction
You start your epic quest in Avowed as the Envoy, one of the Emperor’s chosen from the land of Aedyr. There’s a plague called the Dreamscourge, and it is wreaking havoc on the empire’s citizens, and, more importantly for the Emperor, his throbbing desire to colonise and subjugate the free peoples of the Living Lands.
Of course, it sounds nicer when he says it.
As far as setups go, it reminds me more of Tyranny, arguably Obsidian’s finest effort, but it doesn’t deliver the same feels or gameplay. Evil hasn’t yet won, but it’s reaching out with grasping fingers and you are one of its instruments. There’s no particular pressure on you to deliver the Living Lands to the Emperor or to free it from Aedyr’s yoke; you’ll meet plenty of people from both sides of the aisle who will try coaching you to support them. The real reveal, when the curtain is pulled aside, is that none of this matters, because there’s a mysterious voice in your head and shit is about to Get Real™. Similarities with Tyranny continue when we review the scores each game received, and some of that might be because some people are liars. See, critics claim to like morally complex situations, but what they most often want is to feel good about something. In Tyranny’s evil-has-already-won world, you’re an agent of fuckery. The public perception of this classic is merely Strong on OpenCritic.
This is a marked contrast to Pillars of Eternity and its sequel, which both rank a Mighty:
I appreciate I’m a little late to the party, but it does let us view Avowed through the lens of other reviewers (and, crucially, how it stacks up against Obsidian’s other darlings). As we’ve covered, the Living Lands face an existential threat, but not the obvious one. Reviewers expected Pillars of Eternity 3 with a Doom camera, but what they got was The Outer Worlds in fantasy clothes, borrowing some of Tyranny’s moral complexity. I suspect that mismatch in expectation explains some of the reception. Avowed scored the same Strong rating as Tyranny. Both games are similarly rich in moral ambiguity and are also ones that made people uncomfortable by design.
Of course, moral complexity wasn’t the only sticking point. Some reviewers echoed the same critiques I’ll go into around story pacing, itemisation, and AI fuckity. But even so, Strong feels like the right anchor score here: a game that’s really good, sometimes great, but shy of brilliance due to a few clear missteps.
You Were Judging the Wrong Game
Avowed is at its best when it’s being a colourful Elden Ring. It shares more than a few similarities with FromSoft’s classic, but since people were expecting Skyrim + Pillars + Mass Effect, they were a little let down by Elden Ring Lite + The Outer Worlds + Obsidian’s brand of vibes.
See, the challenge with Avowed is its weakest element: the story. It isn’t a narrative-first RPG like Pentiment or Pillars. It’s an exploration-focused, emergent-story-style game. While it has a quest log and map markers, you’ll have the most fun when it’s pretending to be Elden Ring, allowing you to explore dungeons, find side stories, and experience the rich lore it serves up in spades. But if you focus only on the main story quest, you’re going to miss out on what makes Avowed something remarkable: a first-person exploration game that traded grimdark depression in exchange for a much brighter, almost Crayola-coloured fantasy world.
If we take a step back for a moment, RPGs should be different from each other, sure. But crucially, studios should also learn and grow when they try something new. With Avowed, Obsidian has honoured the implied promise to make each of their stories feel different without ever diverging from the basic formula: an alternate world that audiences can return to. Avowed fits that mould; it’s the same fantasy, the same promise, but a different experience from Pillars. I reckon they’ve learned a few things, too, and we’ll see some of their tricks in games of the future. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For now, it’s arguably a far better Skyrim than Skyrim, a fun and colourful Elden Ring, and is absolutely worth your time.
Escapism Rewritten
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are tired, man. Most of my friends want comfort, connection, banter, or just some goddamn sunlight instead of the enforced hygge of late-stage capitalism’s eternal winter. There’s an interesting recent article from PC Gamer, Game devs want to know what today's teens want, and surveys say sex and romance isn't it.
Avowed leans into this. There are no romance arcs, no forced pairings, just you and your squad cruising the land and righting wrongs. Avowed gives you the agency you lack in real life. It swaps out the cheap thrills drawcard of sex or romance and puts in the doppelgänger of a crew that are on your side. PC Gamer’s article says that 73% of young people sometimes or always feel alone, as well as feeling sad and hopeless. Avowed will give you a group of heroes at your side who want nothing more than to see you to win, succeed, to become the best you can be.
It’s a sad indictment of our world that the best forms of escapism we can find are those where we have real friends. But the word “real” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Avowed gets the vibe right, but misses deeper emotional stakes. The friendship and banter is great, and there are some absolutely golden one-liners, but without tension or arcs, it’s surface-level. And you know, I get the appeal and it brings us to another article from Buttondown, How Much Are You Willing To Pay For A Fantasy? The article digs into why, with so many stories essentially being the same narratives, we are willing to shell out to experience them again.
TL;DR: it’s about what you make readers feel. If Avowed gets one thing right, it’s the feel of having people at your back. Of how your homies Kai, Giatta, Yatzli, and even Marius have your back when the stakes are high and the chips are down. They’ll back your play, even when you make a mistake. They’ll honour your choices, even if they don’t think they’re right. And they will stand at your shoulder when the world is coming for you, blade in hand, and ready for the end.
That doesn’t sound like many companies I’ve worked for, and would stress a lot of friendships. If we’re in this life for connection, and the real world is letting us down, Avowed is here to give you the gateway to a world that makes it all right again. Like the best in the RPG genre, it offers a compensatory fantasy, a narrative that solves for the perceived deficiency in reality.
Exploration Over Plot
I’m going to come clean and say I spent probably the first 4 or 5 of my 60 hours with Avowed just corner-checking the starting town of Paradis. It wasn’t because the game was unclear or I was on meth; it’s because I kept finding environmental puzzles, people who weren’t on the main story quest, and other cool shit. For example, you’ll find a local militia of sorts in a passive-aggressive standoff with your team from Aedyr. Neither side comes forward to ask for help, but as you parkour into a locked building through an open window from a crane, you’ll find evidence telling you exactly which side is being a dick.
Avowed shines when you’re poking around a ruined lighthouse, stealing from pirates, or duelling an arrogant guardswoman to win her arquebus. It has some S-tier world design and environments that very much remind me of the cleverness of Elden Ring. For example, in Elden Ring you can often see traps in the environment and avoid them. Same deal in Avowed; I absolutely adore how traps work. There’s no rogue in your party with a dice roll to disarm a trap. It’s just you, my dude, and you need to work out how to avoid that pressure plate or get to your destination some other way. Or, I guess you can facetank it, because you can build your toon how you want, hero.
There’s no one nagging you to get on with the high-stakes plot. There’s no quest timer counting down to the detonation of reality. Sure, sure, there’s a plague, and that’s bad, especially for all the sick people, but you can 100% fit in one more dungeon before you find a cure. While you need to save the world, Avowed also lets you live in it first.
That said, it’s time to get into some of Avowed’s errors, like how when it tries to deliver deeper story moments, it often fumbles.
The Trolley Problem
One quest was peak low. There are two horrible people arguing about two horrible ways to fix the plague. It’s the classic trolley problem, but the Dumb and Dumber edition.
See, in the classic trolley problem, there’s a trolley heading on a track and it’ll kill, say, five people. You’re standing by a lever, and activating that will divert the trolley to a new path. The only real trouble is there’s already someone on the other track. If you take no action, five people die. If you take action, a single person dies, but you’re complicit because you pulled the lever. Maybe that one person’s your dad instead of a stranger. And so on.
There are other cases of the trolley problem, for example, the fat man version. Wikipedia describes it: as before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a fat man next to you! Your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five.
I’ll let you wrestle with that in the silence of your own mind, but Avowed treats us to the Ethics 101 version, but while there was a substitute lecturer in, fresh from a frontal lobotomy. Neither horrible solution offered solves the broader Dreamsourge plot problem. People have to die, either citizens in the zone or people in the ruins. However, the super crucial thing is by this point in the game you have a pretty good idea on how to solve the Dreamsourge, and the best option is to explain the solution to the terrible people, then walk away and solve the plague. You don’t actually get this option, no matter how many of the 300 different dialogue options you prosecute.
It was so clumsy it was laughable and lost all moral traction on my soul. It was at this point I stopped caring at all about the story and the people in it. It was such a hard faceplant, done so inelegantly, and for cheap artificial hand-wringing and morality points, that I couldn’t trust the writers. Avowed is best when it’s emergent, not when it’s trying to mimic the moral complexity of its CRPG ancestors.
Combat is Great, Once You Unlearn Skyrim
The big mistake you’re going to make heading into this is thinking it’s Skyrim, or maybe fantasy-flavoured Doom. Avowed is more of a… strategic stamina sandbox. Once you rethread your head on this, it’s arguably one of the best combat sandboxes in gaming, and I think we’re going to see games copying it in the future.
Spells are punchy. Melee feels weighty. You switch styles based on need, and nothing feels obviously imbalanced; they all just feel fun. For example, I played primary as a caster, but I slung a sword and shield alongside the wand and grimoire because some enemies just ask to be punched in the face. Both magic and melee feel good choices. The struggle is that it’s all fairly poorly explained, and the initial tutorial will probably confuse you more than educate you. For example, it gives you a dagger, which is a shithouse weapon for blocking, then tries to teach you how to block with it, which will almost certainly result in your newbie character running dry on stamina then running dry on life. It’s implying that blocking is viable early on, but with the zergs of enemies trying to teleport right into your eye sockets, it’s not. Dodging is essential, and the starting dagger is crap for blocking. There are difficulty settings, but they won’t save you from the tutorial dagger. It’s a truly terrible setup.
Dodging is essential for more reasons than the shit-tastic starting dagger, though. Enemies seem to have this ability to warp through a dimensional portal to fuck you up regardless of range when they started their swing. If you, say, back up to what is clearly out of melee range, say, three football fields away, surprise! They will just leap across the distance and stab you with their stick. Distance isn’t a defence; only blocking and dodging are. In first-person mode, this is jarring; in third-person mode, it looks comical. But once you’ve got your muscle memory locked and loaded, you’re in for tackling the real promise of the combat sandbox: the encounter design.
Avowed makes glorious use of the verticality of its spaces, and its varied enemy types, to bring real challenge to each encounter. Enemy healers will keep their tanks up. Casters and archers will pressure you from a distance. The tanks at the front lines will interrupt your casters and bruise your ego. You can’t just button-mash through this but, like a FromSoft title, once you master it, you will feel mighty. It’s a feeling of conquest delivered through skill, not stats, and is more rewarding for it.
Companion AI Is the True Final Boss
I’m going to come out and say it: once you learn the controls, the hardest part about combat is the inability to control your companions. The village idiots you’re expected to shepherd through each conflict make it challenging.
There are some baffling oversights here. You can’t tell them who to attack. You can’t reposition them out of AoE impacts. Your only means of control is triggering special abilities on long cooldowns, and even after you do that, your village idiots will often stop attacking the enemy healer you need to focus down, and go back to swinging at the unkillable tank. It’s like fighting a boss with two golden retrievers on your side—adorable, loyal, and absolutely useless in a crisis.
It’s such a counterpoint to the great combat and sandbox design. It makes tactical planning impossible and adds artificial difficulty. In a combat system that rewards synergy, the party system is a glaring flaw. It stands out because the writing and banter of your companions are genuinely delightful. Kai’s got serious Garrus energy (maybe because they share a voice actor), Giatta wants everyone to be their best, Yatzli’s a dramatic joy, and even Marius grows on you like moss on a damp stone. But none of that matters when they’re tactically useless.
Loot Curve or Cliff?
I suspect the thing that Avowed will be least well remembered for is its itemisation system and how that couples with player power.
It borrows another trick from Elden Ring. Items are rare; you’re not going to be dripping in purple loot by wandering the Living Lands. You definitely find gear, but the real power-up comes from scavenging materials and using them to upgrade equipment. This isn’t quite the dopamine hit many RPG players expect. In most itemisation-based RPGs, you get a cool +3 sword of badassery and take it on a murder spree. In Avowed, you find a +fuckall sword of badassery and need to pick flowers for some reason to upgrade it to +3.
While you’re picking flowers, all the monsters guarding them come factory-equipped with +5 weapons and are trying to murder you. Entering a new zone means starting a new power tier, and it’s rough. But like I said, this is pure Elden Ring. In Elden Ring you find cooler items, but you also need Smithing Stones to level them up. If you didn’t like Elden Ring’s itemisation, you’re not going to like Avowed’s, either.
Parking that for a moment, we need to talk about how the best caster armour drops after the point of no return. Melee builds are easier to structure around scavenged gear; my party stash is full of epic-level heavy armour, heavy maces, two-handed axes, arquebuses, and other forms of delivering that true Iron Maiden experience on your foes. For my caster, I found one special wand and only one decent suit of armour based around a lightning build at about the mid-game point. But once you get into the true endgame, you get god-tier armour that lets casters walk on water like melee builds were able to from level 3. It’s a transformation that turns you from a dollar-store Gandalf into Zeus on cocaine.
It’s baffling that this is kept to a part of the game where you get a very limited time to enjoy it. It would have made more sense to provide this armour while you were playing, like, the rest of the game.
All in, it means the dopamine of RPG loot is muted, especially compared to the Skyrim-style expectation of, “Just find better stuff.” Obsidian’s system is smart in borrowing from Elden Ring, but it front-loads struggle and back-loads reward, which robs the combat sandbox of its full glory.
Spit and Shine
I played Avowed on an AMD Ryzen 7700x with 32GB RAM and a GeForce 4070 Super. I also very briefly played it on an Xbox Series X.
On the XSX, it was surprisingly solid. It looked fine, ran smoothly, and was even remarkably free of the Open World Jank Effect™. Things were mostly the same on PC; it looked better and held steady at around 80fps, but I had about 5 crash-to-desktop errors in my playthrough, as well as a weird bug preventing DLSS from running while also capturing gameplay with nVidia’s overlay. The game does not perform well without frame-boosting technology. This is a minor gripe; most people won’t be capturing footage, so 98% of people are going to have a great time with Avowed’s stability and performance.
The one fly in this ointment is the lack of autosave points. Man, I wish they doubled or tripled these; it doesn’t feel like there are enough of them and they happen at weird times. Get in the habit of manually saving often, friends.
No New Game Plus, No Goodbye… Just Credits
Like many modern RPGs, Avowed heavily sign-posts the point of no return. When I hit that, I was like, sure, I feel as if I’m ready to put the big bad in the ground. I’ve got a couple of treasure maps still to find, but I can do them later.
Nope! As it turns out, despite Avowed having a glorious open world I’d love to 100% map complete, once you’re finished with the boss, the game is finished with you. No NG+, and no postgame exploration. It’s a weird oversight. Just when I’ve finally built the character I enjoy around that armour I got in the last 10%, I don’t get to use them anymore.
It’s another baffling decision in a game where exploration and player power are the main drawcards. It’s a finale that fizzles just a little, like someone turned the lights off while you were still dancing. And that’s a shame, because despite its missteps, Avowed does so many things right that you want to keep playing. You want to keep living in its world.
Avowed Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Still Damn Good
If you went into Avowed expecting Pillars of Eternity 3, you probably bounced off it. If you went in looking for somewhere to get lost, cast fireballs, and set the wilderness ablaze, you probably had a great time. Avowed isn’t here to rewrite the rulebook. It’s here to give you a good world, a solid fight, and some friendly faces who’ll stand by your side no matter what kind of spell-slinging murder hobo you are. It might not be Obsidian’s best story, but it’s arguably their warmest, which counts for a lot… And it’s probably the best gameplay they’ve designed, too.
In a world where our friendships are algorithmically filtered and our stories endlessly commodified, Avowed gives you a fantasy that feels like a place to rest. That’s not just comfort. It’s power.
As a lover of storytelling, I mourn that it’s not another Pentiment, Baldur’s Gate 3, or even Skyrim. But as a lover of emergent experiences, of tales wrapped in camaraderie of shared struggle, I love that Avowed is Avowed. Flawed in places, but a brave and charming RPG that understands something other games forget: sometimes, you don’t want to save the world. You just want to feel a little less alone in it.
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