Avowed is a return to the classic action RPG comfort food we know and love, following two delightfully unexpected diversions from developer Obsidian’s best-known work: a survival game with a lot of insects and a 16th-century 2D detective thriller. This game, which takes place in the fantasy world of Pillars of Eternity, is full of all the clichés I love about role-playing games, such as gathering around a campfire with my party members to share dark pasts and unresolved traumas and looting every single victim before their corpse has even had a chance to cool.
After two pleasantly surprising detours from developer Obsidian’s most well-known work—a survival game with a lot of insects and a 2D detective thriller set in the 16th century—Avowed returns to the beloved classic action RPG comfort food. Taking place in the fantasy world of Pillars of Eternity, this game is full of all the clichés I love about role-playing games, like getting together with my party members around a campfire to talk about dark pasts and unresolved traumas and robbing every victim before their corpse has even had a chance to cool.
As the Emperor’s Envoy and a chosen Godlike with magical abilities, your character is given a reckless amount of power to do as they please. You are sent to the untamed continent of the Living Lands to stop a mysterious plague of insanity known as the Dreamscourge, all the while finding time to help anyone on the street who approaches you for assistance with a personal issue.
Avowed, which draws heavily from Obsidian’s extensive worldbuilding skills, is teeming with lore that expands on the world established by the Pillars of Eternity games. It is simple to lose hours reading books and scrolls or engaging in political discourse with the inhabitants of each major region. Even if you are not familiar with the world of Eora, there is a very helpful reference guide that is updated with important locations, factions, characters, and world-specific ideas whenever a character mentions it in a dialogue. This feature is akin to Final Fantasy XVI’s active time lore feature. Therefore, you may swiftly switch over to make sure you understand what the hell they are talking about before making that crucial decision that could have disastrous repercussions.
The planet is overrun with bears! even in cases where it is not very logical.
My biggest problem with combat is the variety of opponents: I found myself fighting the same few enemy types everywhere I went for the majority of my 50-hour completionist run (you could easily finish it in less than half that time if you breeze past some side quests and play on normal difficulty), and nearly none of them are particularly interesting or have unusual behaviors to begin with.
Of course, there are bears (oh my), huge spiders that spit slime at you, and skeletons that need to be killed again. And my goodness, how many bears there are in the globe! They include some bears in the mix even when their presence is not necessary. Half a dozen thugs gathered around a campfire in a bandit camp? How about bringing two pet bears to the gathering?
My enthusiasm in facing these banal fantasy villains faded after a few hours, as did the novelty of the combat. I would occasionally be reminded of how to overcome a non-bear opponent by something large, frightening, and unexpected, but these pleasant surprises are far too infrequent.
Fortunately, there are lots of other things to see and do when exploring each of Avowed’s four sizable open-world centers, each of which has individuals to talk trash to, secret chests to plunder, small puzzles to solve, and side quests to finish. A forested harbor town will give way to a spooky, tainted countryside, then to a dangerous desert and a desolate wasteland with lava gushing from an active volcano in all directions. It is a structure that is similar to the individual planets of The Outer Worlds: All of the landscapes are pleasantly bright and full of personality, which is a wonderful difference from the occasionally drab and dreary locations we wind up exploring in other role-playing games. None of the maps are particularly large, but they make excellent use of the area they have.
It seemed like the cleanup crew might arrive at any second to dismantle the set.
Those maps are fantastic to explore on your initial pass-through, but because adversaries never respawn, there are not many incentives to return or run through them again. This is advantageous since it eliminates the need to retrace your steps to combat bears and other enemies that have arrived out of nowhere, but it also means that any backtracking is entirely barren of life. Since it seemed like the clean-up crew might arrive at any time to dismantle the set and take out the furniture, they were so vacant that I felt under tremendous pressure to get on to the next zone as quickly as possible.
One distinctive feature of Avowed’s exploration is how much it encourages you to use its parkour system. You have many chances to jump from ledge to ledge and mantle over this and that while you look for secret treasure chests and steer clear of obstacles. In addition to adding an activity that is a nice change from the routine to focus on in between (or occasionally during) fights, this emphasis on mobility is very rare for the genre. Even while you will not be wall-running or doing anything as elaborate as in Dying Light 2, it is still a fun addition to the standard dungeon exploration.
Verdict
Avowed’s fantastic character writing and amazing worldbuilding make me remember why I initially fell in love with Obsidian’s role-playing games. On the whole, though, it plays it quite safe, with a straightforward fantasy adventure that is more recognizable than evolutionary, and there is hardly enough variety of enemies to keep its swords-and-sorcery fights engaging for very long. It is still quite competent with all the tried-and-true elements I expect, such as chaotic combat, leveling systems and a loot progression that lets you build the kind of character you want to play, and meaningful decisions that can have a huge impact on the world, even if it does not go all out or make a lasting impression on the genre.
Avowed’s fantastic character writing and amazing worldbuilding make me remember why I initially fell in love with Obsidian’s role-playing games. On the whole, though, it plays it quite safe, with a straightforward fantasy adventure that is more recognizable than evolutionary, and there is hardly enough variety of enemies to keep its swords-and-sorcery fights engaging for very long. It is still quite competent with all the tried-and-true elements I expect, such as chaotic combat, leveling systems and a loot progression that lets you build the kind of character you want to play, and meaningful decisions that can have a huge impact on the world, even if it does not go all out or make a lasting impression on the genre.
