Avowed is almost good, but there’s something so resigned and workmanlike to its quest design and storytelling that it often feels like dog-eared chorelist of Obsidian must-haves, ticked off so aimlessly that the result is a bit like having an RPG described to you by someone late for a bus.
And that should be that, really. I’d run through all the ways Obsidian’s latest didn’t quite do it for me, most of you would go play it anyway because it’s on Games Pass, and we’d all go back to patiently waiting for the sun to explode.
But, god, what a devastatingly gorgeous open-zoned world this is. What a triumphantly weird, sprawling playground of fantasy naturalia. What a treat it is to just climb all over, its design ethos captured in the first magical ring I found offering a 15% buff to parkour speed.
Ignore two thirds of the weapons and just roll a wizard to witness the stodgy melee combat of other classes give way to crackling, cackling spell-slinging. There is such a gulf of quality here it’s like playing two different games. I spent 27 hours having a meh ol’ time until a reinstallation of Nvidia’s loathsome app deleted 200 some screenshots and I had to restart. Why not play a wizard? I thought. Why not indeed. Suddenly, I’m frying whole families of lizards at once with chain lightning and grinning like Palpatine in a pet shop.
Of all the things I expected to have to say about Obsidian’s latest, “it’s a pretty fun magical treasure-hunting parkour FPS” was not one, but here we are.
Avowed’s introduction follows a multicoloured lemur-like snifflebeast curiously pawing up ivy-licked branches until it disturbs a dripping vegetal cyst, which puffs out noxious gasses and knocks the lemur to its death on the forest floor. Night falls and other lemurs come to investigate, only to be greeted by a snarling fungal zombie in the form of their former branchmate. These are the effects of the Dreamscourge, a mycelial plague with the potential to affect all life on the wild and dangerous Living Lands. As an envoy to the emperor of Aedyr, you’re here to investigate.
It’s a tense situation for a few reasons besides the Big Shiitake. Your first port of call is Paradis, a sanctuary for salty rogues that – like most in the Living Lands – don’t take well to the new Aedyran occupation, nor the presence of an inquisitorial band of supercops named The Steel Garotte. Local customs? Give ’em the musket. Adherents of ancient magical traditions? Free trip to the pyre. The game lets you pick your own flavour of supercop as you try to quell various unrests and placate locals or root out resistance as you see fit, providing you see fit to choose between a couple of obvious responses plus a token selfish bastard option whenever someone remembered to write one in. “How much is it worth to you?”. “This much coin”. “Thank you for your coin”. “No, thank you for taking my coin from me”. I made those last two bits up but that’s the vibe. Everyone feels so easy to shake down, either for actual cash or just their resolve in general.
Initially engaging sidequests fizzle out with little pathos or intrigue; larger beats can offer difficult dilemmas but feel siloed and stiffly scripted. All beats are haunted by a deity that speaks to your character from afar and interrupts the fun constantly with achingly dull riddle-me-this mushroom bullshit. I rarely felt allowed to express myself in ways I wanted, more that I was having choice and consequence™ dangled in front of me as an obligatory feature of This Sort Of Thing.
But! There is a sort of organic, evolving sense of political and social tension in the cities and towns that makes itself known in some fun ways. “I’ve got no quarrel with you,” I tell the bandit leader that’s just stopped me in the street out of nowhere. “Well, you better find some quarrel quick!” he retorts. There is no dialogue option to tell him I don’t know what that means and it sounds like a sofa mimicking human speech patterns so we just fight. Avowed is full of bits like this, unmarked encounters and conversations that add texture to the busy settlements. I help a guard by the gate search a trader’s goods for contraband, find two grenades, pocket them, then tell the guard I ain’t seen nuffin. In a back alley I find a grandiloquent moustache bastard named ‘Cutty Pete” who sells illicit goods. One of them is a magic pistol named ‘The Disappointer’ with a lovely lore blurb that tells me how shit it is.
I’d love to waste money on it but I can’t, because the way Avowed gates-off progress by demanding you carry adequately colour-tiered equipment to deal with certain enemies can be so stringent that it sometimes threatens to make the entire concept of freeform exploration pointless. You can either buy new stuff for millions of money or use millions of the upgrade materials you’ll find in chests strewn about the world, and then you’ll probably accidentally find a magic item that does the job after two hours spent gathering the right resources. Exploration is wonderful for reasons I’ll talk about soon, but few things feel worse than getting truly absorbed in your own freeform adventures before realising you’re now forced to do a chain of side quests in a very specific order to gather funds so you can carry on enjoying yourself.
Of course, you could and should just play as a wizard, which doesn’t negate the gating but does let you fry lizards above your weight class easier. Melee just isn’t interesting. You can fall into a comfortable rhythm with it but you’ll otherwise be doing the same thing hour 30 as hour one: watching your character slash, parry, and block as you shout commands at them through a megaphone full of baked beans. Firearms are fun in concept, but decades of collective gun wisdoms on juice and heft have seemingly been ignored, and so headshots are physically identical to opening a browser tab.
So, magic it is. Spellbook in one hand, wand in the other. One-handed wands can’t help but look inherently twee so it’s always very funny to stun a bear by filling its stagger bar then bring the Bibbidi-bobbidi-boot down. Progressively better books offer upgraded elemental spells which you can then augment and bind to your hotkeys through the class skill tree. There’s another stat tree with percentage bonuses for things like perception and might, and you can sometimes use these to talk your way out of fights. You might want to do that as wizard, because you’re squishy of course, but that’s where your companions come in.
I…don’t really feel like writing about who they are as characters save to say that the only one I liked was Brandon Keener’s Kai and then only a little bit. They do talk to each other at camp though, which is nice. More usefully, they have their own skill trees with hotkey abilities you can mix and match to shore up your own weaknesses. So, if you want to pin down a troublesome guard with an axe, you can have tracker dwarf and charisma void Marius throw down some trapping vines.
Avowed bloody loves a good vine, and not for nothing either. “Are those roots tearing the bridge apart, or holding it together?” asks Kai. What a beautiful and perfect line that is. My favourite one in a script of scant wit and scanter interest in brevity. It could be a mission statement for Avowed’s entire approach to environmental design; nature eating nature eating civilisation and throwing it back up again in myriad eye-catching, hand-crafted ways. Its outside environments beg to be trundled through. Its dungeons and caves feel conjured from a fantasy Boomer Shooter, momentously flowing and stuffed with secrets found through hidden pools and smashed walls.
If you have Game Pass, it’s worth the download just to go rambling and vaulting. And hey, you might find some interesting characters where I just found fantasy-themed insurance advert extras reading from lore encyclopedias with the occasional bawdy dad joke scrawled in the margins. There is a honest-to-god “it’s not the size, it’s how you use it” dialogue option in this thing. Someone wrote that. Someone else okayed it. A willy joke! A lovely little willy joke in my RPG! Tops. Anyway, better be off. I’ve got lighthouses to climb and horizons to dive toward. Sometimes it really is the size. This might be the most beautiful, intricately hand-crafted open-ish world in gaming. I wish I was more excited to spend time in it.
