Avowed
Released: February 18th, 2025
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Systems: PC, Xbox X/S (reviewed)
“I don’t know how, but if anyone can, it’s you,” confidently claims the Pikaman Furby who’s spent thirty minutes in your company, wholly convinced after fighting a few lizards that you’re capable of stopping an epidemic nobody knows anything about. So off you trot to a colonized island to live out the dream of being a Fantasy RPG Protagonist!
Or at least try to.
You are really special and you were born that way, though you’re told (without being shown) that you often face prejudice for it because this is a Fantasy RPG. You’re trying to combat a plague that’s turning living people into videogame enemies, because games have been obsessed with The Corruption(™) as an antagonistic force for years now.
Avowed is very much a game of tropes, all of which are followed to the letter. A mysterious voice talks to you in dreams, a ruthless inquisition ruthlessly inquires, and practitioners of controversial magic are up to their usual thing. Your companions all fit into stock character molds - the friendly bruiser with a past he regrets, the jerk with a heart of gold, the one with the dead parents, the snippy mage, you know the drill.
Is Avowed a dated RPG that hasn’t evolved past the 2010s, or a charming throwback evocative of the 2010s? It’s a question that could be asked of a deeper, richer experience, but sadly there’s not much on offer here outside of a good combat system. The rest is a remarkably breezy walk on well-trodden ground.
Ground that’s walked straight down the center, because Avowed’s script takes its themes and does little with them beyond non-committal equivocation.
Should I also churlishly compare it to The Last of Us? Not because it has any particular horror elements, but because in character creation you need to pick mushroom-themed growths for your head and it’s impossible not to think of cordyceps-infected zombies. One fungal adornment in particular completely covers your eyes and makes you look almost exactly like a garishly colored Clicker.
The Living Lands of Avowed’s setting are full of shroomy shenanigans - the Dreamscourge plague covers victims in them, they carpet the scenery, you eat a lot of mushroom stew, and a bunch of walking bipedal ones serve as enemies. What is it with videogames and mushrooms lately? I noticed last year that there was an explosion of games about fungus, and I don’t know where the trend came from. Games are mushroom mad at the moment.
I’m okay with it. I’ve always thought mushrooms were cool - and quite fun, if you eat the right ones.
I do like Avowed, even though it’s severely wanting in many departments. Its combat is at least really nice, more direct and immediate than The Outer Worlds, and with weapons that pack a hefty punch.
You have the standard categories of melee weapons, from daggers to greatswords, each one responsive and brutal. Magic users can fire projectiles with wands and cast spells using Grimoires, a combination that’s incredibly effective. I can’t say I was impressed with ranged weapons though, as the bows and guns never feel powerful enough to justify their slowness, especially since enemies rush into close quarters really quickly.
Your companions possess useful abilities, unlocked and improved with rarely provided skill points. Kai the Street Shark is great for drawing aggro, Marius the dwarf can bind and bleed enemies, Giatta the Animancer provides defensive support, and Yatzli the Pikaman Furby throws out high magic damage. Remembering to command allies is very worthwhile.
For the most part, moving through the world feels nice and smooth. I find sprinting through open spaces strangely satisfying, and there are quite a few platforming sections that aren’t half bad. When you’ve gotten a handle on evasion timings, zipping out of harm’s way is neat.
The one major drawback with controls is how the jumping and dodging share a button - moving forward or not at all generates a jump, while all other directions dodge, and with so much platforming, it’s easy to do the wrong thing by accident or muscle memory. If you’re the kind of person who likes to holster weapons outside of combat, the automatic arming during a dodge will aggravate me… I mean, you.
I’m none too keen on the UI, either. The radial menu is messy and keeps shifting the position of things like spells and healing. As a result, I only unlocked a handful of spells and used a Grimoire to cast the rest, as you can only bind two of them to a button and casting from a menu isn’t fun. Expect to use it regardless though, as even with high resistances you’ll be poisoned a lot and need to sift through shit to use your curatives.
Your skill points are drip fed and the abilities they unlock aren’t exactly abundant, but in exchange it doesn’t take long to feel reasonably powerful. Because this game is pure tropes, skill trees fall under the traditional fighter/rogue/wizard archetypes, and while you’re free to mix abilities up, the slow unlocks encourage you to specialize in one tree and get more powerful skills sooner.
You can respec at any time for increasing gold costs. I’ll take it.
I went with magic for most of my playthrough, and by the second tier of spells I was throwing out freezing blizzards over a wide area, leeching enemy HP at an impressive rate, and bouncing strong electric balls between targets. Later on, I got to summon big thunderclouds and cause opponents to levitate helplessly. Entertaining stuff!
While it doesn’t take long to acquire power, the lack of options keeps one’s excitement tempered. When starting, I looked forward to casting poison-based spells, but there’s only a single one despite an entire ability dedicated to upping poison’s effectiveness. Most spells fall under ice, fire, or lightning damage, each element containing spells that behave similarly to each other.
Avowed lacks in the loot department, too. Most chests and enemies offer junk items, and the unique gear is spread thin across all categories. You can only equip full body armor with additional slots for gloves and boots - no cool masks or helmets, presumably so NPCs can keep reacting to your fungal head - and pretty much every item looks either generic or stupid. After hours of playing, I found one pair of snazzy looking gloves, and I transmogrified every other ugly pair I wore to resemble them. Not that they went with any of my awful outfits.
Accessories aren’t too exciting either, since a handful are interesting and others offer such paltry bonuses as a 1% critical chance or 5% damage reduction from single enemy types. Cool sounding items like an amulet that recovers Essence (mana) when close to companions perform their functions so mildly as to be a waste of a slot compared to something that simply boosts a stat. About the only truly compelling ones are the items that let you summon creatures, but they're really rare.
The lackluster loot speaks to a huge problem with Avowed overall - there’s nothing you can encounter that’s truly exciting. Every region you visit has one main city and the same small assortment of enemy types, all bearing a repetitive selection of rewards. In a more enthralling RPG, a city of magic technology might offer the promise of weapons and abilities you’ve never seen before. By the time you meet the Animancers though, your options have long been laid out for you. You’ve known what you’re getting from the start, and it isn’t Animancy.
Throughout each map you’ll find spots to set up camp for the party, and camping really shows how little there is to do. Even chatting to your companions gives you just a few stock questions and occasional commentary on the current situation. The rest of your options at camp are much flimsier.
Camping lets you cook with the many ingredients you’ll pick up along this unadventurous adventure, a simple case of combining food types to make items that restore HP/Essence or temporarily boost stats. Recipes are all unlocked for you, and the menu to make them is weirdly cumbersome and doesn’t allow you to properly cook in batches.
You may also upgrade your gear, gaining linear and minor improvements to a stat or two. Unique weapons can be enchanted, but while you’ll have an abundance of materials for it, you’ll not find many worthy candidates unless you’re a melee fighter. Besides, enchanting lets you slightly alter a weapon’s special trait by picking one of two options, which is just kind of sad. You can’t even enchant armor or accessories, despite there being a wider selection of those - or maybe that’s why you can’t enchant them.
Limitation is a constant.
Avowed is the very picture of a game that’s far smaller than it was presumably intended to be. Compared to work from far less prestigious studios, Obsidian’s latest comes up way short - anything from Spiders’ library of work will give you much more depth, though of course the quality of their games vary wildly between them.
As far as narrative goes, you can forget about dramatic choices - you’re the Emperor’s envoy, and no matter how much you attempt to scupper the awful Aedyren regime, an envoy you will remain throughout the vast majority of story. Sometimes you’ll only get your choice of tone, deciding how you’ll agree to something that was agreed for you. Your stats and character backgrounds unlock extra dialogue choices, but they’re similarly meaningless, flimsy lip service.
I’d say Avowed tries to create a thin illusion of meaningful responses and choices, but I think even that would overstate the effort made to convince players of their agency.
Parking its ass on the fence means every contentious event outside the crimiest of war crimes is described as nuanced despite how utterly uncomplicated the plot is. At one point, Kai responds to an accusation against the Empire with something along the lines of, “there’s some truth to that, but it's not the whole story.” It’s a comment thoroughly indicative of how terrified of commitment this story is.
I’ve been replaying Nier: Automata at the same time as this, and good god does the inadequacy show when Avowed’s contrasted against a game that has an opinion.
Of all studios doing RPGs around colonialism, I’d have expected Obsidian to have more to say. In fairness, it doesn’t ever claim Aedyra’s encroachment of the Living Lands’ populace is good, but #NotAllAedyrans is in full effect. There’s a lot of promise in a story that lets you wield political power as an invasive outsider and asks you how to use it, but this right here is tepid and inconsequential stuff.
In one sidequest, you can take part in a drug delivery, and you’re given the option to help yourself to a sample. Obviously I said yes, and… nothing. No weird hallucinations, no wacky effects, the stuff is simply a dud. The payoff is exactly zero payoff. I would say this quest is the definitive example of Avowed’s inability - or unwillingness - to do anything outside of its restrictive template.
Why even offer the opportunity to try the shit in the first place? Why remind us that we’re so unable to walk off the beaten track we might as well be on rails? Why go out of the way to breed resentment? It’s just another disappointment in a line of letdowns, and it’s one that didn’t even have to be there!
The drugs don’t work, they just make things worse, and I’ve mushrooms on my face again.
Remember when I said I liked Avowed? After writing all this, I’m beginning to question myself.
Thing is, I really, really enjoy the combat, and I don’t think its entirely out of gratitude that at least one thing isn’t disappointing. The only oddity with it is how enemies can magnetize to you with melee attacks, scooting into your face if you back out of range. It’s unintuitive at first, but once you realize how much you’re expected to time your dodges, you get used to it. Shield users or those up for parrying won’t notice it as much as ranged players will.
I found myself rushing towards enemies as soon as I saw their little red markers on the minimap, because I could count on having a laugh with my flamethrower hands and lightning strikes. So hey, there’s that.
Avowed’s a very pretty game, which is a second thing it has going for it. The Living Lands are full of color, especially thanks to the fungal abundance splashing environments in vibrant blues, pinks, and yellows. Even the murky swamps of the Emerald Stair region boast purple Animancy lamps and the ever-present Xaurips - basically kobolds, but colorful as heck. Oh, and there are mushroom people too, looking pretty and gross at the same time.
I do wish more monsters were as fun as those two species. From beginning to end, you’ll encounter obligatory undead, elementals, spiders, and bears across every single map. The fact you see the same old creatures in every environment, regardless of climate, really hammers home how empty of surprises the experience is.
This was supposed to be the positive section. Um, what else is good? Occasionally some lines are funny and the voice acting is rather good. There we go.
Avowed ought to have been a more linear action game. Combat is good enough that a streamlined and direct experience could serve it well, but as an RPG there’s simply not enough of anything. It feels like vast chunks are missing, with an initial promise of adventure that rapidly shaves off expectations until you’re left with a toothless story and a frustrating dearth of material.
It’s fun to create a snowstorm and jab lizard men with spears, but the shallow trudgery between fights is consistently disappointing. I don’t think it’s unfair to have expected far more from Obsidian. Thanks to Avowed, I know I can expect far less.
6/10
