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Set on an island that feels like fantasy’s take on the Wild West’s frontier where brigands and undesirables flock to start a new life, Avowed has something endearingly off-kilter about it. There are the usual tropes: you play as a saviour-like envoy tethered to a elusive god, for one, tasked with investigating a plague blighting the land. It’s a land of magic, gobby traders, and a daily life paced to micro-conflicts between groups ever-suspicious of one another. But, the look and feel are distinctive. This is unmistakably an Obsidian game: a fully realized world, distinct and convincing. There is the fauna and flora doused in bright, neon fungal growths and kaleidoscopic lichen that eschews the dark gloom of a good ol’ fantasy RPGs. There’s a delightfully playful, Fable-esque vibe despite the very serious business of saving the world. Like so many Obsidian games, Avowed’s world feels fresh and novel thanks to a polished attention to detail and solid art direction.
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You select a background, spend a bit too long shifting jaw size sliders in the character creator, and allocate a starting stack of attribute points as you see fit, before you’re put to task. Within the first hour, despite a trope-y shipwreck to kick things off, the comparisons to Skyrim feel out of place. What unfolds is a decidedly playable jaunt though it does crib you into a swatch of contained, thoughtfully-designed, though a little well-worn, open-world biomes. It’s penned in freedom. But, Avowed nevertheless does a fine job of prompting exploration within these compact, honed sandboxes. Curious players, or obedient loot globins, will always be rewarded for wandering, whether it’s a chest stuffed with loot, a murky grotto to comb through, or a mithering, down-and-out NPC that needs a hand.
It’s, mostly, a funny game, too. The writing, as you’d expect from Obsidian, is predominantly on point, self-aware and bawdy, though at times the gags feel like they are backed by an inaudible laugh track. The four companions siding you throughout your world-saving travails do often feel like interchangeable characters in a snarky fantasy sitcom. And, boy, does everyone in Avowed have a lot to say. The Living Land-ians are a loquacious bunch. It comes with the territory you could say: Obsidian’s foundational spice mix. There’s plenty of scope in how you respond: you can act out the insolent, dismissive prat, the glib Machiavellian puppet master, or play into the chosen one Godless role and play the sympathetic placater, as you sit fit. There are thousands upon thousands of dialogue decisions that by the twentieth hour you’re sort of compelled to, at best, skim through, or at worse, skip, such is the density and frequency of the chin-wagging.
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Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Chat aside, Avowed’s combat is a fluid, responsive rush. Magic, guns, obnoxiously large axes, lithe daggers, throwables, and companion abilities – there is no shortage of damage-dealing tools and options. You can specialise by sinking points into a stacked skill tree as takes your fancy – magic, ranger, fighter – augmented by the trusty RPG staple of a massive pool of weapons, armor, and gear with unique buffs. A satisfying audio twang accompanies every hit. Hailing down a maelstrom of icy shards hits the spot every time. Aside from a slightly annoying assortment of damage-spongey enemies, even on bog-standard normal difficulty, it’s solid stuff other than sifting through loot in the aftermath.
As you wrap up an area and graduate to the next, and then to the next, the seams come undone: a dependable formula of samey quest objectives, repetitive problem-solving, bounties, endless talking, and looting. Yes, there’s some variety in the minutiae. At one point, there’s a group of proto-steam punkers that reanimate corpses as macabre farm hands, and in another you’ll help smuggle a down-and-out couple out of a slum. Sometimes you’re helping a local denizen with an implied erotic penchant for lizard-like xaurips, and then it’s retrieving this or that gewgaw. But, the grind does set in. You reach a new location, head to a hub city, explore the map, accept quests, seek out totem fragments, track down treasures, then press on with the main story and onto the next location to do it all again. There’s a formula to it all, an almost arcane dedication to process and a self-imposed convention that drains Avowed’s spine of its weird, compelling marrow.
But it is easygoing, frictionless fun and has that quirky, inviting warmth that Obsidian seems so adept at conjuring up. You know what you’re getting and it does what it says on the tin. You’re never scrambling for things to do or unsure how to go about it. Avowed is perfectly fine and very playable, though I doubt it’ll linger long in the mind beyond the credits if you can make it that far.
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