I’ve often joked that Obsidian is my ultimate 8/10 machine. If they put out a game, I’m probably going to give it an 8/10.
I don’t view this as derogatory at all. I generally love their games. They are well-made experiences that often bring something interesting to the table. But they’ve also never quite been able to make a game that I consider a true all timer.
The Obsidian formula is usually pretty simple for me. They craft some great worlds, and they usually have some interesting characters. Most importantly, they almost always deliver an excellent story coupled with choices that have consequences. Meanwhile, the combat in these games tend to be a little less exceptional for me. Passable at best, I’ll say.
So when I booted up Avowed, I was genuinely excited to jump in. Frankly, I was expecting an 8/10, and I was happy about that.
It turns out that I was right. Avowed is an 8/10 type of game for me. But for reasons I did not expect at all. While it has its moments, Avowed’s story falters for me in a variety of ways. But it then turns around and delivers combat and exploration that I would consider near the top of the class for the genre. It’s a bit shocking, but for its flaws, Avowed shows me that Obsidian might be primed to take a huge leap forward with all of its big RPGs going forward.
The Voices In My Head Are Telling Me That Everyone I’m Hanging Out With Is a Boring Normie
Avowed kicks off with our main character reaching the Living Lands, a continent in the world of Eora, which was also the world used for the Pillars of Eternity games. You are there as the envoy of Aedyr to investigate a mysterious plague that has taken hold in the Living Lands called “the dreamscourge.” The Aedryan Empire is very powerful, so naturally, people on this independent continent don’t necessarily love them, which adds interesting elements to your interactions with people.
The other interesting part about our hero is that they are a “godlike.” This means they’ve been touched by one of the many gods that exist in this world, and thus they have special powers. However, our hero doesn’t know which god they are representing, which is not usually how these things go. The game has multiple elements that are pretty interesting hooks right off the bat, which made me feel like the plot had a lot of promise.
Unfortunately, various bits of execution led to me just never feeling as engaged as I felt like I should with these story hooks. There are a few reasons for that. First off, because this world is already very well established from past games, I think there is a bit of a lore barrier in the early going of the game. A lot of nations and terms are thrown at you off the bat that take some getting used to. So I felt like I was focusing on learning everything I needed to more than focusing on the plot in the opening several hours of the game. Avowed does a great job of teaching you what you need to know to get you through, but it still takes some time. The game has a glossary that you can open up in the middle of any conversation to reference any terms that are used that you might be unfamiliar with. I think I felt pretty comfortable with the world of Eora after a few hours, but it is a small barrier for newcomers to this lore to deal with.
More importantly, one of the most significant plot threads in the game just never clicked with me whatsoever. In fact, I found it outright annoying in spots. Early on in the game, the main character realizes that they have a voice in their head. I won’t go into any more detail from there, but the voice is incredibly cryptic. The voice is constantly interrupting you to talk in a completely nonsensical way, and after a few hours, I found myself skipping through these conversations unless they seemed really important. I thought that maybe this would get better as things go along, but it never does, even as you learn more about this voice.
My other biggest issue is that I had zero attachment to any characters in the game. I thought all four of the companions in the game were fine, but I never really cared about what happened with them. I think a lot of the best characters have some sort of hook that engages you from the start, and then you see the depth develop from there. Sadly, almost every companion in Avowed feels like a total normie in a bad way. There are questlines where you can learn more about them, and there are a few interesting things there, but it was never enough to really make me care.
I think part of the problem is that the protagonist in Avowed does not have a voice actor. These big RPGs with choices almost all have a fully voiced protagonist these days, and doing so greatly enhances the interactions between different characters. All of the interactions between the hero and companions feel a bit stunted because of the silence on one end of the conversation. I don’t think this alone is why I wasn’t a fan of the characters in the game, but it certainly didn’t help.
There are a few other things that bugged me as I went along. It seems like the game loses momentum quickly after every big story moment, outside of perhaps in the final hours. I also think the game takes a bit too long to establish who the big villain is, which made the first half of the game feel a little aimless at times.
It’s not all bad, though. Avowed does do a few things that helped redeem the story in spots for me. The biggest strength of the game is the big choices that the game gives you. In classic Obsidian fashion, you have several moments where you must make a big decision that will alter various elements of the plot significantly. One decision at the end of the game in particular is one of the most compelling decisions I feel like I’ve ever had to make in a game like this. The beauty of Avowed is that it doesn’t really paint any of its big choices as a good or evil thing. I thought the game managed to make compelling arguments on each side of any debate that really had me going back and forth in my mind as to what I wanted to do.
A usual tried and true method in games like this is to do the opposite thing of what someone you are an enemy of wants. But Avowed actually had me heavily considering the arguments that my antagonist made. That is an incredible achievement.
Because I had such little attachment to this world and the characters in it, whatever happened didn’t actually bother me one way or the other. That’s obviously a big flaw, and it made me feel a lot less pressure when I made these big decisions. But while I didn’t care about the choices emotionally, I found them all to be really interesting intellectual exercises. I was fascinated to think about what I would personally do in the situations presented. That gave Avowed’s story at least a little value for me, even if it isn’t traditionally what I would expect to enjoy from a story. These decisions at least made me feel like the story wasn’t a complete waste of time, even if I’d still say I really didn’t enjoy it by the end.
An American Harry Potter Story Would Probably Feature More Guns
Despite not liking the story, I still found myself consistently wanting to pick it up and play it again. I never lost interest in it, despite having multiple other great games in my rotation while I played it. That was because Avowed is a lot of fun to play, which completely surprised me.
In Bethesda and Obsidian games, I am very used to getting through the combat as fast as possible in order to get back to the good stuff. Avowed actually had me craving combat encounters. This is some of the best first-person RPG combat I have played since Cyberpunk 2077.
Avowed gives you plenty of options in battle. You can use melee weapons, a bow, a shield, a gun, or magic. There is also a dual wielding mechanic that lets you really go wild with some of your options. You can use a gun and a wand, swords in each hand, etc.
After experimenting a bit with everything, I found myself going exclusively with magic. I used a wand with one hand and a “grimoire” with my other hand. The grimoire lets you use four different spells without having to unlock them in your skill tree. If you do have spells unlocked in your skill tree, using them through the grimoire also makes them stronger.
I went with this method because using the magic feels so good in Avowed. There’s a responsiveness and snappiness to the standard magic attack that feels a bit like Hogwarts Legacy. And you get a pretty nice array of other spells that are destructive and fun. There are spells that let you shoot giant fireballs at enemies. There is another that makes a giant icicle come out of the ground. Another causes all of your enemies to levitate. There are way more than that as well. You can mix and match these spells in strategic ways (including with the abilities that your companions have) and do massive amounts of damage to large groups. That mix of strategy, variety of spells, and excellent sound design and visual indicators for damage all made magic about as satisfying as it could possibly be to use.
My only complaint with using the magic is that while you don’t need to use these grimoires, I found it to be the best and most satisfying way to use the spells in the game. Grimoires let you cast four different spells. But it was really hard to find spellbooks with four spells that I wanted to use that I felt flowed well together. I wish the game let you customize a grimoire and put whatever spells you want in there, but I did eventually find grimoires that I felt were good enough, it just took a little longer than I would have liked.
Because I was using magic, my character was obviously fighting enemies at a distance throughout my time with the game. My goal was to have space between enemies, and I used a variety of spells and companion abilities to slow enemeis down if they got closer to me. However, with the large groups of enemies the game throws at you, it’s inevitable that even with the perfect ranged build that enemies will get close. One of the coolest things about Avowed is that not only can you dual wield in all sorts of weird ways, but you can also quickly swap to another set of weapons whenever you want mid-battle. Because of this, I had a melee weapon and shield to swap to for when I got into danger. I was really focusing all of my skill points on my magic build, so this never felt as effective as I liked, but I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that will really enjoy being able to easily fight in two different ways whenever they want.
I did have a lot of fun with the skill tree too, as while I focused almost exclusively on magic, I did put a few points in the “ranged” skill set, which allowed my dodge to be more effective in various ways. Avowed gives you an excellent amount of freedom to build your character the way you want to.
Since I wanted to avoid melee, I ended up focusing more on evasion when enemies closed in on me. I was regularly using the dodge button, which is why I ended up leveling it up on my skill tree. I did find a few elements of this to be a bit awkward, though. First off, the dodge button is the same button as the jump button. So the dodge works if you hit the dodge button and go to the side or backward. If you go forward, you will jump instead. This was really weird to adjust to for quite a while. I’m not sure if I got fully used to it until around halfway through the game. Basically, if you are in a situation where dodging backward or the side is a bad idea, you have to sprint forward instead, and then maybe slide to help get away so that you can regroup. It’s just a bit clunky. It also leads to some issues if you aren’t really clear with which way you are pressing the joystick before dodging. Early on in the game, there were a lot of times where I was trying to dodge to the side, but it didn’t quite work, likely because I wasn’t fully pressing to the side enough.
Avowed also has a fair amount of tight combat areas. This isn’t a huge deal if you are playing melee. But if you are playing ranged, it can get dangerous fast. I’d say the reason I died in this game 60% of the time was because I dodged and ended up running into something and kind of getting stuck on it for a second. This happens because I’m playing in first person, so I don’t usually have full sight of everything around me. Avowed can be played in third person, which would help mitigate that particular issue, but by all accounts, first person is the best way to play the game, so I stuck with that. Other than that, I don’t have all that many complaints with the combat, as it is very well done overall.
Sometimes It’s Nice To Not Have A Ten Minute Walk To Each Objective
When I wasn’t torching enemies with my magic, the other main thing to do in Avowed is to explore the four different “open zones” in the game. Open zone is an important distinction from open world, as I’d guess that in most of the maps in the game, I could make it from one side to the other in anywhere from 3-4 minutes if I were to just run straight across.
That may sound disappointing to some, but trust me when I say that it is actually pretty awesome. I’ve played a lot of large open world RPGs this year, and while the size can be amazing, there can be some long stretches of doing absolutely nothing while trying to make it to the next objective. That is not the case in Avowed. If I saw a quest marker, I could almost always get there really damn fast. And if you aren’t rushing to your next objective, Avowed feels bigger than it is because there is such an insane amount of things to do in each zone you go in. You really can’t go much more than 30 seconds of exploring in Avowed before either coming across a combat encounter, getting to a new quest, or finding a tower or area that you can explore. The game tucks secrets into every corner and greatly rewards those who want to explore.
I also think it does a great job of having organic exploration while also making it easy to find all the quests and major points of interest. I spent something like 35 hours in the game, but I know people who have spent double that just looking for any bit of loot they can in the world. While I did almost every side quest that I found, there were still a lot of unexplored points on all of my maps when I finished the game. I feel like Avowed really sets it up perfectly for all types of people with how they designed this game.
Exploring is also fun because Avowed shockingly has some pretty decent first-person platforming as well. You can climb up towers, on buildings, jump from one rooftop to the other, and do all sorts of other jumping related activities. I wouldn’t quite say it’s also designed to be a parkour game, but I definitely got some Dying Light vibes the more I played.
Exploration is also great because all the loot you find is extremely helpful. Obviously, you will find useful new equipment at times, but the game also really lets you stick with any item you like for the entire game if you really want to. You can upgrade any equipment in the game to a pretty high level. The chests you find in Avowed focus on upgrade materials more than full on new loot. I actually preferred this, as there was almost no chest in the game that I found where I came away disappointed with my loot. Exploring always was worthwhile here.
I also liked exploring in Avowed because the game is really damn pretty. Avowed isn’t top of class for fidelity, but it has a really nice range of locales with impressive backdrops that helped make these “zones” feel bigger than they are. The zones are often designed so you can see big landmarks in the distance, which help make it so you feel like you can explore without checking the map constantly. Whether you want to mainline the game, just play the side quests, or if you want to go balls to the wall and explore every inch of this world, Avowed is designed to accommodate you.
We Might Be Close To Obsidian Being An 8.5/10 Developer Instead Of An 8/10 Video Game Developer (Do You Ever Think About How Dumb The Standard Video Game Review Scale Is? I Mean, That’s Not Going To Stop Me From Using It, But Sheesh)
That strong combat and exploration is exactly why I feel extra excited about Avowed, despite they fact that it has its flaws. Avowed feels like true growth for Obsidian. Obsidian really delivered in ways that I’m not sure they ever have with this game. The core gameplay and exploration are easily the best that I have seen from them, and it’s a significant step up. If they can take what they learned here and then make a game with more of their traditional strengths, they are primed to start being very high on my list of favorite developers.
Avowed might not be the perfect game, but I do feel like it’s a great game. I also can’t help but be excited that it might be looked at as a turning point in how we view Obsidian going forward. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Score: 8.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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