Avowed - Nurturing Nature
Avowed, the latest offering from RPG juggernauts Obsidian Entertainment, is set in the world of Eora – a fantasy land popularised by the Pillars of Eternity franchise. But those who aren’t already fans of that series can be forgiven for not knowing this fact, and for assuming Avowed is a standalone property introducing its very own fantasy world. To start this review with a confession, I want to admit that I say this as someone who, somehow, between seeing the game’s announcement in 2020 and playing it for this review, had completely forgotten that this game was tied to a pre-existing world. In my defense, this info isn’t really in any of the main trailers, so it’s easy to miss if you aren’t up to date on Obsidian’s catalogue – and in Avowed’s defense, it literally doesn’t matter. I’m sure knowledge of the existing lore would change your experience of Avowed, likely for the better – but it sure is a testament to Obsidian straight off the bat that I got most of the way through the game without knowing I was missing anything.
From the moment your character washes up on the sandy shores of a mostly-deserted island, Avowed is a game that wants you to understand its world. You learn that your character, the Envoy, is on a mission to rid the lands of a plague known as the ‘Dreamscourge’ – a sickness that weaves its way through the minds of its victims, sending them on nonsensical rambles and causing them to lose touch with reality as you know it while also corrupting their bodies beyond repair. You want to understand the Dreamscourge and its origins, and have been sent by the ambassador of your people, the Aedyrans, to abolish it for good – as soon as you can figure out how and why the corruption is spreading.
Though you’ll learn about Eora’s various peoples through conversations with other characters, you’re also given the option to learn about it through a pop-up glossary of sorts, which can be brought up in the middle of any string of dialogue. Every time a character uses a keyword, or refers to one of Eora’s many factions, gods, traditions, races, or other noteworthy nouns, you can access a small entry on said noun that will give you a little refresher on who – or what – they’re talking about, providing you with crucial context needed for making any one of the game’s many impactful decisions. It solves a problem so many fantasy games of this scale suffer from – an interesting world, with extensive lore, buried in codex entries that many players will never read. The pop-up will also show you your dialogue history, which is a godsend for those easily distracted during long conversations with big blocks of text. Any context you’ll need is always right there at your fingertips, which is what makes it so easy to forget that Avowed might expect you to have any prior knowledge of Eora – it doesn’t even expect you to have prior knowledge of the conversation you had ten minutes ago, let alone in previous games.
But in almost every discussion you have, context will be important. Not only is your character an Envoy sent to encourage diplomatic relations between nations and examine the Dreamscourge, but you are also a ‘Godlike’ – a rare being who has been blessed by one of the gods of Eora at birth, resulting in unique physical characteristics that characters throughout the world will never fail to comment on. You’re somewhat of an anomaly in the world, given you don’t know which god has blessed you, but it doesn’t change the fact that it makes people treat you differently. Throughout your journey, you’re just as likely to be trusted blindly and given the power to make decisions beyond your position as you are to be ridiculed or negatively judged based on your godlike physical traits. Either way, you’re forced to make a lot of choices, both about things that directly impact you and your quest, and things that affect the world at large – and those choices aren’t always so clear cut.
Thematically, Avowed is a game about many things, most of which are too nuanced to discuss too deeply here, and which deserve to be thoroughly examined by someone with much greater expertise than I. It’s just as much a racial allegory, or a religious tale, as it is a comment on the destructive nature of colonialism and the constant danger that humans pose to the environment and to each other. At times it feels like it’s trying to be a little too philosophical in its approach, and at others far too heavy-handed, but at the end of the day it’s hard to deny that it never stops making you think.
Sometimes, the decisions you’re considering are small-scale ‘do I turn this thief into the authorities, or let them continue smuggling contraband’ level things, and sometimes you’re weighing up whether the lives or history of entire civilisations are acceptable sacrifices in your quest to destroy the greater threat to the world. Other characters will try to influence you in these decisions, and sometimes you’ll be more inclined to listen than others. More often than not, I found myself just trying to figure out what felt right in the moment, and while it made my character feel a little inconsistent in their choices, it also made them feel incredibly human – and the game seemed to encourage that inconsistency.
No choice I made in Avowed ever felt quite like the ‘right’ one, or the ‘correct’ one – and this seems to be my design. Your Envoy, as well as being a character aesthetically moulded by you in a solid character creator at the game’s start, is whoever you make them. They might be a heavy-handed, violent coloniser intent on ensuring the nation of Aedyr assumes power and control over other civilisations at all cost. They might be a pacifist, sympathetic only to the pleas of nature, convinced that humans and humanlike creatures (known as ‘kith’) are nothing but a blight on the land. Most likely, they’ll fit somewhere in between – and you’ll have to find your own balance.
Obsidian’s ability to so consistently create these nuanced scenarios, while frustrating at first, leads to the game’s greatest strength. Writing that manages to create ambiguity – that fails to identify a clear ‘right’ path – is something we need more of in the current video game landscape. When I started playing Avowed, I resented how much it made me think. By the end, I marvelled at it. On a grand scale, this game’s narrative design is exceedingly clever, and on a more granular level, the dialogue is witty and biting, and the characters are varied and complex. Each of the four companions who will join you on your journey have their own clear motivations for doing so, and your relationships with them are shaped by the decisions you’ll make about what happens to the world around you. If I had one criticism of the narrative, I do wish these decisions felt like they affected your relationships a little more. They led to different conversations, sure, but I don’t know that they affected things in any big, meaningful way. Then again, maybe they didn’t need to.
But despite this nuanced and philosophical narrative, and this expansive and interesting world filled with intrigue and complex diplomatic relations, there is one huge problem I have with Avowed. While the characters are unique and exciting, the enemies sure aren’t. Because Avowed, just like many perfectly good games before it, suffers from The Spider Problem. If you can come up with entire political and religious systems for your game, you know what else you can come up with? Enemies that aren’t spiders. There is no need for almost all of the areas of your game to be populated with a foe that a large part of the population are afraid of, unless you’re making a horror game. I know that I might be an extreme example, and for most people it won’t entirely ruin their experience of a game – but it is likely to make it more unpleasant. Yes, spiders can be big and gross and make easy fodder for ‘things people are going to want to kill’. But they’re also the lazy choice, and the writers of this genre are clearly capable of coming up with something better. Please, I’m begging you, stop making me (and many others) dread going into entire parts of your world map. I want to want to explore, but when you’ve got spiders scuttling everywhere, I just want to get out of there as soon as possible.
For the most part, exploration of the world of Avowed is a generally enjoyable experience (spiders aside). Going a little out of the way of your quest markers will usually allow you to stumble upon an interesting ruin, or a side quest that may ultimately mean nothing to the outcome of your story, but will do a lot for your understanding of Eora’s lore. It’s all about context. You can switch between first and third person at will, so can explore in whatever way is better for you – though trying to play in third person does make picking up items a lot more fiddly, and makes combat a little trickier. Combat which is, for the most part, standard fantasy game fare – choose to fight with melee weapons, ranged weapons, or magic, switching between them as you wish. Build up your stats however you like, focusing on whichever area you prefer – but if you’re anything like me, fights will involve a lot of just spamming the attack button with the occasional magical ability thrown in for good measure (sometimes setting stuff on fire can really turn the tides).
At the end of the day, Avowed is what you make it. You can reflect on the choices you make as the Envoy, and examine what they might say about your views in the real world, and use them as learning opportunities. Or, you can just treat it as a cool fantasy game about gods and monsters – it’s your call. But whatever you take from it, Avowed is a solid RPG offering from a studio that clearly knows how to flex its narrative muscles, and who have leaned into their strengths hard to produce a game that might not be groundbreaking, but that will certainly make you think.
Player2 reviewed Avowed on Xbox Series X using a code kindly provided by Xbox.
