About 50 hours into Avowed, I had to put down my controller and step away after becoming emotionally overwhelmed. It wasn’t because of some big narrative moment or choice, but rather a diary I discovered off the beaten path. An innocuous merchant I’d run into in every previous region had written about how much she loved seeing me, and effusively hoped that our paths would cross again. She always popped up in the most convenient places, offering a warm smile and a place to offload my treasures. Now she was dead in a ditch, all alone.
Avowed is a game filled with moments like this. It constantly evokes reaction — both in-game and out — through superb storytelling that constantly throws players into emotionally harrowing quests, morally ambiguous quandaries, and wondrous discoveries to stumble upon. It clearly follows in the footsteps of Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), but cuts out a lot of the fat for a leaner, sleeker role-playing experience.
Although it occasionally suffers from bugs and visual glitches, Avowed scratches an Elder Scrolls itch that nothing else has for over a decade. It’s a tightly focused game where every element, from the exploration to combat, works marvelously in concert.
For King and Country
Almost disgustingly rich in lore, Avowed takes place in the high fantasy world of Eora — the same setting as developer Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity games. Avowed puts players in the shoes of an envoy (colloquially just called “Envoy”) for the militaristic Aedryean Empire, and a close confidant of the emperor — sent on a mission to investigate a continent known as the Living Lands, a volatile frontier where only the hardest of explorers can survive. As the empire tries to inflict its imperialism on the island, it is met by a disease called the Dream Scourge, a plague of the soul that drives people mad.
The idea of being responsible for the empire’s interest is central to Avowed, and it’s a vital piece of many of the game’s narrative beats and conflicts. From Fallout: New Vegas (2010) to Pentiment (2022), Obsidian has built its reputation on games that make player choice feel meaningful. Avowed truly feels like the evolution of the studio’s formula, a game that largely molds itself around big moral choices and illustrates them through both massive and mundane changes that ripple throughout the campaign.
The Envoy is what’s known as a “Godlike,” a chosen being that serves the interest of a specific deity — but unlike most Godlike, the protagonist doesn’t know which particular entity is their patron. Shortly after arriving in the Living Lands, an ethereal voice makes contact with the Envoy, and they form a connection that’s simultaneously comforting and bizarre. Avowed forces players to reckon between this new mysterious connection and their loyalty to the empire, raising some big moral questions in the process. As a lifelong servant, is duty more important than doing what’s right? When faced with tyranny and the subjugation of an entire people, can you just look away?
In one quest, a brothel recruited me to find a lost shipment, only to discover that said shipment contained an herb used as a contraceptive — which was outlawed in the Empire. While I could turn the brothel in, I could also choose to cover up their smuggling. Even past that, it was possible to convince an ambassador to “fudge” the books to get them more funding. In an otherwise innocuous side quest, every small detail and choice fed back into that main crux of Aedyr trying to seize control of every aspect of people’s daily lives.
For nearly a decade, CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) has been considered the gold standard for side questing in role-playing games, consistently surprising players with how missions and favors would tie back into the main narrative, or even change it entirely. Countless imitators, even long-running series like Assassin’s Creed, have adopted some version of this concept, but Avowed is the closest another RPG has come to matching The Witcher 3 with the strength of its side quests — specifically in how often tackling these distractions can turn into lengthy adventures that flesh out huge swaths of lore or present decisions that could actually impact the main story and major characters. Related Content Inside the Biggest Live Game of 'Dungeons & Dragons' Ever Played 'Monster Hunter' Is a Global Hit. But What Makes It So Popular? How 'Splitgate 2' Is Reinventing 'Capture the Flag' With Guns and Portals 'Monster Hunter Wilds' Is A Colossally Fun Game Whose World Could Be Better
“Authority” is the core theme of Avowed — how it creeps in and shapes our lives without consent, and the ways in which people can choose to push back against it. So much of the game’s writing explores the boundaries of the governments that define society, and what it looks like when those guardrails are absent. It’s a compelling exploration of morality that doesn’t just present players with tough choices but asks them to ruminate on the question of what authority means to each person.
But it also peppers in smaller motifs like the value of human life, the comforts provided by spirituality, and the importance of ecological preservation. As the U.S. and other countries face down increasingly single-minded (and downright tyrannical) governments, the stories that Avowed explores feel direly urgent, and apply to much more than just its fantasy world.
Party members are also a huge part of Avowed, and present one of the single most innovative aspects of the game. These aren’t just hollow stock characters that exist to dote on the player, but living and breathing pieces of the Living Lands. As people, they have history together, things they’ve sacrificed to go on this journey, and places to go back to when it’s all over. Even though you only have four companions, every single one is naturally woven into the main story — meaning there’s different dialogue based on who’s in the party, but each one has a distinct perspective that enriches each scenario.
One particularly great pairing is that of the lizard-like Kai and his dwarven friend Marius. The duo have a playful mentor-mentee dynamic (think: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker), frequently reminiscing about the crazy situations they’ve escaped by the skin of their teeth. Yet beyond their own micro dynamic, each has a place in the larger world too. For instance, Kai is notorious in the city of Thirdborn, and he’s in the party when players explore the area, he can help smooth out misunderstandings or direct the group to a pub owner who might have a tip. But his reputation for having abruptly abandoned the city also provides intriguing story opportunities and adds additional layers to his backstory.
Fitting the Pieces Together
The best way to describe the core design of Avowed is “intentionality.” Every aspect of the game is crafted to feed into its main narrative and lofty ideas. Nothing in Avowed feels like a waste of time or worthless. Side quests contain vital lore and character development, deepening your understanding of this reality and the dynamics at play. Breaking off the main road in any direction will yield some kind of treasure or reward within minutes — whether it’s a shiny new weapon or the crafting materials needed to upgrade that trusty sword that’s been held since the very beginning.
Open world games like Skyrim or The Witcher present seamless realms to explore, filled with countless little icons and distractions to tackle, some of which feel like nothing more than toothless distractions. Too often, these virtual worlds are padded out simply to make the experience longer, inundated with enemy camps to take down and fruitless fetch quests that all feel copy-and-paste. That’s not true at all here, as Avowed strips away all the fluff to ensure each and every activity has some meaning. Avowed tries, and mostly succeeds, to avoid the bloat by creating a handful of open zones that are densely packed with organic experiences to discover, rather than providing one overwhelmingly large map littered with chores.
As in Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds (2019), these are compact areas that each have a completely unique visual aesthetic and design, on top of a specific narrative arc. Each side quest in the region feeds into its own larger story within the macro tale, providing a rich tapestry of history about the people that live there, and distinctly fleshing out one of the game’s companions. There’s just enough to see and do while filling in the puzzle pieces in ways that are enjoyable without becoming redundant or boring.
To this end, even traversal feels designed with thoughtful brevity. Avowed provides light parkour abilities that let the player clamber up cliffs and hills with ease, jump over gaps, and even do a Call of Duty-esque ground slide. The movement in Avowed feels immediately responsive and satisfying, like a hodge-podge between Skyrim and Dying Light (2015). The mobility system is satisfyingly fluid, especially in how it adds verticality to battle, letting you take advantage of the high ground, or perfect positioning for a spell. It’s yet another area that has surprising amounts of depth to uncover.
What’s brilliant about Avowed is how snappy everything feels, and how it cuts the wheat from the chaff. The critical story path in each area is just three to five hours, but it takes double that time to do everything available. Side quests strategically require players to trek across the entire map, giving ample reason to explore and poke around — thus yielding more resources and items. Exploration almost feels reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) in how rewards are constantly dolled out, and how visual cues in the environment guide the way, rather than clear cut waypoint markers. Using spells and items can have environmental effects for both combat and exploration: fire can burn away vines blocking areas, ice creates platforms on bodies of water, and lightning can activate switches (which is also very Zelda-like).
That sense of freedom also applies directly to Avowed’s combat system, which encourages experimentation. Avowed has three different classes: Warrior, Mage, and Ranger. Each of these classes has its own skill tree, and abilities can be mixed and matched with no restrictions. Any weapon can be equipped at any time regardless of class, from gunpowder pistols and rifles to spears and magic tomes. This provides a drastic variety of options for how to approach combat, especially when skills are layered in on top of that.
In my playthrough, I had a devastating rifle that inflicted poison damage and ricocheted to multiple enemies, alongside a second kit that let me simultaneously wield a sword and fire off ice spells from my tome. It’s easy to find ability combinations that feel delightfully chaotic, like freezing enemies in place before smashing into them with a bull charge.
While Avowed’s combat really grows to become more satisfying over time, it’s also the only real complaint I have with the game. Combat can often be janky, with some weapons feeling floaty and imprecise, enemies sometimes bugging out, frozen in place for the party to massacre. Things can also get frustratingly chaotic in battle when too many enemies and allies are crammed into tight quarters.
The game also has a somewhat bizarre way of stopping progress with increasingly difficult opponents. Instead of enemies scaling or leveling up alongside the protagonist, each one has an equipment score. If the player’s equipment score matches the enemy’s, damage stays normal. If the equipment score is higher, damage caused or absorbed go up. It’s a funky system that takes a bit to wrap your head around, and makes getting new equipment and crafting new upgrades absolutely vital.
But again, just a bit of exploration will yield more than enough materials. It can be frustrating at times, but that reliance on equipment means the game liberally encourages trying out new weapons and builds. The only other downside is a lack of hotkeys that would allow for instant use of skills or items without opening a menu. There are only two quick slots for skills, which means having to open the radial menu to select things a lot, which feels like a real oversight.
Setting the Standard
Although it categorically hits mostly every mark, it was ultimately Avowed’s world and story that drew me in. For fans of the Pillars of Eternity series, there’s a lot to love, even with the switch to an action-focused format. The Pillars games were more classical computer RPGs, all about strategic combat and a tidal wave of menus to dig through. But for brand new players, Avowed also does a phenomenal job creating a complex world and characters that anyone can get invested in.
What’s most remarkable about Avowed is how I can’t think of a single instance of regretting an action. No side quest chosen or gnarled path followed ever resulted in wasted time. Over the years, the Bethesda “formula” has grown stale, the company’s style of game that focuses on first-person immersion, simulation, and individualistic role-playing has become too vanilla. Experiences like Fallout 4 (2015) and Starfield (2023) feel too big, filled with busywork and empty space. Avowed is like the John Wick of fantasy RPGs, an experience that gets right down to the good stuff without having to wait through all that sleepy-eyed exposition.
It’s remarkable how Avowed doubles down on the best elements of the games it’s inspired by — the distinctive companions, gripping exploration, and crunchy combat — all hallmarks of the last twenty years of first-person RPGs, sans their worst impulses. That stripped-down approach really works here, even better than it did in The Outer Worlds, and a large part of that is because Avowed is able to easily flip-flop between wacky humor and serious emotion. Whereas The Outer Worlds leaned too heavily on satire, Avowed has a better sense of when to make the player laugh, and when to make them cry. Its dialogue and writing feel more thoughtful and immediately impactful, never dancing around hard topics or deflating its intent by being too slight.
That’s not even to mention the game’s art direction, which is consistently astounding. The Living Lands aren’t dark and dreary, but a rich tapestry of pastel-colored vegetation, grand magical cities, neon-lit alleyways, and scorching lava flows. Each area feels richly distinct from the others, harnessing abstract dreamlike designs rather than sheer photorealism, for the better.
Avowed feels like more than just another iteration on the first-person RPG formula; its streamlined take on choice-driven storytelling capitalizes on everything people love about fantasy role-playing games, while eschewing all of the most annoying trends of the genre. With a thoughtful approach to its world, Avowed shows that there’s a way to make a game like this without the mindless fluff. While it might just be Obsidian’s best effort yet, it’s also one of the best Skyrim-like experiences since, well, Skyrim.
Avowed launches on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC on Feb. 18, and is available day one through Xbox Game Pass. Pre-ordering the Premium Edition grants early access beginning on Feb. 13.
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