Where to even start with Avowed? It’s a surprising game. I didn’t need much to be sold on it: it’s a first person RPG from Obsidian set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Yes, please. The Pillars games weren’t really my jam but I appreciated them for doing weird stuff in a unique sprawling setting.

The setting seemed a bit daunting at first, as it’s already been extensively developed across two beefy CRPGs. The high-level overview is that it takes place in a high-fantasy world of swords and sorcery, various diverse humanoid cultures, ancient evils and mysteries, and medieval squabbles between nations. The defining characteristic is that the afterlife is effectively scientifically understood, reincarnation is a provable process, and manipulation of souls is the foundation of the world’s magic.

Avowed in particular takes place in The Living Lands, an isolated island sort of off in the corner of the world, where the Adra – giant crystals somehow involed in the cycle of rebirth – are isolated from those of the rest of the world. Your player character is an envoy of the Aedyran Empire – the prevailing military force in the world – sent to investigate and end The Dream Scourge, some sort of magical fungal plague sweeping over the island, to make sure the island is safe for an invading force to conquer. The player character is also a godlike, a human champion of one of Eora’s sizable pantheon of gods, but you were marked by a seemingly unknown god that happens to manifest itself through fungal growths that make you look like a clicker, so off you go to solve the mushroom problem.

Quick Aside: Yes, this can seem pretty daunting if you’re coming in without a lot of background in the history of this world, the game loves dropping bold proper nouns all over the place in dialogue, and often times they write the characters such that they’re just not interested in explaining the history of the world to you. They’ll explain why the Living Lands is weird, you’re an outsider, but they won’t explain anything else that you should just know as a citizen of Eora.

But it’s ok if you’re new! A lot of the world is explained in in-game books, and also all those big scary proper nouns you’re supposed to know about are highlighted in all dialogue, and you can pause the dialogue at any time both to see the scroll-back and to see quick explanation about key terms. It’s not quite as insanely comprehensive as the similar functionality in FF16, but it’s enough.

This alone sets up the tone as significantly unusual. Yes you’re a Very Special Individual by birthright, but you’re feared for your seeming connection to this incredibly dangerous plague. Yes, you’re an Important Government Person, but you’re seen as the vanguard of the most hostile military force on the planet, so everyone rightfully sees you as a colonizing bootlicker and treats you accordingly. Everybody treats you like a dick, and they’re right to treat you that way. Most of your role playing options and dialogue choices are also skewed that direction, like your choices aren’t:

  • Good heroic nice boy says nice thing to save the children and animals.
  • Stoic neutral bystander acknowledges the discussion.
  • Moustache-twirling villain says the most heinous thing possible while kicking a puppy.
  • LMAO COMEDY third FOURTH OPTION SO WACKY!

Instead here your options are significantly more nuanced:

  • Yeah I know I look like the insane plaguebearers please listen to me I’m just trying to do my job.
  • I don’t particularly care what your plight is here, I just want to get paid.
  • Yes, I am exactly what you fear, do what I want before I make the plague worse so we can conquer your stupid island faster.
  • Yes, I am exactly what you fear, do what I want before I make the plague worse so we can conquer your stupid island faster. ( Said while kicking a puppy. )

So yeah, they treat you like a dick because often times the vast majority of your options are to act like a dick. And that’s ok? It’s sorta nice to have the range of possibilities skew to one side rather than trying to cover the entire spectrum of alignments. I can understand why some might find this off-putting, but I found it worked well. This is a pretty world but it is decidedly not a happy world. That said, there is some hearty guffawing to be had at some of the side-quest plots and dialogue choices, really good writing all-around as is to be expected from an Obsidian joint.

…and yet somehow, inexplicably, the writing is NOT the best part of this game. That’s usually the case with Obsidian games: they’ll be buggy, not graphically amazing, pretty same-y combat loop, but the writing more than makes up for all of it. Completely not the case here. Combat in this game is amazing. It’s not like a Bethesda first-person RPG where inevitably you end up crouching and sniping for 120 hours. You sort of can’t really do that in Avowed, and are seriously discouraged from trying. The game has your standard fare of swords, shields, hammers and bows, but it also has flintlock pistols and arquebuses. It has spells, but often you’re casting them by holding out a grimoire, providing you access to a spell you don’t technically “know”. It has magic wands, but they’re not just spell-casting foci, they’re magical guns that you can use to rapid-fire bolts of energy around a room.

Also, nearly all of these options can be mix-n-matched: you can have a sword and shield, or just a big warhammer, or a pistol and a shield, or two pistols, or a pistol and a wand, or two wands, or a pistol and a magical grimoire. You can’t have two grimoires, sadly, so you can’t be a big geek dual-wielding books. Furthermore, all these options feel AMAZING. Melee combat has unique combo attacks for each class of weapon, guns do huge chunks of damage but have a lengthy reload animation for you to dump gunpowder down a barrel and tamp it down, wands and grimoires have a bunch of different loadouts of what spells you get access to, and the spell variety itself is all over the place between elemental spells, debuffs, huge area-of-effect spells, summons, a magical bonk stick, etc.

Combat can start off sneaky, but that all goes out the window when you blast a dude in the face with an arquebus and he goes flying off a cliff. I typically ran one loadout of a beefy arquebus to open encounters, falling back to a wand and grimoire when enemies closed in. Combat also has a “reasonable” amount of interactions, mostly you’re building up stun with power attacks, which both cancel an enemy’s active ability and eventually build to a stunned state where you get a per-weapon unique super attack. Beyond stun, you can also set enemies and environments on fire, shock with electrical weapons, and freeze with cold abilities (which can lead to shattering). It’s not like a full-on immersive sim level of interactions, but it’s enough to keep combat feeling fresh and varied, far far far better than Fallout: New Vegas or The Outer Worlds.

Avowed also has an interesting selection of unique items, and has TONS of them, and they’re all pretty interesting with different effects, bonuses, etc. Some are just straight up damage boosts, some apply elemental effects (which work outside combat, great utility!), and some do wildly broken stuff like make your bullets bounce between targets. By mid game you’ll likely be rolling with a full suite of unique gear, using random items for upgrade fodder or to sell. The upgrade and item rarity system is a little weird, upgrades require mats, and mats are largely locked to the main different biomes. That’s fine. What’s less fine is that item rewards appear to roll at different rarities based on your average item tier, so until you unlock a couple things at Tier 2 you won’t see any roll naturally at that rarity. And that then impacts your ability to dismantle random gear into the higher rarity mats you need. You can convert between rarity of mats, but the exchange rates sorta suck. It’s not terrible it just feels a little clumsy.

The game also looks outstanding, both technically (it’s a UE5 game, after all, so it better look good), and artistically. The environments have pretty common overall themes – the core biomes are Woodland / Jungle, Coastal Swamp, Desert, and Lethal Lava Land – but they really look great, lush, vibrant, bright colors, weird ruins and enormous mushrooms and tendrils everywhere. And holy crap the water looks amazing, there’s no reason they needed to go this hard with the water but they did and I love it.

There are only two things I did not love about this game, and they honestly aren’t that big of a deal:

  1. It was super crashy for me on PC. When it ran it ran great, 4k60 no problems, but woof every couple hours it’d just hard crash to desktop. Some people said tweaking some arcane Nvidia settings could make it better but the issue never really went away for me. Good news you can tweak the autosave frequency.
  2. Whole lotta garbo achievements. Several missable achievements. Several “you have to play a very specific way the whole game long”. Couple straight up broken ones. That bothers me but I know it isn’t that big of a deal.

Amazing game, top to bottom. I squoze basically all I could out of a single play through in just shy of 50 hours. No filler, solid all the way through. Highly Recommended, extra bonus highly recommended if you’ve got Game Pass.