Avowed is one of the best RPGs of all time
★★★★★ | Just wowed, really
Reviewed on: Xbox Series X
Distributor provided a review copy.
When I first saw gameplay of Avowed in the summer of 2014, I commented to a friend: “There’s no way this comes out early next year. It looks nowhere near finished.”
Luckily, I’m not a betting man because I’m often wrong. So, I want to start this review with an apology to Obsidian. I was so wrong that it’s almost humbling. Avowed isn’t just a finished, thoughtfully constructed game; it’s one of my favorite RPGs ever.
Over the past two weeks that I played through the sprawling main story of Avowed, I kept finding new things to do in its expansive world. When I wasn’t playing it, I thought about it, and when I slept, I dreamt of it.
Avowed is the most comprehensively captivating fantasy experience since Skyrim. It’s a triumph of old-school roleplaying that combines the thrills of Dungeons and Dragons with a sense of joyous wonder I haven’t experienced in years.
The Story
Avowed begins in classic adventure style with a shipwreck. You’re an Envoy for the Imperium, sent to broker a deal in The Living Lands, where a devastating plague called the Dream Scourge threatens all life. A freak storm capsizes your ship, killing your crew, and leaves you stranded in a strange land.
From there, Avowed’s story unfolds in four large maps, each one a distinct area of The Living Lands with its own politics, nature, and danger. The story, which changes in surprising ways based on player choice, is rich with themes about colonization, faith, imperialism, cultural history, and how organized religion shapes entire civilizations. It’s a nuanced and topical weave that feels timeless, thanks to smart writing and a cast of memorable characters who are some of the best Obsidian has ever created.
Refreshingly, Avowed forgoes the traditional elements of romance as a reward and instead focuses on deeper and often conflicting character interactions. Your team won’t always agree with you or each other, and sometimes, there isn’t a path forward that pleases everyone. The result is a genuine role-playing experience, one where your views of the world deeply affect every choice ahead.
For the first few hours, you’ll spend your time on the road with Kai (Brandon Keener), who naturally slots into the role of a trusted friend. Keener also voiced Garrus VAkarian in the Mass Effect series, and as good as he is, it’s hard to escape how similar the two parts feel. Despite this, Kai is a fantastic partner to travel with, and his pragmatic and socialist nature serves as a counterpoint to the militaristic world surrounding the city of Paradis.
As more members join the party, the player can choose three to tag along at any given point while the rest wait in camp. Like in other titles, the active members will offer input directly at the moment, but returning to base allows you to hear the thoughts and opinions of everyone else, too. There’s a constant sense of growing camaraderie, and it makes Avowed feel alive and lived in.
Gameplay
Avowed’s world is a large continent split into four major biomes, each of which has a main storyline to follow, along with numerous smaller sidequests and surprises. I spent the better part of ten hours in the first area, eight in the second (and my least favorite) one, another ten in the third, and almost eleven in the last one. I did not see nearly everything there was to see and mostly focused on the main storyline for the review.
If you explore every single thing the game has to offer, Avowed can easily last you over 80 hours, depending on your playstyle. And that’s not taking into account the variety of story beats that can change based on your choices.
It’s almost deceptive how much there is to do and how heavily Avowed leans into the roleplaying elements since the majority of the gameplay loop is action-heavy. The Living Lands are dangerous, and every location comes with random encounters with animals, bandits, monsters, and ghosts. Players start with a baseline character of their choosing but can develop them freely from there. At one point, I played a knight wielding a flaming double-handed sword. Hours later, I switched up to a quick-footed mage with a pistol. You can re-spec your character in exchange for gold, which promotes and rewards exploration and trial.
Your companions have only a limited set of abilities to choose from, and large-scale strategizing is not the emphasis here. Instead, the combat is fast-paced and visceral, and as long as you’re not expecting a repeat of Pillars of Eternity, you can find plenty to love about it.
At first, I wasn’t entirely sold on the first-person combat mechanics. Something about the blocking and parrying felt off, and I couldn’t figure out how to navigate the menus with a controller to cast spells in the heat of battle.
After a few hours, those issues vanished, and I realized that Avowed allows for a surprising amount of freedom in how you map your attacks, especially as you don’t have to carry a spellbook around for casting, as long as you’ve memorized the incantations you want to use first.
Another element that surprised me is how vertical The Living Lands are and how much of it you can explore on your terms. The Envoy isn’t stuck firmly on the ground, and the game constantly encourages you to climb and jump into new places. It has elements of Dishonored in the way the world is designed, though Avowed never reaches the agility of that series.
Some areas are frustratingly limited by invisible walls, which eat into the fantasy of a rough-and-tumble explorer. I get why they’re there since Avowed emphasizes handcrafted areas over copy-pasted repetition. But I wish they were more elegantly disguised.
As the story progresses and you travel across the continent, Avowed allows for fast travel to places you’ve visited before. Each biome has numerous travel points and party camps, which cuts down on pointless running back and forth, especially as you start to handle sidequests.
Funnily enough, I only used the system when I needed to return to town after completing multiple missions in a row. All other times were spent exploring every inch of the beautifully crafted landscape in hopes of finding more things to do. At least as time permitted, I’m certain that I’ve missed out on entire sections and adventures during the review period, and I can’t wait to go back for more.
But, as an example, I discovered a hidden camp late into my playthrough of the first area and realized that it was in a place I had passed numerous times before. Surely, I thought, it wasn’t there before, and it’s one of those things that appears only after the plot allows it.
I loaded up a save from the very beginning and made my way to the location. Sure enough, there it was, and exploring it triggered a variation of the quest that I had discovered hours later in the game.
Avowed is an experience that encourages and celebrates the act of discovery. I love it for that.
Accessibility
You can play Avowed in either first- or third-person, and the change between perspectives is only a button click away. For someone like myself, who has difficulties reconciling distances in first-person games, this was a godsend. It made the platforming sections bearable.
There are also options for colorblindness, text size, and audio. It’s not the most comprehensive array of accessibility settings, but it’s far from the worst.
The one thing I wish Avowed did differently is in dialog choices. The way it’s built, Avowed has an immense amount of responses to story beats. Some of these are clear, but others feel like options that answer in a way that’s entirely different than what is presented to the player. Or at least the reactions are so different that it doesn’t match the expectation.
For an autistic gamer, it sometimes becomes a chore to figure out what the game wants to convey with its dialog. This doesn’t happen often, but enough that I had to mark down in my notes that I was certain a character hated me or wanted the worst for me because their dialog always veered towards the combative. When they suddenly blurted out I was their best friend, I was baffled, to say the least.
For arachnophobes, Avowed offers no respite, and there are numerous sequences where you have to fight massive insects that cannot be turned off or changed. Considering that Skyrim already saw an opportunity to fix this already a decade ago, it’s a shame that Obsidian has not.
Technical Aspects
My review copy was for the Xbox Series X, and I played the entire game through on performance mode. At the time of review, the only options were either that or the resolution mode, which favors a 4K output at 30fps. This gives me migraines, so I will choose the 60fps setting every time.
Played like this, Avowed is a fine experience that only occasionally stutters or has texture issues. In areas with lots of detail, I noticed the visuals pick up an odd sand-like texture grain, which went away as I looked in other directions. In heavy fight sequences with lots of combatants, I noticed the framerate struggled to keep up.
But these are minor complaints because Avowed is a spectacularly beautiful game. Every single area of it is a joy to behold, and I spent hours just going around taking pictures and oohing and aahing at the spectacle Obsidian has crafted.
It’s a wildly vivid fantasy world that reminds me of Morrowind and old-school titles from the SNES period. Something unbound by any expectation of realism. It’s so sincere that it makes me profoundly happy. There isn’t a hint of irony or snark to be found, even as the game knowingly makes fun of itself on occasion.
Who’s It For?
Avowed is the kind of game that’s easy to recommend for everyone. It’s accessible enough that even newcomers can jump in without too many issues, while fans of the Pillars of Eternity series will find plenty to love in callbacks and lore. It won’t please the most diehard fans of the genre, those who demand deep strategic combat or a slower pace.
If Avowed were a movie, it would be a mix between Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons (the new, good one). It’s grand and emotional when it needs to be and immensely funny other times.
It is as linear and free as you want it to be as well. In breaking up the world into more contained areas, Obsidian has found a perfect marriage between exploration and plot-driven mechanics that keep the pace brisk and the story fresh. If you have to stop at any point for an extended period, the handy lore guide journal is easy to read and clear.
Avowed is a game that I didn’t expect to like, let alone love. Yet here I am, happy to be proven so wrong. For RPG fans, 2025 is shaping up to be an all-time great year. For those who’ve missed the feeling that Skyrim once provided, here is your remedy. Avowed is a spectacular adventure epic worth every minute of your time and one of the best roleplaying games ever made.