Avowed Review: Skyrim’s Spiritual Successor

Avowed has scratched an itch for me that few other RPGs have been able to scratch in recent years. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed recent RPGs like the absolutely stellar Baldur’s Gate 3, but sometimes you are looking for something hyper-specific. I have been yearning for a game like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for years but no other studio makes RPGs quite like this besides Bethesda. That is until Obsidian stepped up to the plate with Avowed, a brand new fantasy RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe that clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the highly respected Elder Scrolls franchise.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should go into Avowed expecting Skyrim 2, but it’s a nice appetizer while we all wait with bated breath for The Elder Scrolls VI. Truthfully, I had low expectations for Avowed. Xbox has let me down a lot this generation with its first-party offerings and this game has been gestating for quite some time. As a result, a piece of me was prepared to be left with lukewarm feelings, but my experience was quite the opposite. 

Avowed sees players filling the shoes of an envoy sent by the Aedyr Empire to deliver a message and investigate a plague infecting a region known as the Living Lands. However, nothing is remotely simple. Within the opening hours of Avowed, your ship crashes into a hostile fortress, there are multiple coordinated attempts on your life, and you cross paths with plenty of non-violent characters who would rather you swim back to wherever you came from. It’s a story that immediately sinks its hooks in you and pulls you in closer with each new revelation.

On top of all of the political intrigue in the Living Lands, your custom created character is also a Godlike, which is someone who was personally touched by the gods before their birth and grants them special powers. This introduces a layer of divinity to Avowed as you learn more about the spiritual piece of this universe. Where things get really interesting is when you connect with some higher, almost cosmic power that is called “The Voice”, which is presented as this trapped being in some kind of spirit world. Like a genie in a bottle or a devil, it frequently presents you with tough choices. It may offer you something incredibly irresistible or lucrative, but now you are indebted to The Voice and must carry out its bidding.

You are frequently unsure of whether The Voice is actually a force for good or evil, which creates compelling situations where you hover over your dialogue options weighing out the potential consequences in your head. It’s impactful and even if certain things don’t ultimately lead to anything earth-shattering, what matters the most is that you feel like your decisions are important in the moment and you put thought into everything you do. Of course, your choices aren’t just limited to your interactions with The Voice, but that’s where you will see a lot of the heaviest choices.

Of course, like any good RPG, you also meet a colorful cast of characters along the way. All of the different party members in Avowed can benefit you in different ways thanks to their varied combat abilities, but I often chose them based on nothing more than their personality. I want someone who is going to keep me entertained more so than have my back. It’s more interesting to have someone like Kai, a character who is clearly well-known throughout the Living Lands, but typically not for good reasons. Seeing the small tiffs he has with others is always a treat, but he’s also someone who is interesting to learn about when you have downtime at your camp.

However, this is where one of Avowed’s downsides lies as well. A lot of RPGs suffer from extensive conversations with characters where everyone stands there stiff as a board. It may not be unique to Avowed, but it’s one of those things that can wear on you after many hours of play. It’s hard to sit there and look at someone talk for extended periods of time while they barely emote or move. It’s hard and likely totally unfeasible to animate that many dialogue scenes to make it feel more dynamic, but sometimes it feels easier to just read the dialogue and skip to the next line to speed the process up. As much as I enjoy learning about a character like Kai, sometimes I don’t even bother going through all of the dialogue options because I quickly become disengaged by the dry and stilted conversations.

Avowed’s conversations do have one thing worth praising, though. This is a very lore-heavy game and almost immediately, I felt incredibly confused with all the vocab words that were being thrown at me. However, there’s a whole glossary of keywords that you can view in the dialogue menu. It only allows you to see the notable words that were spoken during that conversation, so you don’t have to dig endlessly. I have personally never seen that in a game, but it’s a handy tool that allows you to easily keep up with the lore and understand what people are talking about.

When you aren’t idly standing around talking to someone, it’s incredibly easy to become swept up by Avowed’s world. The world feels incredibly hand-crafted with lush, green pastures and forests, frosty snow regions, and cities with all kinds of events happening around you. There are abandoned houses to raid, caves to explore, and waterfalls with secret treasures behind them. It’s a game that wants you to discover all its nooks and crannies as it’s made to be explored and you’re frequently rewarded for doing so. You can stumble upon crime scenes, inspect civilians’ cargo for contraband (and then decide whether you snitch or not), and of course, meet people who give you interesting side quests. 

One side quest early on in Avowed has you going off to clear out monsters out of a person’s house. When you arrive, you quickly realize things aren’t as malicious as they seem to be and this person has a special connection to these creatures. It’s then up to you to talk to the person and help her determine whether or not these creatures are worth killing or if she should try to leverage her unique connection. It’s the kind of sharp RPG writing that once again emphasizes a degree of choice and makes you want to seek out other side quests to see what other absurd, whimsical stories exist within this universe.

Avowed’s other big strength is its combat. I was really surprised by how much nuance there is to combat and how much thought was put into designing how you can fight. For starters, you can dual wield just about anything unless you have a two-handed weapon like a big axe. If you want to have a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, you can do that. If you want to dual wield a wand and a gun, you can do that too. On top of that, you can have two loadouts that allow you to quickly switch to another set of weapons. So, you could have one loadout be more close-quarters-oriented while another one focuses more on ranged combat. Or maybe a loadout designed for stealth and another that’s not. The choice is yours.

Avowed really puts a focus on combining different aspects of combat. You can use your magic to freeze someone and then pull out a gun to shatter them to pieces. It’s incredibly satisfying to chain a bunch of different attacks together and use all of your resources to take down your foes.

I really enjoyed this level of freedom, but it also made me realize how you need to be a bit more thoughtful about it. I expected to absolutely slaughter everyone with a sword and a gun, but realized not having a shield was allowing me to get destroyed. I didn’t really use shields in games like Skyrim, but it’s something that is constantly in my loadout rotation in Avowed. 

Enemies are pretty determined when it comes to taking you down and will toss projectiles at you, attack you head-on with light and heavy attacks, and so on. To help with this, Avowed lifts a pretty interesting element from another genre of games to make its combat more engaging. In games like the Batman Arkham and Marvel’s Spider-Man series, there will usually be a colored flash above an enemy’s head to warn you of an attack so it can be countered. Avowed has the exact same thing, telegraphing moments when you should block or dodge. The Batman Arkham games helped create a rhythm to its combat with this and Avowed benefits from that just the same. Each blow feels impactful, you have a greater degree of awareness, and it rarely feels like anyone got a cheap shot on you. 

That’s not to say Avowed doesn’t have a few areas where it can improve its combat. For starters, stealth feels a bit underbaked. I figured if I used a bow early on, I could pick enemies off with ease. However, even a well-placed headshot from the shadows didn’t kill an enemy and would sound the metaphorical alarm on nearby foes. Of course, you can probably upgrade the bow to be much more powerful to achieve that, but I didn’t even bother to do so because it was so disappointing off the bat. There are some takedown moves as well, but they were pretty repetitive and it felt more interesting to just charge into battle instead.

Guns and bows also don’t have any kind of ammo counter. You can fire your gun seemingly forever and the only downside is it takes a few seconds to reload. I wish there was more thought into making a gun feel like a limited resource rather than something you can use as much as you want, as it makes it feel less impactful as a weapon. They are still fun to use, but it would be more interesting if there was a higher trade-off for using them.

Avowed may not be the most advanced RPG in the world and there may be games that offer unparalleled levels of depth by comparison, but that doesn’t stop Obisidan’s new fantasy game from being great. It offers a dense world bursting at the seams with beauty, compelling characters, consequential choices, and gripping combat that rewards players for being creative. It’s one of my favorite RPGs in quite some time and is one that I am going to continue enjoying for the foreseeable future. If you have Xbox Game Pass or have some money to put toward a new game on PC, I encourage you not to sleep on Avowed.

Rating: 4/5

An Xbox review copy of Avowed was provided by the publisher.