‘Avowed’ Review (PC): An Excellent ‘Elder Scrolls’ Intermission

It may be unlikely that Avowed will end up as treasured as Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas, but after nearly sixty hours and two playthroughs, I can certainly say that it fills a similar role. And despite a shorter length, simpler systems and other AA compromises, it’s a ton of fun and an easy recommendation to those who have been waiting a decade for a new full-on Elder Scrolls game.

Avowed is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, but you don’t have to know anything about it to appreciate the adventure, as there’s plenty of lore to fill you in along the way, and the story is easy to follow, which can not always be said of this genre. You are a “Godlike,” a person with mushrooms on their head touched by a mystery god. You’re sent to the “Living Lands” for answers and/or possible colonization of the locals.

There, you will search for solutions to the icky Dreamscourge, a blight that is colorfully turning the landscape into more mushrooms, but also people and bears and all sorts of things that are dangerous when remote controlled by mushrooms. Plus you have your non-mushroom bandits, big spiders, lizard guys with spears and so on.

On your journey to stop the Dreamscourge you of course link up with a team, albeit smaller in scale than other party-based adventures. You only have three teammates by the end, Kai, a fish guy with a shotgun, Yatzli, a rabbit girl with a void spells and Giatta, a human healer. You can take two of them out at a time, and remote control their abilities when needed like we’ve seen increasingly in this genre.

This is not an open world, rather some disconnected zones with somewhat traditional archetypes, jungle, desert, erupting volcano. But the maps themselves are mini open worlds themselves, and very rewarding to explore. It is indeed the “hm, that thing over there looks weird, I should explore it” concept, and essentially every time you will be rewarded with some quest start or at least a bit of treasure. I’ve burned open a root-covered doorway in a little tiny hillside three steps from the road and found an extremely strong unique piece of armor I could have easily missed. And in two playthroughs now, no doubt I have still missed a lot.

Yes, the game is short. The main story and every side quest I could locate (though not every collectible or hidden chest) was 30 hours. Sure, if you want to view this as a negative, you can, but I also think you can make the case that it is somewhat refreshing to have a fun fantasy RPG that is not some 50-100+ hour investment. This is one of the few games I finished and then without even pausing, went straight into another playthrough on the spot with a different build and decision-making, and played for another five hours that day alone. I wouldn’t do that if I wasn’t itching for more.

The simplicity of the game has its strengths and weaknesses. It “casual-ifies” some RPG aspects in some ways, but they mostly fix personal annoyances I have anyway. Sprinting does not use stamina. Food, potions and everything else but weapons and chest armor (not even gloves, boots or jewelry) do not weigh anything. There’s no item durability to sink into costly repairs. I do not miss any of that.

But it can cut both ways. Smaller budget character design makes for more stiff NPCs than we’ve gotten used to, albeit with good writing (and the writing is often good) it makes that ignorable. There are no romance options here, you get to know your teammates well and flirty a tiny bit, but true pursuit is not in the game. Weapon and armor upgrading is almost too basic, as most normal chests you find are just a pile of six materials, three of which you will use to upgrade your gear depending on your class as you take items through different tiers. Even modifying unique items is just picking one of two perks, one time.

Actual gameplay? Combat? Very fun. It looked a bit stilted in early previews, but my melee build felt meaty and substantive. It did have a few issues, like a bit of a repetitive stun combo being the build’s too-common killing move, and the fact that you stopped ragdolling NPCs in fun ways if they were even one difficulty notch above you. Still, lots of fun.

Mage may be even better, even if it takes a while to get rolling. I became a “storm” mage raining down lightning and blizzards in between whipping out wand bullets like Harry Potter. In the late game, it’s an utter blast. And yes, I would like to go back and do a “Rogue” pistol, rifle or bow build at some point. I’m guessing that is also fun. I didn’t love that Giatta’s free heal seemed eternally necessary in all fights (and after fights) unless you wanted to chug a million consumables, and I couldn’t find a way to build to avoid that with any playstyle.

I enjoyed the story, namely because I found the central mystery of the source of the Dreamscourge and the nature of my character and their mystery god to be quite engaging. And when the answers did come, I found them satisfying without any cheap tricks attempting to make them engaging. They were genuinely surprising and interesting in ways that really hooked me into the Pillars of Eternity universe despite having no previous experience there.

Obsidian also knows what people want from an RPG like this, something that even Bethesda RPGs have been missing in significant quantities as of late, which are choices that matter. Yes, there are dialogue skill checks, though they don’t always change results (high level ones definitely can, such as avoiding entire boss fights). But it’s the little things that got me.

I decided to spare an enemy, and later she appeared in a quest to help me escort some refugees to safety. But picking the other side of that coin in my next playthrough, killing them led to their gang leaving the corpse of an ally hanging outside my camp one night for revenge. Another was a woman infected with the Dreamscourge that I encouraged to stay put to be collected and cared after by her friends. But the next playthrough, I told her to flee instead, and an hour later, I found her flailing around in the woods, rushing to attack me after the infection took over. My team made a comment about how it was sad things went that way after I killed her.

Avowed is an excellent game. Yes, it may be a bit of a bite-sized, stripped-down experience in the grand scope of epic RPGs, but in many ways, I found that refreshing, and I think others might as well in this age of too many big games and not enough time to play them. I would make time for Avowed, you won’t regret it.

Score: 9/10

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.