Quite some months ago, I made a vow to finish Avowed. I’d found the game to be unrelentingly nice, to the point where its seemingly bottomless consideration for the player and their time felt like some stridently subversive act. Avowed was kind to the point of disbelief at points, and while this was never really considered in most reviews, its combination of great world, fun characters and fantastic combat systems drew together a moderately light RPG that serves as an example of how expertise can make a real difference to games that don’t fall under the tight constraints of the blockbusting AAA grandstander. Avowed felt concerned with other things; a game made for the joy of its world and systems more than it felt like some extravagant bauble to make money and sell systems and subscriptions. Perhaps Avowed’s long-standing status as a Game Pass standard bearer, though not a key pillar like Forza Horizon 5, Redfall or Starfield, gave it a certain laxity. With the day-one sales imperative presumably gone from its concerns, Avowed was able to relax into being what it is: a delightful romp built by experts.
I found myself uncommonly lucky to have my favourite template expressed across three games that I loved this year, with yet another coming in a month’s time. Avowed fell in between a lull in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and the launch of Atomfall and while those two shared some profound commonalities, it’s the brightness and deliberate artifice of Avowed that underwrites much of its charm. Yet, I struggled to pick up its thread, long after I’d put paid to other games waiting on my slate. Returning from a holiday, and well aware that The Outer Worlds 2 will be arriving shortly, it was perfectly fitting to fulfil my promise to one of this year's most undersung gems. Having felt quite some resistance to restarting it, I picked up Avowed at the final story mission in the game’s third of four major maps, Scattersharp. I had left it there knowing I’d be going to the fourth map in short order and after yet another really nice bit of dungeon-delving, we ended up at the final map, Galawain's Tusks1. What pleased me was how quickly I slipped back into proficiency with my fighting loadout - I carried a ranger’s bow and used a grimoire and dagger combo for close work. This, combined with the rogueish stealth-and-stab special power, gave me plenty of joy in that story mission’s many fights, and that was more than enough to reignite my interest in seeing the game through - and to my delight, seeing it through as a fun activity rather than obligatory chore. Beautifully, the game never flagged into a workmanlike slog for me; the acquistional arc still offered enough upgrades and skill boosts to keep me hungry in the game’s final quarter, but not so much as to be a distraction.
The story was simply fine. There was a fair amount of intrigue in reaching the endgame, which is set up to offer twin confrontations. One borne from the fundamentals of the game’s narrative setup, the other in chase of an emergent antagonist (should you have a moral compass and aren’t roleplaying as a fucking dick), and these are suitably propulsive, even if Galawain's Tusks is the least appealing of the game’s four major regions. And yet that lack of appeal feels deliberate in some mad way; it’s as if the game understands the momentum of the end-stage urge to finish, that it’s aware the player’s interest might wane should you pack that last area with too much beauty, content, loot to rinse. This may feel like a reach, but there’s a definite visual arc to the maps as you progress. They open in a strictly linear sequence, so it’s valid to suspect there’s intent in their aesthetics to increasingly sharpen the point of the player’s goals. From freeform exploration at Dawnshore, through the denser, combat-heavy Emerald Stair and into the barren, hard-edged deserts of Scattersharp, the scenery gets more hostile as opportunities to delve seem rarer. That Galawain's Tusks is a basaltic wasteland pockmarked by ruined citadels and threaded with rivers of lava is fittingly stark, given the obvious progression you’re taken through. By the time I got there, I was definitely moving from exploring the acquisition boundaries for optimal loadouts and pushing into using my loadout to burn through the narrative and its attendant gameplay challenges. Galawain's Tusks doesn’t invite an inspection of every nook and cranny, nor does it offer that many suggestions of a pathway that may end in a fun skirmish and decent loot. Instead, the map feels more aggressively funnelled towards its main story content than any of the others, which fits the hard-edged austerity of its landscape.
Avowed’s gradient of play, its guiding hand feeling all the more forceful as you approach the climax, felt great, nonetheless. It had an assured confidence that seemed less serendipitous than my accidentally perfect ride through Atomfall, but my happiness to trust Obsidian’s taste as it ushered me into its climactic end stages is a testament to how well it’d fulfilled the player/game contract since the beginning. The last of the main story areas, however, fell short of expectations.2 Where I assumed things would get really wild, they felt oddly tepid. Suitably capable, but not quite the grand leap it surely could have been - or maybe should have been? It’s hard to say, yet it felt a little at odds with the opulence of Dawnshore and the Emerald Stair, especially given the story’s signposting and stated parameters for how this last environment could be defined. Naturally, I assume this was a shortcoming of being at the end of the development cycle, a product of the squeeze on time and resources, but there is almost certainly some shortfall in creativity there too. For something telegraphed for so much of the story, its realisation fell a little flat for me. Though mercifully, it was short. Then, after the big choices had been made, there was a lovely coda to tie up some loose ends and reap the true rewards of your journey. Short of issuing spoilers, rest assured it kinda makes up for the slightly disappointing ‘narrative climax’ area, offering a lovely sense of unexpected and uncharted territory lying just a step beyond the confines of the formal main story, a fitting end to the game’s circle, and a final slab of grand battling that reaps what you’d previously sown to great effect.
There was a critical point, just before the narrative point of no return, where I was able to fashion a kickass weapon from special material I’d bothered to acquire. The options were limited to two weapons - a one-handed sword or an arquebus (a rifle, fyi). Having tired of the bow, I went for the comedy musket and was immediately rewarded with a supreme weapon. This really had a Borderlands vibe, as it was the kind of miraculous, over-levelled equipment that lives in your inventory forever, but in Avowed’s case, it came right at the end and fundamentally changed my combat approach. This highlights Obsidian’s greatness for me: an almost iconoclastic invitation to change tack, right as the game reaches its most challenging combat sequences. And what fun it was! It opened up a host of new possibilities for an NG+ run, when such a thing arrives. Though for me, and much like Atomfall, I’m absolutely happy with what I got and feel little urge to go back. And again, just like Atomfall, I’m filled with a warm affection for what it was to me. There’s something fundamentally endearing in Avowed’s heart, and something truly great in its soul. It feels like it’s destined to be the eternal hidden gem of sorts. So quickly forgotten in the flurry of 2025 releases, so quickly drowned in the tidal waves of memes and praise for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II3 that Avowed feels smaller and less prominent by default, it feels like an underdog awaiting rediscovery or a fucking NoClip documentary about its greatness and how everyone should feel bad and stupid for not playing it at the time. Not that I think it matters that much to Obsidian, although maybe it is Obsidian’s Deathloop, if not quite as superbly conducted. Yet it is superbly crafted. Like Prey it’s inexplicably ignored, or consigned as merely ‘mid’, despite its obvious humanity and charms. And yet, it’s not quite the definitive statement that Prey was. And even after finishing it, Avowed carries the air of some preparatory study, a model for similar world-building and systems for The Outer Worlds 2 maybe? I speculated about that way back in my February review - though I can concede that’s probably got a lot to do with my hopes for that sequel rather than any concrete truth. Despite that sense of it being a second fiddle to Obsidian’s actual big games, Avowed commands respect and praise. It’s a delightful game and a genuinely helpful one. A brilliantly adapted adventure that slots with frictionless ease into the timetables and scant affordances of playtime for the over-40s. A special treat for gamer parents, perhaps, but absolutely an illustration of how a good-hearted game should be. A game of maturity, that in some way echoes Obsidian’s own mature sensibilities as a studio that, if you follow the Black Isle Studios lineage, is nearly thirty years old. In that context, Avowed’s qualities and motivations make perfect sense. It’s an expression of three decades, a golden braid woven from the 1990s to here - and this pulls a lot of its oddly 90s vibes into focus. And as I mentioned in comparison to Atomfall, its sage lack of over-ambition and its contentment to simply be itself, unapologetically, without aspiration to that which it cannot attain, is a lesson in humility. One that the grandiose, over-expensive big shots should definitely be paying attention to.
[21]
This was the land populated by dwarves, and I normally hate dwarves. However, Avowed’s dwarves weren’t that bad.
Spoilers ahoy: this is an ethereal realm called ‘the garden’, which houses a prisoner. Despite license to go full bonkers, it was all a bit too sober and a bit too in keeping with the sensible vibes of the last two maps, which don’t enjoy the same cartoonish vibrancy as the first two.
I still recoil in utter disgust at a panel of shouty streamers trying to rank Avowed alongside the Kingdom Come sequel as if the two are remotely comparable beyond facile feature face-offs.