Avowed REVIEW - to live or survive
Rhianne Ward
Near the end of Avowed - don't worry, I'll keep this free of spoilers - one character says to another, and I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't write down the line in the moment, “you've spent your entire life surviving, but now is the time to live.”
Looking back on the month or so I spent with Avowed, 54 hours in total, I find myself coming back to this sentiment. To survive is to scrape by with the bare essentials, never risking that carefully maintained balance with seemingly unnecessary pastimes. To live, on the other hand, is to partake in little activities that make you happy, even if doing so has no material purpose beyond personal satisfaction.
It's a dichotomy I find myself struggling with quite regularly these days. I spend a lot of time at work, and when I do have time off, I'm often utilising it as efficiently as possible. Indeed, my final stretch in Avowed came when I decided the night prior that I needed to finish it, because if I didn't do that soon, I would leave it behind forever. It didn't matter if I wanted to play something else. Avowed had to come first, so I could tick it off the list. It turned the game into a task I had to complete, rather than a treat to indulge in.
To be fair, in this case, it worked out! Avowed is a good time, and I enjoyed scaling his remaining flight of stairs. There is satisfaction to be found in setting myself an objective - beating the game - and then accomplishing it, even if it can feel like work at points. Even in survival, there is joy to be found. But that's not living.
Avowed is a game that survives on many qualities. The Living Lands is a lush and awe-inspiring setting to explore, its spectacular locales often giving way to cracks and crevices that hide all sorts of secrets and goodies. It's a dense environment begging to be picked apart and stripped clean of its mysteries, which I suppose is why the Aedyran Empire is so interested in it. Within the unknowns and oddities of the Living Lands lies incredible untapped potential, and everyone wants to see it realised. The potential for what? Well, there lies the conflict.
In a game full of weapons, the strongest wielded by Avowed is its writing. Characters are rich and layered, spoken into incredible life by a talented cast. The individual stories of the companions are, in comparison to the exceptional bombast of the main campaign, quite reserved, often manifesting as simple conversations in key locations. Some fighting will happen on occasion, but nothing that will alter the shape of the world in any real way. They don't need to, though; the characters are compelling enough that they alone carry the drama and heartbreak beautifully.
The many stories of the Living Lands range in their complexity and scale, but all are nonetheless well considered. Sometimes you'll be directed to a tower to deliver a package, only to discover it was a plot to take you, an Aedyran, out with various tripwires and pressure plates. Other times you'll come across a guard arguing with a civilian, and when you go to investigate further, you uncover an old guy's attempts to yank a god into the mortal realm. Then you'll talk to a merchant who sends you on a bizarre scavenger hunt which ends up being a secret drug dealing operation. These quests, which so often begin as innocuous favours, spiral into memorable little vignettes of life in the Living Lands. Tales of love, loss and betrayal, and some of the characters even reappear later in the game, as a satisfying reminder of your efforts.
Avowed is an Obsidian game through and through. If you've played one of them, you'll know what to expect with this one, with a notable focus on player expression in combat. I jumped between a number of different weapon types to see what worked best for me, and by the end of the game I had settled comfortably into an Arquebus build with a heavy focus on stun accumulation and frost damage. It was cool to experiment and find a version of my playstyle that fit best. One of Avowed’s greatest achievements is definitely its capacity for specialisation, and its limited dispensing of skill points all but requires that you find a build that works and commit to it fully. There's no room for spreading yourself thin; you need to decide what kind of character your Envoy is, and stick to it. If that's not a perfect encapsulation of roleplaying, then I don't know what is.
There's a genuine magic to the little beats of Avowed. Figuring out a build that works and feeling all the combat elements click into place is profoundly satisfying. Finding a stunning vista of the old world, and being invited to travel back into your past lives to learn more about the history of the Living Lands was consistently as thrilling as it was haunting. Sharing a quiet conversation with your friends by an inviting campfire, moments before your final battle, was a special thing. Even that drug dealer questline had a beautiful moment where you acquire the drugs and your companions immediately suggest testing them out. For quality assurance, of course!
These are the moments when Avowed truly lives. It's a shame, then, that the game as a whole does not have enough of them. It's so easy to coast your way through this game. Quest markers are clear and unambiguous, and many potentially interesting moral choices are undercut by a clearly superior option to compromise. The game hands you the ability to deal with every situation so frequently that it rends the juicier moments of their flavour. Rarely does it feel like
So many design elements are clearly intended to sand off the rough edges. That can be a good thing at times - I certainly never felt frustrated by Avowed - but I also think that somewhat robs the game of a certain emotional potential. Very rarely did I have any experiences in this game that felt unique or personalised. It's a rollercoaster ride by all accounts; a series of events you walk between in order to experience them. Much of the Avowed experience is told to you, but not felt. Characters will decry the dangers of the borderline inhabitable Galawain’s Tusks, but once I got there, I had very little trouble. These guys are crazy, I thought to myself, the Tusks ain't shit!
Ultimately, that's because Avowed doesn't want to make the player feel stuck or uncomfortable, because that runs the risk of them dipping out early. It's an understandable way to be, but the reverse issue is that much of the experience turns into this amorphous grey goop I struggle to recall in detail. What's fascinating too is that I definitely liked Avowed a lot! I had fun every time I booted it up, and there was never a point where I felt like stopping. I was consistently satisfied with the experience. Avowed was, in my mind, surviving, but rarely was it living.
Near the end of the game, I was clearing out some of the remaining bounties, and I came across a fight against a pair of ogres. The character models for these two were so clearly identical, except one for them had a big white beard. I laughed, thinking this was going to be a joke fight. Not so! They kicked my ass, many times. It was easily the hardest fight in the game, and I had to seriously consider the equipment I was using and plan carefully before going in. After about five tries, I brought them down.
At the time, I was irritated. Why is this so difficult, especially when the rest of the game was a relative breeze? Is this bad design? Maybe, but you know what? It was also an absolute delight to overcome. It was the first time in a while I was met with friction from this game, and that made such a difference for how engaging it became. I'm not necessarily saying that Avowed needs to be harder - I can just turn up the difficulty if that was all - but I wish it made me think more, and give me reasons to seriously engage with its systems and its world.
The honest truth is that I really liked Avowed. I was consistently pleased with my experience, and by the end, I was satisfied. I don't wish for you to come away from this review feeling negatively about the experience. Play Avowed! It's a very good game! Maybe there's a place for games like this. Games that don't ask the world of the player, but only a moment of their time. It's okay that Avowed is the way that it is. I just wish I didn't have to qualify it in that way.
