Avowed

The Living Lands are in trouble.

A terrible illness has swept the land. Known as the Dreamscourge, the sickness first impacts people in their dreams, giving them visions of natural terrors and confusing their thoughts. Over time, the Dreamscourge invades its victims’ waking thoughts, resulting in confusion, madness, violence, and eventually death. The only outward indications of illness are the strange fungal shapes that appear on victims’ bodies. No one is safe, and the method of transmission is a mystery.

Players take on the role of the Envoy, a mysterious “Godlike” who has been sent to the Living Lands by the Emperor to investigate – and hopefully stop – the Dreamscourge. Godlikes are incredibly rare specimens – mortals selected by gods in the womb to be their earthly representatives. The players’ status as a Godlike, combined with the fact that they come representing a distant and hated imperial government, immediately starts them on the back foot. They are instantly recognizable wherever they go, and equally immediately distrusted.

The game follows the Envoy (the details for whom can be adjusted by a very robust character creator) and their eventual companions as they investigate the source of the Dreamscourge. Together, they uncover ancient secrets, thwart (or encourage) political uprisings, and kill scores and scores of lizard men. I don’t want to say more, as Avowed’s narrative is one of the strongest aspects of the game. Players should experience this one for themselves.

On practical terms, this means that the envoy explores the very large "zones" of the Living Lands. While not quite a full "open world", Avowed might as well be, as each zone is deep and wide, packed with stuff to see and do. There is a hub city in each zone as well, allowing players to pick up bounties and restock on food and potions - though plenty of that stuff can be found in the game's bountiful treasure chests. Wander around, kill baddies, pick up treasures, maybe stop by a nearby waypoint to complete a quest or bounty. The gameplay will feel very familiar to genre veterans, in a good way. 

Playing a preview build a few months back, my first impressions of Avowed were spectacularly positive. I was deeply impressed with the game’s world design, and the beauty of the presentation. It seemed that around every corner of the Living Lands there was some new secret, some incredible sight, some terrifying new monster to overcome. The game seemed deep and dense, with a wealth of content to dive into. I came away from my time with the early build of the game thrilled to jump into the full experience.

Many of my initial impressions were correct. There is a large world here, and exploring it rewards the player constantly with both the thrill of discovery and precious experience points – both keys to enjoying any open world RPG. But that first experience with the game did not tell the complete tale of Avowed. I was capped at Level 4, and there was a limit to how far I could explore. I pushed to the limits of the build but eventually walked away satisfied that I had a good handle on the game. I did not.

Avowed is not Elder Scrolls, nor is it Dragon Age. These differences are apparent in numerous ways, including one that I did struggle with - and I’m not sure if it is a critique or just a general observation. The enemies in Avowed do not scale with the player. Now, you might think “Oh, that’s fine, I don’t like scaling enemies”, which is a legitimate point of view. But the non-scaling enemies are not the primary source of frustration for me in Avowed. It’s the cascading impact that dynamic has on the rest of the game.

What the preview build didn’t reveal was that Avowed presents a mountain range of difficulty spikes. Because in the preview build I never got to move on to the next zone, I never saw what happened when you do. Traveling between zones, or even between regions within the zones, is fraught with danger. Over and over again, I would be merrily adventuring along and I would wander face first into a difficulty buzzsaw. This often happened mid-quest; I would be perfectly fine for the first part of the quest, but then when I would go to the next waypoint, some horrible ambush would be waiting there for me and I would be utterly overpowered by enemies that were well above my level. It's not just that you hit strong enemies, and you need to master the combat system. It's that the enemies unexpectedly leap forward in level and strength, and you do not. One minute, you are wiping out groups of five or six guys, and the next you are surrounded by ten dudes and your hits don't even visually register on their health bars.

I died in Avowed. A lot. Enough so that I dropped the game down to Easy (which is the second easiest difficulty). It did not help. The only way to combat this dynamic was to go back and play through some of the game’s side content to level up. Over and over again. Trying to move into a new area? In the early part of the game, at least, you better be damn sure that you have completed every side quest in the zone you are leaving, or you are gonna be scurrying right back there when a gang of skeletons spear-mugs you.

And that’s fine, I guess. But it does speak to a greater balance issue that I had with the game at large. And again, I’m not certain this is a criticism, or just a preference. But Avowed seems to be balanced in a way that keeps the player just a squidge away from where they want to be.

Progression feels very slow, and the rewards for leveling up are paltry indeed. One character point, which can be placed towards a tiny, incremental increase in overall stats (with diminishing returns, I noticed), and one skill point to add to a tree that has at least a hundred nodes. For the duration of the game, there never seemed to be enough skill points to complete a build in any meaningful way, no matter how often I would respec and rearrange things. So many cool skills left untried, just because I had to focus on direct damage and survivability. 

I played as a wand and grimoire guy, and even at the end of the game, all of my points were committed to increasing my wand damage and unlocking ranks of spells. Committing any points to individual grimoire spells to make them more powerful and see the fun tricks they could do at higher levels? Forget about it. What, am I trying to get killed out here?

Speaking of survivability and gear, Avowed insists that you must upgrade your gear in order to progress; your companions are constantly screaming at you in battle that you need a new weapon, or your armor isn’t good enough. And sure enough, when I would go to upgrade my stuff at the companion camp, I rarely had enough materials on hand to do so. How do you get more materials? Go play more side content, fool! Wander around! It’s literally laying everywhere!

I am the sort of player that prefers side content to be side content; I want to use that stuff to find good loot and become an overpowered wrecking ball. I don’t want to be forced to play it. I’m certain that many long conversations were had about how to balance Avowed’s progression in order to maximize the player’s enjoyment. But after a while, playing Avowed felt like touring Disneyworld with a militant tour guide who insists that you ride EVERY ride. So, when you start Avowed, just come in with the mindset that you will want to take your time. Cash in every bounty. Find every lost army platoon. Investigate every cave. Kill all the bears. Don’t rush, don’t try to push ahead. You are here for the duration.

Now you read all that critique of the game’s balance, and then you see that I’ve given Avowed an 8, which is still a pretty good score. How does that jibe?

Well, Avowed is still a pretty good game. Eventually, in the back third of the game, the balance issues subside and I was able to come close to being the power mage that I wanted to be. I eventually found what I had been looking for the entire game - a unique wand with extra elemental damage and a higher level grimoire that unlocked some better abilities. Though, I gotta say, it took forever. I know these things are supposed to be rare enough that it's exciting when you find them in the game, but I actually exclaimed "Oh my God, THANK YOU!". But these finds did unlock the key to survivability for me, along with some better mid-tier armor that I pulled off of one of the mid-game bounties. After that, I was cooking with gas.

But a ton of time and love was obviously spent on every other aspect of Avowed, and it is well worth digging into. The world design is absolutely stellar, unique and lovely. Wait until you see how many secrets the design team has packed into every square inch of this landscape. I felt pretty smart finding some of the stuff I found (I finally found a unique wand about thirty hours into the game), and I’m quite sure that I stupidly marched past maybe 60% of what was out there. There is a LOT of stuff to do and find here.

The visuals are fabulous, with some of the best use of color I’ve seen in a game. The graphics is this game are capable of being downright dazzling. I played on a Series S, a Series X, and my PC, and found the experience to be very similar across the board. I mean, sure, my PC is pushing more frames per second, but the Series S is still totally a viable way to play. So a tip of the hat to the optimization team.

I also very much enjoyed the narrative, which unfolds over the 35-40 hour playtime in an even, measured way. The story had enough twists and turns to keep my attention, and the writers packed in enough humorous detail to keep me amused. There are a ton of fun little touches left laying around for the player to discover, and even some of the primary throughlines of the game can be a hoot. One of the primary baddies in Avowed is the fiery-eyed Darth Vader-like leader of the Steel Garrote, a military/mercenary band that is threatening to spin out of control. I loved that the writers allowed me to indicate that Vader was an ex-lover of mine, and then they let me carry that thread through the rest of the game. Every time she popped up looking all evil, I was thrilled to be able to respond with the in-game equivalent of "Hey, girrrrl! You miss me?". 

The companions are also incredibly well-written, though I did find the companion quests to be ultimately unsatisfying due to a lack of reward for carrying them out. I ran through the whole questline for my #1 homie Kai and was rewarded with a big pile of nothing for doing so, other than seeing him work through his issues. Still, the companions were fun to have by my side, and their personalities were a hoot. Like most modern games of this sort, the companions keep an ongoing commentary on whatever is going on around you, and I found their observations to be interesting, and actually kinda helpful. At certain points in the story, you can ask what they think, and I actually cared what they thought. I particularly enjoyed Yatzli, who comes off as a cross between a 1940s comedy actress and a gremlin. Listen to how she calls the décor in a wizard’s tower “gauche”, then cackles like an evil lunatic when she kills something. Egotistical, narcissistic, and wildly unstable. Loved her.

Take my moaning with a grain of salt. As Paul Simon says, "I'm accustomed to a smoother ride. Or maybe I'm a dog that's lost his bite." In this case, either could be true. Despite all my grievances about the progression system, there are a lot of rewards for playing Avowed, and I definitely recommend it. Just be ready to spend a lot of time outside of the main questline in order to keep up with the game’s rather rigid demands, don't rush, and enjoy the drop-dead gorgeous views.