Avowed review: a vital reminder of how epic RPGs are supposed to play

How much time have you spent in games gazing in wonder at various funghi? No, nor us, ordinarily, but that was before first-person RPG Avowed turned up and… changed things. Very rarely does such a strange, captivating, and considered world arrive on your screen. It’s even rarer for that world to be realised in pin-sharp, bleeding-edge visual techniques and combat systems that tug at the corners of your mouth every time you engage with them. Avowed is a lunar eclipse of a game.

Perhaps we shouldn’t sound so surprised. This is the latest production from Obsidian Entertainment, an old RPG master with the likes of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout: New Vegas and the Pillars Of Eternity series to its name.

And it’s had a head start building the world. Avowed takes place in the same settings as the aforementioned Pillars games, the fantasy world of Eora where gods treat humans as their playthings and races with wildly different cultures struggle to share the lands without bloodshed ensuing. Although it’s an incredibly rich setting for this new Skyrim-esque adventure, Obsidian built this world for old-school isometric RPGs, and to an ever-changing crowdfunding budget, too. The shrewd allocation of resources it must have learned in the process has evidently paid off hugely on this big-budget project.

Nowhere else in the industry is there quite the same assembly of expert heads, and Avowed reminds you of that constantly. In the Lovecraftian, tropical look of the Living Lands, where your tale takes place. The satisfying depth of its character stats. The grown-up conversations that inform your quests. The way your weapons and magical abilities combine during a fight, countering specific enemy strengths and exploiting weaknesses.

It’s even evident in the character creator, a place you can and will spend 30 minutes just… thinking about stuff. Your backstory. The size of your ears. The exact protrusions of supernatural fungus coming out of your face.

Which brings us back to the start. This is a game with little details worth stopping and looking at, and it’s a damning indictment of gaming in 2025 that it feels so refreshing. Such a wake-up call. The art direction here is just staggering, reminiscent of Alex Garland’s 2018 fantasy sci-fi flick Annihilation in the way it makes sinister natural anomalies look so beautiful, and provides a heck of a hook to get you interested in its world.

It’s a world in which – wouldn’t you know it – you’re a rather important figure. An envoy, sent by the Aedyr (read: nature-loving wood elf types) Empire to the lawless Living Lands to investigate a plague known as the Dreamscourge. That in itself isn’t breaking new ground as a premise, but as always it’s the specifics that matter. The gods and monsters you meet along the way, and the characters drawn to help or hinder you by their own specific motivations.

Washing up on the beach of a mysteriously quiet island fortress, you and fellow shipwrecked survivor Garryck head inland to find a grisly scene, and the first beats of that Dreamscourge plot that takes you across a vast world map. The narrative’s a slow-burn affair really, and probably won’t be the reason you keep playing for the first eight hours. But by the time you reach the tipping point, you realise you’ve become attached to your small band of party members, and committed to uncovering the vagaries of your Godlike nature.

Until that happens, what keeps motoring you forwards is the combat. Old-school devotees of the Pillars series’ incredibly complex real-time-with-pause fights might initially feel like Avowed has shed some of that depth in the name of first-person spectacle. They’re not entirely wrong, either, but it’s hard to feel particularly irked about that when you’re lobbing spells and abilities about like you’re on report card at Hogwarts.

Fights happen in a highly stylised way, the action slowing to a momentary pause to highlight incoming attacks and opportunities to counter. There’s the faintest whiff of a Street Fighter or Dragon Ball Z about it, which isn’t a comparison we were expecting to draw when we hit ‘new game’. Timing your block and attack inputs, thinking about the best moments to deploy your abilities and command your party members to deploy theirs, plus the layer of magical attacks you can ping off from grimoires and wands, gives you a lot of freedom to express yourself in each fight.

Every component part of that fight feels so polished, too. When you fire an arrow with a longbow into a Xaurip you get the same bass-heavy thwacking sound cue and crosshair animation that Call Of Duty uses to sell its satisfying headshots. Even burning away some vegetation with a fire spell feels like a lot of very smart people thought carefully about it, and then arrived at the most gratifying combination of sounds, animations and visual effects possible.

It’s not perfect. It demands a lot of your time. Quests can meander for long enough that you forget why you’re doing them. There’s a lot of walking past NPCs in towns who have nothing to say, making them basically statues, and even for a Pillars veteran the level of exposition in the opening act can feel like overload. And by modern standards, the roster of four possible party members feels small.

But weigh that up against all of Avowed’s victories, and they feel barely worth mentioning. The most important of these is the fact that Obsidian’s somehow managed to make this game now, in the present moment, when triple-A games regularly release unfinished, without any clear identity, artistic imperative or respect for your time. It’s a timely reminder that games can feel polished on day one of release, that they can still be interesting, and feel like actual human beings with something to say worked on them, even up here in big budget territory where the graphics are so spellbinding you find yourself fawning over fungus.