Being the representative of both an empire and an unknown god is going to put pressure on anyone, and that’s the situation you find yourself in with Avowed, the latest RPG from Obsidian Entertainment. Set in the developer’s Pillars of Eternity universe, the game takes the previous two titles’ top-down perspective and goes full first person. While it may be a significant shift for players of the earlier games it does leverage the advantages of the switch with detailed areas to explore that makes the most of the 3D environments.

The game casts you in the role of the Envoy, a representative for the Emperor of Aedyr who has sent you to investigate the Living Lands. Early on in your adventure you discover the Dreamscourge; a plague that is impacting bith the population and the world they inhabit. On top of that you begin to have visions from a god who you don’t know but pushes you to make decisions on their behalf. All your decisions can impact the final outcome so understanding the world around you becomes a key aspect of your adventure. The path to completion is fairly linear with side quests limited in their complexity so there’s little chance of straying so far off the path that you lose sight of your objective.

On first impression it’s easy to compare it the Skyrim thanks to that first person perspective but the game is substantially streamlined to focus on the main aspects of gameplay in combat, traversal and dialogue. Combat is fluid and feels pretty good regardless of your choice of weapon (melee, magic or ranged). Traversal is particularly good with your character capable of discovering areas both above and below the main map. Dialogue leverages both you starting character and your evolving character attributes to provide options in many of your conversations in different playthroughs may not be the same. What you’re not going to see though are major side quests, multiple faction affiliations or houses full of cheese wheels… this is “Skyrim-lite” and all the better for it. The game can be completed in around 20-30 hours which makes it far less intimidating than a Bethesda RPG.

Visually, the game looks great with distinctive areas that make it easy to identify each of the main locations. The size of these areas makes it quite easy to miss major sections of a map on your first time traveling through them so for completionists you might want to put in some extra time wandering around. Enemy design is good but the variety isn’t near as prolific as the environments demand – a couple of enemies specific to each map could reinforce that each region is truly unique and solve this in a future game. Audio is excellent with a strong soundtrack but major credit has to be given to the choice made for the voice actors for your party; they are all very distinctive and are easy to hear during combat (they call out when enemies are around you) and the volume of general dialogue from each flesh them out significantly.

I really think a game like Avowed is perfect for players as it’s a fun game that can be completed in a decent amount of time. For Microsoft it keeps up player interest while much bigger games like The Elder Scrolls VI are still in development. That Obsidian also have another game like this coming soon in The Outer Worlds 2 show they have a pipeline that is both reliable and prolific and to be honest I think they are onto a winning strategy. I hope we see more of this. 🙂

Avowed is out now on Xbox and PC. Played on an Xbox Series X via Game Pass.