Holding court in 'Avowed'
Lisa Frank-core plagues and political intrigue meet in this new fantasy RPG
“Beneath every history, another history.”- Wolf Hall
I make no apologies beginning this newsletter about the new fantasy video game Avowed with a quote from the late, great Hilary Mantel’s masterful historical fiction novel about Sir Thomas Cromwell holding (and manipulating) court in the time of Henry VIII.
While wandering the medieval open world environments in Obsidian Entertainment’s bleak, eye-popping, and utterly absorbing new RPG, I found this book1 informing nearly every narrative move I made.
I was apprehensive about diving into Avowed, because I heard it was set in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity, a series I have never played and was not familiar with until this game landed on my radar. This is partly because I was once blatantly lied to by a GameStop employee who insisted that I “didn’t need to know anything about the other games” before diving into Witcher 3.
As someone with both great respect for meticulously built fantasy lore and limited time for gaming, let’s just say I was a more than a little pissed when I spent $50 on a used copy of Witcher 3 only to discover that it dropped me in the middle of a world I had no clue about.
Avowed, I am pleased to report, is different. This game dropped me in the middle of a world I had no clue about and made that the driving thrust of its story. There were a couple vague, irritating references to past character relationships that seemed drawn from other games in this universe, but overall, Avowed felt like a self-contained narrative.
It is to the game’s credit that you enter its world with immediate baggage. No matter how you build your character, you begin as the Envoy for a never-seen Emperor of a powerful realm called Aedyr.
You have been sent to a chaotic island called The Living Lands to investigate The Dreamscourge, a Lisa-Frank-core mushroom infestation overwhelming its landscapes and killing its people.
Or is that investigation just a pretense? As soon as my character arrived, it became clear that the people of The Living Lands mostly distrusted or outright hated him and everything they thought he stood for. They saw a would-be colonizer who wanted to erase their unique cultural traditions and make them an extension of a faraway king.
You can certainly do that! As I navigated Avowed’s diverse environments, I could choose to join forces with Inquisitor Lödwyn,2 a ruthless would-be conqueror who not only wants to find a solution to The Dreamscourge, but make its citizens bend the knee in the process.
I wasn’t feeling evil, so in my initial playthrough I opted to be a wild card who takes nearly every opportunity to shut down Lödwyn’s agenda and flame the fans of dissent among the citizens of The Living Lands rather than encouraging them to join, and bow to, the realm.
Like many fantasy RPGs before it, Avowed also makes you The Chosen One. Not only are you sent to stop a plague, but you are a Godlike, a person bonded with one of this world’s many gods at birth. It gives you special powers and weird, plant-like growths on your body that are similar to those that The Dreamscourge produces in infected specimens.
The difference? Your growths are harmless, while the ones on people and creatures with The Dreamscourge, a so-called “soul plague,” turn them into mindless, violent zombies.3
As the story progresses, you must not only decide the future of The Living Lands, but of the very god you are connected to. You can choose to subordinate and doom them all, if living out a grim power fantasy is your thing.4
To be clear, I think the option to be unapologetically cruel and domineering is a necessity in games like this. I’m thinking of one of Obsidian’s other iconic works, Fallout: New Vegas, where you can choose to side with a patriarchal fascist who wants to impose Ancient Roman law and aesthetics onto a nuclear wasteland, crucifixions and all.
True narrative freedom in games like these means leaving the capacity for terror on the table. Knowing that I had the option to take drastic, violent action in almost any situation in Avowed made the appeal of more measured discussions or outright rebellion against my royal mandate that much stronger.
Whatever you choose, the game makes you feel it. The hefty consequences that come with certain actions triggered a genuine emotional response in me, and a number of times I reloaded my latest save to experiment with the outcome while still holding true to the character arc I was creating.
While some of these decisions are black and white- side with Lödwyn and her ruthless, bloodthirsty legion of soldiers acting in the Emperor’s name or do literally anything else for fuck’s sake- many are truly difficult to parse.
For example, midway through Avowed, you have the opportunity to stop The Dreamscourge in its tracks in one area of The Living Lands. Doing so requires powerful, unpredictable magic that will result in the sudden deaths of dozens of people in the area. Do you let the plague continue spreading unabated, or do you sacrifice a not-small-number of people to stop it?
Enter he, Thomas Cromwell. When faced with situations like this, of which there are several, I felt the need to disconnect and ask: WWTCD? At what cost, victory? To what end, practicality?
Because of him, Cromwell, I chose the role of Court Augur, a person taken in by the Emperor after a rough, impoverished childhood, "who has learned to wield power from the shadows.” If I’m going to be an extension of an emperor, I might as well emulate the best.
“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”- Wolf Hall
Let me back up a bit. As with many RPGs, Avowed begins by having you design not only your character’s exterior but their interior. You can make them male, female, or nonbinary; pick from a ridiculously large number of hair, scar, eye, and nose options; choose how intensely the mushroom growths will dominate your Godlike’s appearance.
Then you pick their past, their character attributes, and their combat skills. You have to balance how smart and perceptive they are with how much muscle they have; determine if they favor magic over swordplay and archery; decide if they will enter this story as a warrior, a diplomat, or something in between.
As a Court Augur, my character would be an expert at navigating the political complexities, gamesmanship, and backstabbing inherent in monarchies. He would be ideal to either manipulate people into accepting the laws of Aedyr, or in subtly pulling the rug out from under his Empire.
As I progressed through the game, he was given unique dialogue options to insert pithy, often poetic asides into conversations. Sometimes others were intimidated or moved to action by this, though often they responded by asking what the actual fuck he was talking about.
This included my companions, four characters with combat skills as varied as their perspectives. Two of them wield different types of magic, while the other two prefer guns and axes. All of them have a lot of shit to say, especially when they feel you are towing the line of the Emperor.5
Your followers look at you with a heavy dose of skepticism at first, and a couple of these alliances start as matters of necessity to stop The Dreamscourge. Because of the way I played, I was able to earn their trust and keep all four of them with me until the end. I suspect that making more Aedyr-focused choices on another playthrough would lead to a starkly different outcome.
While the world-building, voice acting, and character development of Avowed are unique and first-rate, the combat is a fairly straightforward combination of spell-casting and ranged and melee weapons.
Even if these encounters are violent bursts of color with a sometimes overwhelming barrage of spells flying around, after a while they started to feel the same. I often found myself attacking unsuspecting enemies with large-area spells and then rushing in and slashing the survivors to death with my sword or spear. To the game’s credit, its swordplay feels heavy and brutal, even if it is simplistic.
The enemies, while colorful and detailed marvels of design, can be redundant in battle. The skeleton hordes, insects, bears, and spirits look and move differently, but by and large their attack strategies are the same: They’re going to bite, scratch, stab, or shoot you the same way over and over again. And you’ll do the same to them.6
The only enemies that really complicated these encounters were magic-wielding ones like wizards and priests, who lurk on the battlefield and heal all those around them. While an intriguing challenge at times, this too started to feel overdone by the game’s midpoint.
Avowed does some welcome streamlining when it comes to its controls and gameplay, though. One feature is the grimoire; equipping this weapon gives you access to 4 different spells at once, rather than having to cycle through them in the middle of combat. Another is allowing you to switch between two custom weapon loadouts with the simple press of a button. There is still quite a bit of stop-and-start to the flow of battle when it comes to non-potion health items, but I found a good combat rhythm using the grimoire. So much so, in fact, that I didn’t want to bother with bows, guns or shields for much of the game.
Then there’s carrying capacity. How many times in a game like Skyrim did you have to pause and drop a bunch of stuff just because the idea of carrying 3,000 herbs, 35 swords, and 10 suits of armor is “unrealistic?” Avowed doesn’t entirely do away with the concept of weight, but it does make it so that you can send items directly to your camp rather than stopping the flow of gameplay and forcing you to drop and lose these items forever. It also only assigns weight values to weapons and armor. Carry all the plants and spirit essences that you want!
I spent well over 40 hours on my initial Avowed playthrough over the last couple of weeks. Its central story is much more contained than its more sprawling RPG counterparts, and rather than dropping you in the center of one, big open world, it opts for smaller environments. For the most part, this keeps the story feeling urgent and the environments fresh. After each big narrative development, you move on, from forest to desert to volcano.
That said, I did run into situations where materials I needed to enhance my weapons could only be found in an area I’d already left behind. Upgrading weapons from one tier to the next requires a certain kind of stick or plant, and even if you have a more powerful kind of stick or plant, it won’t do. Silly! So, rather than travel back and scour the past environments for weaker sticks and plants, I usually just forked over some coin for a newer, stronger item.
Annoyances like this hold Avowed back, but didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of my first playthrough. It has a wealth of narrative experiences in all four of its different areas, even if the combat stays largely the same. You arrive as each faction of The Living Lands is contending with both The Dream Scourge and the threat of colonization from your kingdom in their own way. Your help is reluctantly accepted, if it’s accepted at all.
Choosing to maintain your alliance with Aedyr is never comfortable, no matter how small the interaction is. I found the identity that’s thrust on your character to be a thrilling complication to stories like this, where you are usually a completely blank slate who is afforded a chance to forge a totally new identity. Avowed gives you the baggage of empire, and you have to decide whether to drop it or feel its burden with every move.
Avowed is currently available on Xbox Series S/X and PC.
Wolf Hall and its follow-up, Bring Up the Bodies, are two of the richest reading experiences I’ve had in the last decade. For reasons unknown, I haven’t gotten to the third installment yet.
According to the Pillars of Eternity wiki, Inquisitor Lödwyn was a prominent character in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire… Idrgaf, but maybe you do!
For the most part, the people you interact with in Avowed know you aren’t sick, unless you act like a sicko!
I would’ve done this in middle school, but I’m normal now.
It’s notable that Avowed does not have any romance options available with these companions. Strictly business!
Well, no biting.
okay I do think I'll play this
it's true that you don't need to know anything about previous Witcher games to play Witcher 3.... when they quiz you at the beginning you're just giving whatever answers...