Avowed plays like a funny Obsidian role-player where you buddy up with the voice of Mass Effect's Garrus
And maybe that's enough.
I'm still a bit fuzzy about the lore of Avowed - I've not played Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity games, whose world this new RPG shares - but after an hour hands-on at Gamescom 2024, I'm clearer about some of the details. And, happily, I'm a little more convinced this is a world I'll explore further, when Avowed's new February 2025 release date rolls around.
In Avowed, the game's world of Eora is experiencing some kind of magical plague, and you play as an important envoy from a nearby empire, investigating the cause. The Gamescom demo allows you to play as a beefy Barbarian, stealthy Scout or magic-infused Mage, with locked ability loadouts - I picked the latter - in a dungeon exploration mission where you were tasked with tracking down a lost expedition.
Accompanying you on this quest is Kai, a companion character voiced by the unmistakable Brandon Keener, who many players will recognise as legendary sidekick/romance option Garrus from the Mass Effect trilogy. Kai very much acts as your Garrus here and shares a strikingly similar personality also: an encouraging comrade, with a dry sense of humour. When I wasn't looking at his blue face, I could imagine it was my favourite turian there beside me. When I did look at his face, I was always a little surprised it was one of Eora's Aumaura staring back.
For fans of fantasy proper nouns, Avowed has a ton of lore to learn. This is clearly a world with a decade of backstory - perhaps too much, and I say that as someone who loves a good codex. Still, there's a smart system here to get Eora newbies up to speed, which lets you press a button to quickly surface an explanation for the many places, people and historical events that regularly pepper the conversation.
Visually, Avowed looks impressive, but its graphical style can sometimes feel an odd mix. The dungeon I explored is refreshingly bright and colourful as video game caves go, but it - and everything else I've seen from Avowed so far - seems a bit of a fantasy hodgepodge: Skyrim meets Lord of the Rings via a punchier colour palette, with blobs of James Cameron's Avatar thrown in. I'm reminded of Kingdoms of Amalur, a game made by a starry development team that never - for me - managed to really define an identity of its own.
Down into the cave I go, Garrus chattering away. There's humour to Avowed, which I'm really pleased by, a sense that underneath the Proper Nouns there's personality here too, and one potentially as enjoyable as in Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. A handjob gag later and we meet Sargamis - a Midas-like figure covered in gold, whose role in the proceedings can, depending on your subsequent choices, vary greatly.
Sargamis is after the artefact your missing expedition disappeared trying to find, it seems. And so with a request from him to find said macguffin, you head off again, now with more information on what's going on. I have a feeling that Pillars veterans may twig the dungeon's overall storyline sooner than I did, but I still enjoyed discovering exactly what was going on here - and, crucially, it all still made sense to this newbie, more or less.
Exploration is fast and fluid, with first-person crouching, mantling and sliding that felt modern for the genre. You can sneak up behind unaware enemies and surprise-melee attack, via a mechanic that looks like you're stabbing them with a Mass Effect omni-blade. As a mage, I held a spellbook in one hand and then either my wand or another melee weapon in the other, with the game's two loadout options swappable with a quick button press. A selection of four other, more elemental, abilities was spammable by holding down the left trigger and hitting one of the face buttons. All classes seem to be able to lob quite powerful ranged explosive items that act as grenades.
When all was said and done, I felt I'd had a number of options for how to conclude the quest, and also spend a good amount of time chatting through my various options with Sargamis. At one point I could also choose to ask Garrus what he thought. My mind was already relatively made up, but I ended up siding with him. Did Avowed do enough to sell me on its final promise? I'm more intrigued than I was, certainly, now I have a novice understanding of its playstyle and story. More time is good, then. As perhaps Microsoft itself knows, judging by its recent statement it was delaying Avowed into 2025 "to give players' backlogs some breathing room" - which felt something like an admission it might struggle to stand out during the busy Q4 period, particularly amongst RPG entries in established series such as Assassin's Creed and Dragon Age. If you're after a fresh Obsidian hit after that, Avowed is one to keep an eye on. Also, more Garrus.