Avowed
It’s best not to poke a bear, but if you have to, the envoy has a powerful stealth attack.
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Format PC (tested), Xbox Series
Release Out now
You get to know your party more at camp, rather than on the road. This is Yatzli: orlan, ancient historian, and raunchy wine aunt.
Avowed, much like its setting, is a thing of contrasts. In this RPG, which shares a universe with the Pillars Of Eternity games, you’ve been dispatched to the Living Lands as the envoy of an expansionist empire. Ostensibly, your role is to root out rumours of a plague blighting the land and the people who live on it with rot and madness. The implication that your real role is to clear the way for further colonisation, however, is obvious.
Even without the issue of a plague, the Living Lands do not lend themselves to being settled. Corpses of ill-prepared adventurers lie scattered about, sometimes with expository notes, but more often the nature of their death is apparent from their surroundings: a cliff fall, starvation, giant spider territory. Despite how beautiful the nature often is, it is deadly.