Avowed looks fine. I didn’t have much problems with jank across my 50 hours or so I’ve spent in the Living Lands sweeping up every quest, and played mostly in third person. I still have some issues with the game, but how it looked or ran was not one of them, even on The Little Engine That Could known as the Xbox Series S. It also looks fine in another sense, in that it goes for a colourful realism, and pretty much delivers. Fine. Good, but not spectacular. But part of Avowed has me craving something more.
It might not be as graphically intensive as the likes of even Ghost of Tsushima at the end of the last generation, but I neither need nor want it to be. It sets its expectations and limits well, and manages to look modern without striving for expensive hyper realism. It also features absolutely gorgeous eyes, something that thoroughly annoyed me during my playthrough because I put Godlike petals over the eyes of my Envoy, fair Caoimhe. However, what really stung were the loading screens.
Games Are Lacking Colour These Days
Avowed looks fine. Maybe you remember me saying so about 150 words ago. But its loading screens look mesmerising. These are not attempts at faux-realism as the main game attempts, but beautiful and vibrant depictions of the game’s various settings. A few of the memory cutscene/flashbacks use this style too, and it’s highly evocative in telling its historically charged story. It would make Avowed a completely different game, but I so wish we saw more of this art in the game than what we got.
This sort of colourful, sketch-based art style might be too bold for a modern triple-A to take, where there needs to be a level of comfort to hook players in. Though my colleague Andrew King makes a compelling argument that niche is becoming mainstream as more arcane gameplay systems become smash hits, Avowed is aiming for the mass market in a way that rules out doing anything too radical upfront. It could have bolder, more creative stories or mechanics hidden under the surface – I would argue, frankly, that it doesn’t – but it needs to look the part. And it does. But occasionally, it looks better. That’s the game I really want to play.
Of course, Avowed is a game that exists, took years to make, was pretty well received, and does not look like its loading screens. It looks like Avowed. And as you may have heard, Avowed looks fine. I suppose what I want less is specifically for Avowed to look like Avowed’s loading screens and more for that sort of art style to get an outing in a bigger game. It’s odd: I don’t like the cartoonisation of the Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain remakes (games that were channeling their era’s answer to realism), but I also don’t like that everything else uses realism as a crutch. Maybe I just need to cheer up.
Avowed’s Art Style Delivers What It Needs To
There’s also the point that Avowed does deserve some credit for how it looks in any case. It lives within its means but still delivers a game that feels at home in 2025. It uses colour, lashings of it at times, in ways that modern triple-As seem scared of. Xbox generally has been better at this side of things (Halo, Fable, and even Gears offer more saturated tones), consistently giving its games more life in their palette. Sony, often self-serious, presents God of War in shades of blue and The Last of Us or Days Gone in shades of grey, though Spider-Man and Horizon introduce more light and variety. Of course, many would argue God of War and The Last of Us remain the pinnacle of the console war, so that may explain why games chase comparisons to those two most often.
Avowed may only give us five major settings (one of which is really only half a setting given the limited endgame time spent there), but each of them does have some personality. They’re not that distinct for the fantasy genre – a dockside town with a forest, an enchanted jungle, a desert, a different kind of desert, and we’re back to enchanted jungle – but they do at least feel distinct from each other, and that’s half the battle. It’s not that I think Avowed’s art style is atrocious or even a reason not to like the game, but that it dangles something far more creative and never expands on it.
I don’t think the art style is something many people will care about in Avowed one way or the other, and that’s exactly what Obsidian was aiming for. Other parts of the game will stir stronger emotions, and I’m curious where the dust will settle on this one. For now, all I can do is hope these splashes of creativity seen in the loading screens might get their moment in the sun one day.
- Released
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February 18, 2025