Avowed Hides Easter Eggs in One of the Most Unexpected Places

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home February 25, 2025 169 Views 6 Min Read
Avowed Hides Easter Eggs in One of the Most Unexpected Places



Avowed is the first single-player fantasy RPG from Obsidian Entertainment in more than half a decade. After wrapping up development on 2018’s Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, which Avowed shares a world with, Obsidian went on to work on games in other genres, such as the sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds and the 2D adventure game Pentiment. Avowed may not be the exact same as Pillars of Eternity, given that it is played from a first- or third-person perspective instead of an isometric one, but it’s still a refreshing change of pace from the studio that is largely known for other types of projects these days.

Obsidian is a unique developer in that many of its recent games are very different from each other. Besides having some RPG-related mechanics, Grounded, Pentiment, and The Outer Worlds have very little in common from a gameplay standpoint. There is one thing they all share, though, and that’s clever Easter eggs. Obsidian has a knack for hiding pop culture references in its video games, and Avowed continues that tradition. The game not only has an Avatar: The Last Airbender Easter egg, but even a Fallout: New Vegas-themed quest, as well. Some of Avowed’s more notable Easter eggs, though, are not even hidden in the game itself, but rather in its Xbox achievements list.

avowed xbox 360 era throwback for better or worse

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Avowed Feels Like a Throwback to the Xbox 360 Era, For Better or For Worse

Even though it came out only a few days ago, Avowed feels like a game that was ripped straight out of the Xbox 360 era, in both good and bad ways.

There Are a Lot of Easter Eggs Hidden in Avowed’s Achievements List

On both the Xbox and Steam versions of Avowed, players can unlock tons of achievements while playing through the game. There are, in fact, 50 of them in Avowed, 18 of which are hidden. Fortunately, unlike Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth or the Gears of War franchise, getting 100% completion in the game isn’t too difficult. Most of Avowed’s achievements are, for the most part, pretty straightforward. A lot of them are either story-related or pertain to specific tasks, such as “kill 15 enemies using stealth attacks” or “slay 10 Spiders and 10 Beetles.”

What’s really notable about some of the achievements in Avowed, however, is that their names are subtle references to other franchises, both inside and outside the world of gaming. One of the most referenced series in the game’s achievement list is, unsurprisingly, Fallout. There’s an achievement in the game that, for example, is called Two Bears High-Fiving. Those who are out of the loop may have a hard time understanding how this name relates to Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic franchise, but it’s actually a reference to a minor tribal NPC with the same name in the Honest Hearts DLC for Fallout: New Vegas.

Some fans created a mod for Fallout: New Vegas that changed one of the selectable answers for the Rorschach inkblot test at the start of the game to “two bears high-fiving,” and Obsidian added the Two Bears High-Fiving NPC to Fallout: New Vegas as a reference to it.

Avowed’s achievement list has plenty of other Easter eggs that are also worth mentioning. The Everybody Disliked That achievement in the game, for example, is a reference to a message in Fallout 4 that famously became a meme among the gaming community. The “That Sign Can’t Stop Me Because I Can’t Read” achievement, meanwhile, is a direct nod to a line from the children’s PBS TV show, Arthur. There’s also an achievement called Gotta Cache ‘Em All in the game, which is a riff on the “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” slogan from the Pokemon franchise.

Some of Avowed’s Achievements Are Named After the Games That Obsidian Developed

Many of the other achievements in Avowed are simply named after the games that Obsidian worked on. The achievement that unlocks after players complete every side quest in the game is named Pentiment, for example, while the achievement that they get after siding with the Steel Garrote is called Tyranny, which is a direct reference to the eponymous 2016 CRPG.

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