Despite claiming to have multiple endings and various pathways, Avowed’s finale reveals its innate shallowness. You might feel like you’re roleplaying as you go through each conversation, but you’re not really – everything heads the same way. This leads to two basic endings: Good and Bad. And by Bad, I mean absolutely hilarious.
You don’t get to make too many choices in Avowed. The appeal, for those the game works for, comes from how strong the illusion is. With the ability to be rude, pedantic, and manipulative instead of the usual ‘nice’ or ‘nice, but cocky’ options, you are playing it your way, even if we’re all heading in the same direction. At the very end, you get a choice of two distinct pathways, but even then, the game clearly wants you to opt for one specific option.
Avowed Doesn’t Have The Depth For Its Own Ending
Spoilers follow for Avowed
All throughout Avowed, your companions feel a couple of inches short of where they should be. Two of the four don’t even have side quests, and the pair that do both feel fairly short and basic. When asked to make a decisive choice in Galawain’s Tusks that fundamentally alters the fate of Marius’ people, he grumbles mildly if you disagree with him. That’s all the dissent you ever get, for anything – except the ending.
You never feel like you’re getting the full story in Avowed. You’re constantly told of the evils of the Aedyrans, but in other RPGs, you’d expect one of the companions to offer a little bit of balance to things. An Aedyran themselves who puts things in perspective, a former Steel Garrote man who can argue the soldiers once did some good, or even a sympathiser who had a different perspective. The best bad guys don’t consider themselves the bad guys, after all. But Avowed has no room for nuance.
This brings us to our ending. As we leave the Garden, we return to find more time has passed and war has raged throughout the Living Lands. Interstellar-style, we’ve been gone far longer than we thought. This leads to an abrupt showdown with Inquisitor Lodwyn, where you need to fight through a small band of the Steel Garrote before the game’s ultimate showdown. But before you head off for this final mission, you have a choice – resolve to kill Lodwyn, or side with her. If you side with her, your team grows a spine for the first time and leaves you to soldier on alone. And folks, that’s where things get really, really funny.
Siding With Lodwyn Gives Avowed Its Strangest, Silliest Ending
If you fight Lodwyn, then you fight her. Nice and easy. It’s a decently spectacular endgame battle with a suitably sinister monologue and multiple stages. Everything you want in an RPG ending. However, if you choose to side with Lodwyn, things go in a decidedly different route.
Marching into battle against her alone, she does not believe you come with good intentions. She questions your loyalty, and makes you beg to serve her. She does not believe your begging, and makes you beg harder. And again. And again. Louder! Harder! It starts to feel less like two commanders meeting on the battlefield and more like you’re in her dungeon, chained to a St Andrew’s cross, with a credit card subscription to her dirty socks. Then, to further this submissive subjugation, she makes you kneel. If you resist at any time to this humiliation, you will fight her alone. However, going all the way unlocks another ending.
Should you agree to kneel, Lodwyn draws her sword to anoint you as her knight, confirming your servitude to her cause. Only instead of knighting you, she just chops your head off and the game cuts to black – the end.
If Avowed were a better game, I think I would consider this to be one of the greatest video game endings of all time. Side with the villain and get unceremoniously executed in a cutscene? It’s brilliantly subversive and darkly funny. Oh, you didn’t think there would be consequences? Sike!
The problem is this decision-making confidence, depth, and sense of consequence are not present elsewhere. You never get to appreciate the Aedyran perspective (until you do at the end), you never get to see your companions act as real people (until you do at the end), and you never face any real comeuppance for the choices you make (until you do at the end). It makes the brilliance unearned and, as a result, less brilliant and more silly. It comes out of nowhere, and while it’s definitely good for a laugh, it doesn’t feel as if it fits Avowed. In the end, it’s just another example of the game’s potential that never gets realised.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
81/100
- Released
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February 18, 2025