I had quite high hopes for Avowed, and these were matched by the opening few hours. The character creator, while not the most robust I’ve seen, was flavoursome with its thematic use of Godlike features, and was capable of creating avatars that looked both beautiful and relevant to the world. The opening shipwreck was a handy tutorial that felt active rather than passive and included a decision that impacted an early game quest. When it was over, Kai made a good first impression.
After that, it went through the motions a little as I made my first tentative steps in the world, unlocking fast travel points. I didn’t have the arsenal to make the combat enjoyable yet, but felt suitably like a starting character in an RPG. Then I got to the first major city, and it felt like things were finally starting to get interesting. Unfortunately, that was actually where things stopped.
Spoilers ahead for the opening hours of Avowed.
Avowed Actually Kills The Envoy
When you first arrive in Paradis, the game’s opening city after a prologue by the coast, you die. As soon as you enter, a cutscene plays and you are shot in the chest and stomach with arrows fired from the city’s central tower. Then, you come back to life. The game is explicit that you have not survived a near death experience nor made a miraculous recovery from wounds. You died. You were past tense. The lilies were being gathered for your grave. And then you woke up.
Games have an odd relationship with death. I ‘died’ dozens of times in Avowed as a natural consequence of this being a combat-based game wherein the main gameplay loop is fighting. I healed too late, did quests too early, or just generally sucked, and thus I died. But canonically, these deaths didn’t count. I’ve written before about how video games struggle to make death meaningful when it is indelibly tied to a failstate scenario, but Avowed seemed to have figured it out. It also uses this canonical demise to offer a powerup: when you fall in battle you can come back at half-health to keep fighting.
However, Avowed does nothing much with this. Trying to find who killed you leads to recruiting your second party member, a tracker named Marius, but with him by your side, you learn this is a fairly standard plot against the government you represent. You are the Emperor’s Envoy, people don’t like the Emperor, so they killed you. No hard feelings. You find them and kill them (which they do not recover from), some hard feelings. The revival, and entire death arc, goes on the backburner from here on out – there are no other ‘canon’ deaths in the game and the gameplay ones just see you respawn.
Avowed Uses Too Many Tropes For Its Story To Matter
A key part of the game is discovering who your Godlike is – those facial features mean you have a link with your god, and it’s unusual you don’t know who yours is – which kind of ties into the revival, but it just seems to lean further into fantasy tropes as a hat on a hat on a hat. You’re already a chosen one as a Godlike, and already special within that group by not knowing who your God is and by your senior position at the Emperor’s side. Meanwhile, the underlying story of a blight sweeping across the land is nothing special either.
You’re three degrees of chosen one inside a generic fantasy plot as it is, and then it also gives you a resurrection motif that ultimately means very little. To finally treat death with reverence is something of a twist in itself, but it comes so early in a plot that dwindles out to nothingness you’re left wondering why exactly you died and came back to life, instead of just being mortally injured and healed like every subsequent death. This would have given you more reason to protect Paradis and feel a connection to the city rather than being a special little soul who is above the petty problems of peasants.
So much of Avowed feels squandered, whether in straining for greater scope, going the Dragon Age: The Veilguard route of stopping players from facing discomfort, or just messy and trope-laden quests that fail to stir much emotion whatsoever. Your death that isn’t a death is another part of that, and goes from being what I thought might be one of the boldest twists gaming would see this year into a forgettable cutscene. In a way, it’s the perfect fit for Avowed.
- Released
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February 18, 2025