I Didn't Get Avowed

This is not a review of Avowed. I don't believe that I played enough of Avowed to honestly say that I can give it a fair review, but I can at least explain why I found it so dull that I uninstalled it four hours in. I've been seeing a lot of glowing praise for this game, and I'm not bothered by people loving something that I don't, but I am surprised at how little criticism I've seen for a game that, in my opinion, has absolutely zero sauce. This is what I experienced in my time with Avowed. Mild spoiler warning if you care!

Let's start with something pretty minor that was driving me up the wall by the time I stopped playing. The protagonist of Avowed is a Godlike. Neat! I haven't played Pillars of Eternity, so this is all new to me. The intro tells me that every Godlike is affiliated with a particular god, but it's unusual that I've never been contacted by mine and I don't even know which god they are. Interesting! All of the options for physical traits in the character creator are mushrooms, flowers, and wood. I give my guy a giant slab of bark for a face and branches growing out of his head. A loading screen tooltip tells me that a Godlike's traits indicate which god created them. NPCs will continue to comment on my appearance and what a mystery it is that I don't know which god I'm related to as they literally talk to a man with a tree for a head. I'm assuming the god thing will be very important at some point in the game and it's infuriating how obtuse everyone is being about it. For all I know, this universe could have one tree god or a thousand tree gods. I am begging an NPC to comment on it one way or the other. This will continually grate on me until I uninstall the game.

The first thing about the game that seriously made me worry was one of the first things that happens when you take control of your character: the combat tutorial. The dodge animation in this game is shocking. Your character will fly in your chosen direction with a sickening lurch and will not stop until they've traveled what feels like fifty feet. Every battle sends you circling endlessly around the arena in a way that I found both unsatisfying and genuinely unpleasant. The animation fails to sell any sense of impact from your attacks, and every combat encounter feels like you're doing pathetic chip damage, whether it's a boss (where you actually are doing pathetic chip damage) or a small group of lizard guys. Using a melee weapon? Lurch around your enemies. Using a wand? A bow? A gun? A grimoire? Lurch around your enemies. I tried changing up my weapons and they all felt different kinds of bad. I spent most of my time as a wizard, but half the available spells had such short range that I kept falling back into lurching distance. A fight with a large corrupted bear told me that it was weak to fire, but my joke-ranged fire spell required me to stand directly inside of its mouth. Good one, game!

If your weapon isn't doing enough damage, you can always upgrade it! Pick up some extra wands, bows, etc. to break them down for sticks, and keep an eye out for any grass you can harvest! Save up enough sticks and grass, and you're blessed with an additional point of damage on your wand! Yahoo! The flipside of this is that you have a non-negotiable obligation to pick up every piece of garbage you come across in the world, because there aren't enough sticks to go around. How is it possible that an un-upgraded wand can feel so uselessly weak, while an upgraded wand can feel hardly any better? What a treat! Make sure to explore the world thoroughly. If you're lucky, you'll find a little section of janky first-person platforming that leads to a treasure chest that plays an honest-to-god lootbox opening animation and gives you a bounty of one stick and a basic bow that you can break down for a second stick. Locked chest? No problem! Come back later with a couple of lockpicks to retrieve an even more thrilling bounty of two sticks and a basic bow that you can break down for a third stick. I didn't know video games could feel so rewarding!

That's okay, I've played plenty of games before where the story makes up for the gameplay. Let's see how Avowed introduces the player to sidequests in the starting town of Dawnshore. There's one where a local guard mistakenly assumes that you're a new recruit and challenges you to a fight. When you win, she gives you a choice of weapon (to break down for a stick!) and then casually mentions that you're the Imperial Envoy in a way that I don't think was meant to be a "haha just kidding, I knew who you are!" I think the game just messed up and forgot that she thought I was a new recruit. Whatever. This one took about thirty seconds so let's write it off and move on.

The next sidequest in the starting town was actually kind of interesting until I thought about it for a second. A woman looking for a magical cursebreaker asks for help. She's been having terrible luck recently and believes she's cursed after Xaurips, the aforementioned lizards guys, moved into her house and ran her out. I agree to go take a look. I've slaughtered dozens of Xaurips already, what's a dozen more? I make my way to her house, killing plenty of bonus Xaurips on the way, and clear out the ones inside. I find a few things around the house: a mural painted on the wall showing the woman and a Xaurip coexisting peacefully. A diary entry describing her recurring dreams of her hanging out with a Xaurip. A book about "soul twins", a phenomenon where two beings are born, each with half a soul, who are tied to one another on a deep spiritual level. Hmm...! I return to the woman and ask her if she has a Xaurip soul twin, and she confesses that a fortune teller told her she does. She couldn't cope with this information, and when the Xaurips arrived at her home (I guess one of them also talked to a fortune teller?) she ran away. I, a soothsayer according to my backstory from the character creator, advise her to give her soul twin a chance. Xaurips are beings with souls just like you or me, and this connection could be incredibly meaningful and important to you! She is reassured and agrees to do so. I take her reward and walk away, presumably wiping her soul twin's blood onto my pants. Hey, maybe I didn't kill them yet? Maybe that was an unrelated group of Xaurips who painted an unrelated mural depicting a beautiful connection between Xaurip and Elf. I don't know. Anyway, back to killing these dang lizard men on sight!

The last straw for me was the first companion you recruit. You arrive in Dawnshore and meet a militia captain and a mercenary named Kai. They explain that the ambassador you're looking for has gone missing along with the town's governor. His actual title is "claviger" but I'm too annoyed at this game to go along with that, so he's the governor to me. Kai is looking for the governor for reasons I don't think were ever explained, so you agree to look for them together. I think he says something about how this town has been kind to him and the governor is important to its security. Anyway, you discover a corrupted forest full of angry bears and twisted vines. The governor is dead on the ground, and the ambassador is hiding from the angriest bear of all. You lurch around it for ten minutes pelting it with wand lasers, magically connect to a consciousness inside a big crystal that doesn't remember who it is but heals the forest for you (I assume this is my nature god, but I don't know) and talk to the ambassador. He tells you to meet him at his office in the nearby city of Paradis, and you set off with Kai.

Sorry, did I miss something? Was there a deleted scene where Kai reacted to the death of the governor and came to some kind of decision where he, a former soldier in the military of a rival nation turned mercenary for the Aedyran-hating city of Paradis, believes that the best thing he can do with his life right now is follow around an Envoy for the Aedyran Empire? What did he want with the governor that is now completely irrelevant to him? Beats me. I have no idea who this guy is. You can't talk to your party members in the world. He's constantly chiming in with his thoughts on things, but nothing that remotely characterizes him. The only impression I have of his character is from a brief interaction with a shopkeeper in Dawnshore. When she saw Kai, she became annoyed and said something about how he's a deadbeat who "borrows" her weapons for his adventures and never pays for them. Kai responds with something vaguely pleasant and polite, and she loses interest in the argument. Great! Me too.

When I go to camp for the first time, I find out that I can talk to him and get to know him. I look over the list of questions and realize that I'm already completely checked out and have zero interest in this man. I walk to the workbench, break down some wands for sticks, and glue them to my main wand. I rest at the camp, fight some more enemies, and notice no difference. I feel nothing. I close the game and uninstall it after four short hours, even less than I spent on Obsidian's last "what do other people see in this incredibly boring game?" the Outer Worlds. I used to think I was a fan of Obsidian's games, but I think at this point it's pretty safe to say I'm really a fan of Josh Sawyer. I guess I'll just have to look forward to Pentiment 2: Still Pentimenting!