Avadon: The Black Fortress

I want to be straight with you from the first sentence: Avadon is not trying to seduce you with spectacle, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner its particular kind of magic starts to work. Spiderweb Software has been operating out of a small Seattle studio since 1994, and this game wears that scrappiness like a badge. The isometric visuals are functional rather than beautiful, and there is, famously, almost no music - just ambient sound effects filling the silence where a sweeping orchestral score would normally live. Remarkably, after a few hours that absence stops feeling like a flaw and starts feeling like craft. The world breathes quietly. You lean in. The setup is politically rich in a way that larger-budget RPGs rarely bother with. You are a newly recruited Hand of Avadon, an agent of a secretive fortress that enforces the peace between five allied nations known as the Pact. Your commander, Redbeard, is an apparently ageless figure who inspires equal parts loyalty and dread - a man who has held the continent together so long he may have forgotten where duty ends and tyranny begins. The moral question running through the whole game is whether an institution can be both necessary and monstrous, and Avadon asks it with genuine seriousness. Side quests branch into their own small stories - an abandoned house with an unsettling history, wretch infestations in distant territories, companions whose personal agendas pull at the main plot. The world does not feel like a theme park. Combat is turn-based and grid-adjacent, switching modes the moment enemies spot your party. You create one character from four classes - the tanky blademaster who draws attacks and hits in area bursts, the sorceress for crowd-control spellwork, the utility-heavy shaman who can summon creatures and heal in the same breath, and the shadowwalker built around positioning and distraction - and then take two companion NPCs with you on missions. Those companions have opinions. They comment on quests, push back on your choices, and occasionally disappear on side-missions you must resolve to get them back. It is closer to a BioWare party structure than the blank slates of earlier Spiderweb entries, and it works. Skill trees are organised around utility, aggression, and passives, with a cooldown system on abilities that forces you to ration carefully. A single misused heal can flip a difficult fight into a reload. The mazelike level layouts and a minimap that omits quest markers and staircase icons are the most honest complaints the community raises, and they are legitimate - bring patience and save often. Where Avadon earns its place is in the writing and the weight of its choices. Multiple endings are not a marketing checkbox here; the story genuinely bifurcates based on where your loyalty lands. Veterans of Spiderweb's Avernum or Geneforge series may find the character customisation shallower than those games - no race selection, no custom party from scratch - and the skill trees, while functional, can feel uniform once you understand the passive-plus-one-aggressive pattern that optimises most builds. First-timers to the studio, though, will likely not notice the ceiling because they will be too busy reading. There is a lot of reading. That is the correct amount of reading.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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