Avowed

I went into the Living Lands with the same cautious optimism I bring to any Obsidian release post-Deadfire, and what I found was a game that's easier to admire in motion than to summarize on paper. Avowed drops you into Eora's roughest frontier as a Godlike envoy of the Aedyran Empire, sent to investigate the Dreamscourge, a fungal plague that blurs the line between sleeping and waking and turns the infected violent. That premise has real teeth, and the political undercurrent of playing a colonial representative in a land that has every reason to distrust you gives the writing a texture you don't often find in first-person RPGs. The moral choices here are rarely clean binaries. Obsidian's signature refusal to hand you an obvious good-versus-evil slider is intact, and the endings do genuinely reflect the decisions you made along the way. The combat system is where Avowed surprised me most. There are no locked classes, which means you can open as a pure mage slinging grimoires and end up dual-wielding a fire-enchanted sword and a wand without the game punishing you for it. Swords, axes, hammers, shields, wands, spell books, arquebuses, and flintlock pistols all feed into two hotswappable loadout slots, and a pauseable ability wheel gives every encounter a light tactical layer without slowing the moment-to-moment pace. Enemies flinch, stagger, and respond to status effects in satisfying ways; freeze something solid and then shatter it. The no-respawn system is genuinely divisive, areas clear permanently, which kills any XP-grinding loop but also means the world actually remembers what you did. NPCs acknowledge that you cleared the bandit camp. That camp stays cleared. For players who hate filler combat loops, this is a relief. For players who like to over-level before a hard zone, it will frustrate. Where Avowed shows its seams is in the companion writing and the world's sense of aliveness outside scripted beats. Some companions feel like they're reaching for the warmth of Pillars of Eternity's roster without quite getting there. The world itself, while visually striking across its distinct biomes, can feel static once the scripted events resolve. Enemy variety also thins out across longer sessions, and the gear upgrade system was unbalanced enough at launch that Obsidian had to patch it. Post-launch updates have been steady, including cooking and crafting improvements, new abilities, additional unique weapons and armor, and a New Game Plus mode added later in 2025, so the version you're buying today is meaningfully better than the February launch build. Newcomers to the Pillars of Eternity series should know the lore runs deep; the game is accessible, but some contextual gaps will show if you've never touched Eora before. Avowed sits comfortably in the upper half of 2025's RPG lineup. It holds an 81 critic average on OpenCritic, which feels about right. It is not the generation-defining RPG some trailers implied, but it is a focused, confident, frequently beautiful game that respects your time more than most of its peers. The classless build system holds up past the midgame, the political writing rewards attention, and the combat stays engaging across the full runtime. If you want a sprawling systemic sandbox, look elsewhere. If you want an Obsidian game that actually shipped in a coherent state and has been actively improved since, this is worth your time. Monika, Scout Team