There was a time when I had pretty much decided I wasn't going to play Avowed. At launch, it was racking up 7/10 reviews, I hadn't played Pillars of Eternity, and while I respected Obsidian's pedigree, I'm just not all that well-versed in the studio's catalog beyond Fallout New Vegas. On top of all that, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had just launched to great reviews and I was still ransacking my way through Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. It took Avowed's mere existence on Game Pass to undo all of that -- and 30 hours later, I can't get enough
I booted up Avowed one night while my wife was at work. I had nothing to do, and went in expecting to run around for an hour or two, get bored, and never think about it again outside of working hours. And, yeah, initially I remember thinking, this is a video game. I liked the pretty colors but thought the animations were stiff and the combat was clunky. The premise, about an envoy sent to discover a mysterious plague called "The Dreamscourge," initially sounded like something ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it to make an RPG story, and I was almost immediately attacked and killed by some weird little lizard people.
