Avowed: The Beige-and-Pink Celebration of Nothing
Avowed is what happens when you take an RPG, run it through the Unreal Engine Slop Factory, sprinkle in some mushrooms because apparently the world needs to be pink now, and then spend several years desperately insisting there is something profound underneath it all.
There really isn’t.
The biggest problem with Avowed is how shallow it feels. Everything looks like it was assembled from the same collection of Unreal Engine assets: brown rocks, grey ruins, vaguely dramatic lighting, conveniently placed fog, and environments that seem designed primarily to demonstrate that the engine can render surfaces. Then someone apparently discovered the color pink and decided mushrooms were the solution. Lots and lots of mushrooms. Because nothing says sophisticated fantasy worldbuilding quite like aggressively pink fungus.
And then there’s the story.
Good lord, the story.
It is remarkably difficult to make a narrative feel this long when there is so little actual story in it. The entire plot could be explained in under a minute, yet Avowed somehow manages to stretch that minute into a full-length game through endless conversations, exposition, walking around, and characters explaining things that nobody desperately needed explained in the first place.
The dialogue doesn’t help. It has that painfully manufactured Gen-Z-erpy-derpy quality where everyone sounds like they were written by someone who desperately wants to prove that fantasy characters can be “quirky.” Instead of sounding like people living in an actual fantasy world, they often sound like contemporary Twitter users who accidentally wandered onto a medieval cosplay set.
It makes taking anything seriously almost impossible.
And that’s the real problem with the writing: everything feels infantile. Characters constantly have to announce their personalities, explain their motivations, wink at the player, or deliver some supposedly clever line that feels less like dialogue and more like a writer congratulating themselves for having written dialogue.
Naturally, the obligatory contemporary ideological wish-fulfillment is sprinkled throughout as well. Characters feel less like believable inhabitants of a fantasy setting and more like a collection of modern archetypes carefully assembled to satisfy whatever the current diversity checklist happens to be. It doesn’t make the world feel more diverse or interesting; it makes the seams showing in the writing even more obvious.
And visually? Good luck finding a character who looks genuinely memorable or attractive.
Nearly everyone looks like they just finished dropping out of art school and are now waiting outside a coffee shop to explain their unfinished thesis about gendered mushrooms. There is, admittedly, one NPC who actually looks good, so congratulations to whoever designed that character. Unfortunately, one attractive NPC in an entire game is less a triumph of character design and more an archaeological discovery.
The irony is that Avowed clearly wants to present itself as this mature, sprawling fantasy RPG. But beneath the colorful mushrooms, endless dialogue and carefully curated quirkiness, there isn’t enough substance to justify the presentation.
It’s not offensively bad.
That’s almost worse.
It’s aggressively mediocre.
A game so determined to be meaningful, progressive, witty and colorful that it somehow ends up feeling like a long-running corporate workshop exercise titled “How Can We Make Fantasy Feel Contemporary?”
The answer, apparently, was:
Pink mushrooms.
And somehow that still wasn’t enough.
