Avowed Didn't Rewrite The Rpg Rulebook In 2025, But It Still Gave...
Call me shallow if you must. In fact, I encourage it.
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
Does the wheel always need reinventing? Of course not. If it did, we'd have some really weird cars. Welcome, everyone, to my dissertation on why Avowed the rather good video game, is, in fact, rather good—despite its tendency to cling to RPG clichés that feel thoroughly played out in 2025.
I am an unashamed enjoyer of big, open-world RPGs. If there are gamer archetypes, I would class myself as an explorer. Someone who gets a kick out of climbing a big digital mountain just because it's there, that sort of thing. Avowed feels, in many ways, like a game designed to scratch that itch.
Right from the off, you're thrown into a fantasy landscape that looks to be ripped straight from the cover of a dollar-store novel—except rendered in all the gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 loveliness you could hope for—and are immediately tasked with stomping all over it.
Well, map by map, I mean. While The Living Lands are vast, they've been broken up into sizable chunks, each with a huge amount of variation. There are cave networks, sprawling fields, dwarven mountain complexes, and hidden temples. Places you want to get lost in, divided into sections that feel charmingly old-school in their implementation. Avowed is an odd creature—somehow managing to feel both cutting-edge, yet stuck in the past.
The gameplay loop looks like this: You make your way to a hub town, pick up quests from Artus the Helmet-shiner, Barry the Fishman, and Sally the Goblet-collector, run off into the wilderness, and come back with quest items, loot, and some hints as to what's going on with this fungus-plague that everyone's so worried about. Occasionally, Artus, Barry, and Sally have dialogue options to consider, most of which lead to what feels like the same eventual result.
As you can probably tell, I can't remember the name of a single character. Also, this is the same loop you were probably enjoying in open world RPGs circa 2005. It's so far away from being revolutionary or genre-pushing that, at points, it feels like a game that's been trapped in amber and polished in 2025 for others to enjoy.
There's a hidden god plot to uncover, an existential threat to stop, a you-are-the-chosen-one (I mean, envoy) w
Source: PC Gamer
