PC Gaming

Well, I would say that it is just and average history with serviceable combat at best (wonky at worst) and not half bad written characters, even if the dialogue options are normally A, B and C but all they lead to a variation of the same answer. And yet, despite it all, it hooked me for 90 hours. Which it is something, because I very rarely play fantasy settings RPGs nowadays. What got me hooked was the exploration and the sense of being in another world, which is something that I really appreciate in videogames

The world they managed to build is beautiful, it is dark yet colorful if that makes sense. It has this mixture of medieval fantasy with some renaissance and a dash of steam punk and tribal ruins here an there all sprinkled with some phosphorescent fungus. In a sense it feels more like an alien world than a medieval fantasy game and that won mi over.

There is also the exploration. You enter some random ruins and suddenly there is a whole Indiana Jones esque temple with traps and treasure in there. You get the idea. There is one things that many RPGs fail to do and it is to let you explore the world at leisure without worrying about quests. See, in other games you enter a cave with some rotten food and stuff in the floor and chains in the wall but nobody inside. You need to speak to a certain NPC so the quest triggers and then you to go to the cave, again, and see a girl (the NPC's wife or whatever) chained to the wall and and ugly ogre eating beside her. In Avowed the quests happens as you go, you don't need to "trigger" them. So you go to that cave see, the ogre and the girl and you decide if you want to talk to the ogre or kill it right away, then you might get a quest item depending of what you did and then, latter on, you may find the NPC and reedem the item for a reward or whatever or maybe you never find him at all and that's OK. This way the exploration is so much fun and organic.