Avowed, One Year On: The RPG That Keeps Pulling Me Back

I bounced off Avowed twice at launch. The first hour is all systems and no hook, and the internet had already decided the game was either a masterpiece or a misfire before most of us finished the tutorial island. A year later I have put more than three hundred hours into Eora, and I think the people who spoke quietly about it were right.

The opening undersells the whole game

Avowed front-loads its weakest material. The combat feels stiff until you have two full ability trees, the companions read as archetypes until their second questlines, and the world only clicks once you stop treating it like a checklist. Give it six hours and it becomes a different game.

What changed for me was learning to read the environment. Obsidian hides its best writing in the margins: a ledger on a desk, an argument you overhear, a shrine that has clearly been repurposed twice. None of it is marked on the map. That is the point.

Combat that rewards commitment

The first-person melee looked clumsy in trailers and it is genuinely great in motion. Parries have real weight, spell timing matters, and the difference between a sloppy fight and a clean one is entirely on you. It is not Souls-hard, but it respects the player who pays attention.

• Grimoires let you swap spell loadouts mid-fight, which turns every encounter into a small puzzle.
• Environmental kills are absurdly satisfying and almost never necessary, which is the right ratio.
• The best build in the game is the one you enjoy piloting, not the one on the tier list.

So is it worth your backlog slot?

If you skipped Avowed on the strength of the launch discourse, come back to it. It is a confident, hand-built RPG that trusts you to find its edges. Bring patience for the first evening and it will keep pulling you back for months. That is exactly what happened to me, and I bought it twice by accident because I forgot I already owned it.