I finished Avowed last night, and despite all the tense battles and carnage and explosive effects and beautiful colours on display during the game's closing hours, I've woken up today unable to stop thinking about...a bunch of choices I had to make in the middle of otherwise pedestrian dialogue sections.
Obsidian (and Pillars of Eternity) fans in particular will already know where I'm going here, but a lot of people (myself included!) are new to all this, so indulge me: If you play Avowed, and you are approaching the endgame (or any decision that will seemingly have ramifications on what happens later), please have conviction.
Avowed does not shy away from putting tough choices in front of you, but what separates them from many other RPGs is that they're choices that are tough for you. Avowed will show you a town and say, oh no, is this town in trouble? You could do this to try to help, which will kill a bunch of people. Or you could do this, which will kill a different bunch of people. Or this, which could kill nobody, or kill everybody. Who knows! How much do you care about one group over the other, and how will it sit with you if you condemn one to death instead of the other based on their vibes? There is no best decision here, because every decision you make is flawed.
Whatever you choose, people will die, it will suck, and someone in your party will hate you for it. I spent the last few hours of Avowed with folks openly furious at me, an entire race of people unable to even look me in the eye, and that's after I'd made a decision that saved their entire city. I thought I'd done the right thing! But nope, to them, I was a monster.
Turns out there's no clean fix for a dying island ravaged by plague and haunted by an imprisoned god. Everything here is terrible, everyone you meet imperfect and for some reason the fate of that terror is continually left up to you to decide in the middle of a conversation.
I'm not saying the choices here are inconsequential. They're very consequential! They decide the fate of gods, of continents, of cities, of empires! But when every decision you make has a huge impact in some way, the focus is less on you changing the world, which is being changed no matter what you say, and more on how you can live with the changes that you chose.
Basically, Avowed is not a game for reloaders. There's no way to revisit older decisions to make the "right" choice because there simply isn't one. There's no avoiding casualties; you just have to choose who dies and make peace with that. There are only choices that are right for you.
That's my favourite thing about Avowed, and also maybe my biggest piece of advice to anyone who is yet to play it: its most consequential narrative "rewards" aren't found in changing the ending or making sure a party member survives, but in presenting a world in chaos to the player as a Rorschach Test, one designed to see that if terrible decisions must be made, it's up to you to reflect on just why you made them.
