Avowed Has Killer Skeleton Storytelling

Neon White designer Ben Esposito once joked “in game design, ‘environmental storytelling’ is the art of placing skulls near a toilet.” I have yet to see a toilet in Avowed, but there are a lot of dead bodies placed in specific and often funny situations, and it has become one of my favorite recurring bits in the game.

Avowed is dense. Unlike many other games in its genre, which can often feel bloated, dull and empty, every inch of the Living Lands begs to be explored. Each ruin and corpse feels boutique, and every moment feels like it’s touched by the hand of a real person with clarity and intent. I have rarely seen an RPG executed with such meticulous attention to detail. Few things feel recycled, and every nook and cranny has a little story to tell.

This attention to detail in world design helps set the mood for the Living Lands. Any RPG can throw a bunch of spiders and bears at you with increasing difficulty and claim that as a win, but Avowed goes out of its way to drive home that this is a place of peril and malice. The people here should not be here, and nature is actively trying to kill people trying to settle it. This partially explains why you will find a dead body roughly every 20 minutes, with an elaborately constructed note next to it about the specific reasons that person is now a corpse.

A pyromancer cackling and exploding only to leave a smoking skeleton. A man dead in a bear cave with a hazing note explaining how he has to return with a “bear egg.” A cartographer’s body crushed under a big wall. Every skeleton is a beautiful painting.

In less expert hands, relying on this device too often could be considered a hack move. But Avowed leans into “skeleton storytelling” so aggressively that it becomes a running bit unto itself. You constantly read notes about people pushed to their breaking point, with fatal consequences. Others notes are comically foolhardy and boastful. I have lost count of the number of times I have read a series of logs where the person claims that there is no way they are going to die in the exact fashion that they died.

So much of modern AAA gaming feels disposable and empty. At times it feels like companies are in a pissing match to see who can make the most elaborate and expensive adult daycare with nothing substantial in it. What makes Avowed so atypical is the care and detail in every single inch of the map, often done with density and humor that I did not think was possible to do at this scale. It turns out a great way to do that is to fill your world with a whole bunch of well-considered skeletons.