AVOWED

A year after it lit up Xbox and PC, Obsidian's Avowed lands on PS5 — and it arrives as exactly what it always was: not the Skyrim-killer some wanted, but a tighter, smarter, more colourful thing entirely. This is a first-person fantasy RPG that trades open-world sprawl for handcrafted density, and combat so good it carries the whole adventure.

You play a Godlike Envoy of the Aedyran Empire, sent to the Living Lands — a vibrant, dangerous island in the world of Pillars of Eternity — to investigate the Dreamscourge, a spreading plague of the mind. Almost immediately a voice starts whispering in your head, and the question of who you really are anchors a story about colonialism, faith and free will that's far more thoughtful than its fireball-flinging surface suggests.

The best first-person combat in an RPG in years

Avowed's combat is the star. You dual-wield anything — sword and pistol, wand and shield, two grimoires, a hatchet and a spell — and swap loadouts mid-fight to chain together a kinetic, improvisational flow that few RPGs can match. Parries (here, the riposte) feel meaty, magic is genuinely powerful, and the four companions — Kai, Giatta, Marius and Yatzli — bring abilities that slot into your rhythm without ever playing the game for you. It is fast, readable and endlessly customisable.

The Living Lands themselves are the other triumph: not a vast empty map but four dense, lavishly art-directed regions stuffed with verticality, secrets and reactive encounters. Climbing a mushroom-draped cliff to find a hidden Pargrunen Cache or a Strangled Adra to cleanse is the kind of small, frequent reward that keeps you moving. It's gorgeous on PS5, holding a crisp frame rate even when the screen fills with spell effects.

Where it stops short of greatness

It isn't flawless. The story, for all its strong ideas, can feel a touch restrained — a couple of the big choices land softer than they should, and the back half loses some momentum. The companion roster is small, the cities are more diorama than living metropolis, and players expecting the systemic chaos of a Bethesda sandbox will find Avowed's tighter focus either a relief or a limitation. It's a very good RPG that occasionally brushes against greatness without quite holding it.

For trophy hunters, Avowed is a choice-driven, missable-heavy platinum — the trickiest kind. Mutually exclusive endings (release Sapadal, destroy Sapadal, or go full tyrant with the Steel Garrote), companion-dependent moments, and dozens of one-shot quest decisions mean you either juggle a forest of manual saves on a single Path of the Damned run, or play it safe across two playthroughs. Plus the hardest difficulty and a full completionist sweep of every region. Our full guide below maps all 51 trophies, every fork in the road, and the save-management plan that keeps the platinum to as few runs as possible.