Avowed is just the latest RPG from acclaimed developer Obsidian Entertainment, but it takes some inspiration from a game that’s often overlooked in the studio’s oeuvre. Most comparisons will be drawn between Avowed and The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s 2019 sci-fi RPG. Such comparisons aren’t misplaced, and in many ways, Avowed is a direct descendant of design principles laid down by The Outer Worlds, and it won’t be surprising if The Outer Worlds 2‘s release later in 2025 builds on Avowed in a similar way.

Despite Obsidian’s reputation, though, there are plenty of games the developer has released which are frequently overlooked in considering its catalog. Not every game can reach the acclaim of a Fallout: New Vegas or a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 – The Sith Lords, and lesser-known Obsidian projects like Tyranny and Skyforge often get left out of the conversation. Oddly enough, Avowed owes a great deal of its roleplaying prowess to Pentiment, a game that is very different superficially. The illuminated manuscript-styled historical drama is a far cry from the first-person fantasy action of Avowed, but Obsidian’s latest would be much worse off if it hadn’t inherited a key feature.

Avowed Has A Version Of Pentiment’s Codex

Define Esoteric Terms At The Push Of A Button

It’s not uncommon for games to make what is essentially an encyclopedia available to the player, compiling relevant information and facts about their virtual worlds, but Pentiment‘s use of the idea is a revelation. Pentiment was Screen Rant‘s 2022 Game of the Year, a 16th century murder mystery set in Bavaria and animated like an illuminated manuscript. Players step into the shoes of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in the scriptorium of an abbey in the small town of Tassing. Although Tassing and its denizens are fictitious, the game has an extreme affinity for historical accuracy, even structuring each in-game day around the schedule followed by the abbey’s Benedictine monks.

Such strict adherence to history, in addition to Pentiment‘s intense focus on pre-Enlightenment Bavarian culture, makes many conversations difficult to parse. Without extensive knowledge of the time period, it’s very hard to follow the minutiae of what’s happening in the game, but Pentiment makes its codex available at the press of a button in the middle of conversations. While Andreas is chatting with any character, certain terms will be underlined in red, and using the codex will cause pop-ups to appear, defining terms, giving some info on historical figures, or reminding you which Pentiment character is being discussed.

Pentiment is available on Xbox Game Pass, and even though it was formerly an Xbox-exclusive, it’s playable on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch as well.

Avowed has the exact same mechanic, but it’s used to help players familiarize themselves with its fantasy setting, the world of Eora. Avowed shares its setting with the two Pillars of Eternity games, CRPGs from 2015 and 2018. There’s a wealth of world-building that many Avowed players may not know about, and while there is a wealth of reading material to be found throughout the game, conversations with characters operate on the assumption that you are a part of the game world, since the main character is an Envoy sent by the emperor of Aedyr, one of Eora’s preeminent nation states.

Avowed’s Active Codex Benefits Roleplaying Substantially

Make Informed Decisions

While Pentiment used its codex for all sorts of helpful information, it was largely an education tool, helping players contextualize the historical setting they were exploring. Pentiment has plenty of roleplaying elements, but Avowed is more traditionally an RPG, and many of the choices presented to the player throughout deal directly with Eora’s larger sociopolitical climate. If you’ve never played Pillars of Eternity, it might be hard to follow along when Kai starts telling you about his time in the Rauataian navy, or when Marius’ sentences are filled with dwarven slang.

Conversations in Avowed can be paused to read up on people, nations, gods, cities, words in fictional languages, and more; it’s not sequestered in a separate menu, but right there when you need it. It helps players make informed decisions, and avoids issues that other esoteric settings can have where players may miss some of the finer points of a conversation. As the Aedyran Envoy especially, it feels fitting to have a comprehensive understanding of certain cultural crossroads. It being readily available too makes it easy to absorb extra knowledge about Eora piecemeal; that way, players don’t have to go digging through menus to find what they’re looking for.

Avowed & Pentiment Demonstrate What Obsidian Does Best

Believable & Interactive Societies

More broadly than their immediate gameplay applications, Avowed and Pentiment‘s codices help deepen what has long been a strength of Obsidian: world-building with complex societies. As far back as at least Fallout: New Vegas, and arguably the studio’s take on Star Wars in KOTOR 2, Obsidian’s games have effectively put players in the midst of deep sociopolitical conflicts. The major factions of New Vegas are still frequently celebrated as the best in the Fallout series, and both Avowed and Pentiment continue that tradition in similar but distinct ways.

Pentiment is working inside largely a known quantity, real history. But its narrative nevertheless operates on a lot of complicated middle-ground between classes of people in 16th century Bavarian society. You can send innocent people to death in Pentiment because available evidence doesn’t make it clear who the killers are, and the situation is only complicated further by the idiosyncratic relationships from this specific time period and location, despite the wealth of information afforded by the game’s codex.

Avowed goes to similar lengths in its depiction of burgeoning colonialism in the Living Lands, and many of the decisions players are afforded in the main story are different shades of gray, morally. Video games often give players easily identifiable “good” and “evil” playthrough paths, but Obsidian has long fought against this, and its game worlds, including its most recent venture in Avowed, are fascinating in their world-building and general storytelling because of it. Eora is a large place, and much of it seeps into Avowed even though the game is sequestered in the Living Lands, but understanding it all is much easier thanks to what Obsidian brought over from Pentiment.