Avowed understands the appeal of a lil' Waterfall Treasure

The TTWT metric is, of course, the ultimate measure of any video game that contains both the concept of waterfalls and the concept of treasure: The length of time it takes for developers to stick an eye-catching water feature in an environment, and then to shove some garbage behind said water feature to reward those players who’ve been compulsively trained to check behind every single waterfall they see. The treasure you get behind a waterfall usually isn’t any good—in Avowed, it’s a simple, unenchanted knife and a short lore note—but that’s not the point: The real satisfaction of waterfall treasure is in closing the loop that happens in the waterfall seeker’s brain, the jump from “Oh shit, a waterfall” to “Yes, the developers put something behind it! This video game universe is my friend!”

I will admit, personally, to being somewhat ambivalent about waterfall treasure, despite obsessively checking behind every single one of the damn things I see. (And despite really enjoying my first few hours with Avowed, which feels like it’s applying real character-build rigor to the typically floaty first-person combat you might normally associate with an Elder Scrolls game, situated within Obsidian’s well-observed Pillars Of Eternity RPG setting.) As someone who enjoys video game rejection, and who doesn’t pet the dog in games, there’s a part of me that genuinely enjoys the idea of developers not indulging my obsessive treasure-hunting instincts, of just sticking a blank wall behind the largely cosmetic torrents of water. (Or, god help me, a small cave without any treasure in it at all.)

I do appreciate Avowed front-loading stuff like this early, though: Figuring out where a game stands on waterfall treasure—which means, in a less glib sense, also figuring out how much the developers generally want you to push at the boundaries of their game world in order to discover secrets, optional content, and even whole plot branches and levels—is a major part of getting in tune with a title’s exploration ethos. (Taken to its extreme in, say, the original Dark Souls—one of the most waterfall treasure games of all time—where From Software hid a whole secret area behind two fake walls in an out-of-the-way little treasure room. It’d be impossible to find… if the game hadn’t already trained players to seek obscurity in every cranny.) Sticking a waterfall in the game’s opening minutes—but not putting anything especially great behind it—lets me know that Avowed probably isn’t going to try to break my brain when it comes to environmental navigation, but will generally reward me for taking an interest in its world. (See also a few minutes later, when it pulls another classic video game exploration “puzzle,” hiding one of its gently glowing chests behind a secret tunnel between an empty room, and a locked one.) Both design extremes, between “Obscure, brain-melting secrets everywhere,” and “follow the glowing line with no variations” have their merits, but the key is for them to be applied consistently: There are few bummers bigger than getting 20 hours into a video game only to find that it’s suddenly become a dense web of secrets, after training you to be a less diligent hunter.

All of which feels of a piece with the little I’ve experienced of Avowed so far, which feels more streamlined than the top-down Pillars games, but not to the point of simply being a slick on-rails experience. (Something I struggled with in Obsidian’s last big first-person RPG, The Outer Worlds, which felt like it wanted to be huge and obscure, but often felt like there wasn’t time and energy to fill out its sci-fi universe with secrets or meaningful story branches.) I’m ready for something that goes down smooth without insulting either my intellectual or my emotional intelligence, and starting the game off with a little waterfall treasure, as a treat, is a good way to know roughly where Avowed stands.