Avowed director may have drawn on Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation for inspiration

Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming flagship first-person RPG, Avowed, may have a smudge of weirdness in it. In a recent interview, Avowed director Carrie Patel explained that the game’s already iconic mutated skeleton warrior may have been inspired by Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, a popular New Weird novel.

Press Start‘s James Wood interviewed Carrie Patel and her fellow director, Gabe Paramo, about Avowed. It’s an interesting and engaging piece that helps put much of Avowed‘s previously shown-off gameplay footage into context, but the really curious bit comes at the end. When checking out Avowed‘s splayed-out key art skeleton, Wood was reminded of Vandermeer’s haunting horror/sci-fi thriller. With that in mind, he brought the matter up with Patel, who was thrilled that he did so.

Is Avowed an example of New Weird?

“So again, without getting into story details,” said Patel, after Wood highlighted the similarity with Annihilation. “I will say you are not reading too much into things! I am so glad you’ve made that connection. I had perhaps heard that that one was a little too esoteric.” Not much more was revealed on that front, but it’s more than enough to send the mind racing.

Vandermeer’s Annihilation (and the Area X series at large) is, essentially, post-modernist horror/sci-fi that exemplifies the New Weird niche. As he puts it, New Weird is “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping-off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy.” It’s a heck of a definition, to be sure, but it may be important to understand what Avowed is, and what it is not. It remains to be seen whether Obsidian’s upcoming flagship is true New Weird, but Patel’s admission could suggest that there’s much more to the game than what first meets the eye.

There’s no lack of parallels present between Annihilation and Avowed as it currently stands, either. In Annihilation, the sole survivor of a failed expedition comes face-to-face with what may or may not be an alien terraforming device that changes the ontology of its surroundings. In Avowed, players are envoys sent out to investigate rumours of a soul plague. Sounds a fair bit stranger than you’d expect out of a run-of-the-mill fantasy narrative, but we’ll need to wait and see how it pans out.

Kudos to Wood for not only spotting the parallel, but also for bringing it up in the interview. For fans of New Weird, this suggests that Avowed could take its narrative into some wild territory, and if Obsidian really was inspired by one of New Weird’s most prominent authors, there’s every possibility that some of Annihilation‘s best qualities ended up rubbing off on Avowed, to boot. In the interim, for those who’d like to see what a New Weird game might look like, Remedy Entertainment’s Control is a prime choice. Obviously, Vandermeer’s Area X series of novels is a great choice for those who are keen on reading New Weird, but Alex Garland’s (fairly loose) silver-screen adaptation of Annihilation works wonders as well.