Enshrouded is my favourite early access survival crafter this year (Yeah, I know)
I spent a decent chunk of the end of January playing Palworld - not just because it's fun (which it is) but because of the huge conversation around it. It's a derivative game, for sure, but it does just enough with those copied components to have gripped me for a while. That was until Enshrouded launched just a week later and showed me exactly how I want games to explore concepts I already know. It's a repackaging with enough depth and heart to make me care about it now, months later, in a way I just couldn't with any survival crafter this year so far. It's very good and you should play it.
If you have managed to play Valheim, you probably have a good idea of how Enshrouded works. It's a multiplayer survival crafter that encourages you to commit to legacy playthroughs thanks to genuinely intriguing worldbuilding and story components. In a lot of ways, Enshrouded feels like you grabbed a bunch of concepts, threw them in a hat, and picked a few out. It's the exact type of game you would expect to launch on Steam yet it's nowhere near as insufferable and soulless as that may make you think.
It's one of the most approachable survival games I've played in years because it leads with that action RPG element. You aren't overly punished for your sense of adventure, and it is, instead encouraged at every corner. I have no problem with being punished for playing by the game's rules, in fact, as you might be able to tell from my love of soulslikes, I love when a game has an internal logic it beats into you. However, Enshrouded's approach to its world is downright enchanting thanks to the freedom offered to you. There aren't time limits, nothing is absolutely pressing. The World is gone and you have to slowly pull back a sanctuary for you and whoever remains.
To put it simply, you awake in a world that has been lost to a great corruption. When enemies and fauna aren't threatening you, the shroud is. The shroud is a great fog that you can only spend minutes in at a time before you eventually die. At the start, this presence is incredibly menacing, until you slowly push the perimeters of your base and start looking at your life as a resource you can spend in between rests. This works to organically push you into being more bold and taking a few more steps past your point of comfort.
Two things help this exploration along greatly. The first are quests, that challenge you with finding NPCs and resources. These can add more actions to your base camp or allow you to upgrade the flame keeping your camp alive. Essentially, you can choose to put down your base anywhere, and this gives you a square perimeter where you can access a building menu. With everything laid out on a grid, you can physically map out the perimeter with flooring, to then build houses, shops, blacksmiths kilns and more. As well as allowing you to upgrade your gear, making your base bigger gives you more ways to protect yourself from enemies and more space to place NPCs. Said NPCs can give unique actions if you build the right type of house for them so you are encouraged to constantly expand your little base of operations. Anything in the world can be carved into, which, multiple times, led me to dig straight into a mountain rather than risk falling into the shroud below.
This ability means you can terraform the space around your base, and pump those resources back into it. It's a gripping gameplay loop that, while familiar, is incredibly satisfying. Exploring further outside your base will allow you to get upgrades quicker but you don't hit a hard dead end when sticking to the one area for too long. The NPCs not only give the buff of allowing to craft more gear but it adds to that homely feel when creating your base.
Base crafting.is simple and effective with a handful of major sections, which control certain types of shapes. Rather than crafting entire houses, you put things together like LEGO and just hope something isn't sticking out at a horrible angle. Some things just look a little off sometimes but that's part of the charm. It becomes easy to turn a base into your base. As well as making your base bigger, upgrading it can eventually let you build more than one, encouraging you to create a new outpost across the map to haul items between. It's not exactly a strand game but still connects ideas in satisfying ways
My Twitter: / jamesmbentley
Abigail's Twitter: / abigaileshannon
Code provided by publisher for critique purposes
00:29 Why You Should Play Enshrouded
03:38 Learning to Fly
07:48 Let's Do it Baby, I Know the Lore
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