Enshrouded Review – Rebuilding One Block At A Time

A couple of years ago, many popular survival games, such as Palworld and Valheim, had active Early Access builds. As a fan of the genre, I played some of these games, both in Early Access and after their full release in recent months. But I was limited in my time, and I had to pick and choose between a few titles that all seemed very intriguing. One game that I didn’t get into was Enshrouded, and after playing the 1.0 build, I realized I’d missed out.

Enshrouded, developed and published by Keen Games GmbH, is a survival RPG that first launched in Early Access a couple of years ago. The 1.0 full release offers an expanded world, with a new end-game biome and a finished story, new combat skills and spells, and a fully fleshed-out adventure sharing platform. But if you, like me, didn’t experience the game in its earlier stages, Enshrouded has even more to offer.

Enshrouded has decent character customization and a lot of settings for us to tailor the world to our preferences. After playing the genre for a long time, I created a world on the more difficult side, with slower progression and harsher survival mechanics. And once I felt the settings were not to my liking, I was able to adjust them and continue playing. These customizations are not new in the genre, but were very clear and easy to understand and navigate even for players who aren’t as familiar with survival games.

Starting the game, a brief intro tells us about the world of Enshrouded. We learn how an addictive magical elixir drove humanity to extinction, and how our soul was created and preserved to help save the world. I’m not usually a fan of the “Chosen One” archetype in narratives, but Enshrouded uses it in a way that makes more sense. The world is already destroyed. We are not the chosen one who can magically fix everything. Instead, we were created specifically to help rebuild after the apocalypse, and it takes a lot of hard work to actually achieve that.

The storytelling is not the main focus of Enshrouded, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the main and side story content it has to offer. The main quest and storyline act as the guide to help us progress through the game, and side quests and environmental storytelling help flesh out the world. Post-apocalyptic settings are especially suited for environmental narratives, and Enshrouded takes full advantage of that. There are so many small details in ruins scattered around the world that paint a picture of how civilization lived before it was destroyed. Lore books and letters we find around the world are fully voiced, so instead of pausing the game to read about these stories, we can continue exploring and crafting while listening to them in the background.

Enshrouded‘s visual design is a huge part of what helped immerse me in the game. At first, the art style might seem a bit generic, but I grew to enjoy the more grounded and gritty atmosphere compared to the flashier and more vibrant vibes of other popular games in the genre. Enshrouded wants to be a more serious RPG survival game, and the art design definitely helps it achieve that feeling. The sound design is also decent, providing a fitting atmosphere to explore the world. There are some noticable bugs with sound balance and echoing that the developers are aware of and are still working on, so hopefully that will get addressed in future patches.

Survival, such as food, drink and shelter, is mostly optional on default difficulty. But they provide strong buffs to incentivize us to partake in those mechanics. If you have the starvation setting turned on, you might struggle the first couple of hours. But it becomes an easy thing to manage very soon, but I’d rather turn it off and use food and drinks mainly as a source of passive buffs and not worry about accidentally dying from starvation if I idle my character waiting for a crafting project to finish.

Crafting in Enshrouded is mostly split between two categories: NPCs and workshops. We can discover and summon NPCs such as a blacksmith, a hunter, and a carpenter who can craft us weapons, armor, and other items and workstations. These crafts are instantaneous, and we slowly discover more crafting options by doing their quests. NPC quests are the main progression tiers for the crafting tree, creating a well-paced and engaging gameplay loop to unlock better items as we explore new areas. Crafting workshops are mostly used to create higher-tier ingredients, and they do their work passively over time once we provide the needed materials for them. Farming also feels similar; we can create seedlings and plant them, or tame animals and shelter them to gather their products after a while. The combination of these two crafting mechanics creates a slow, but steady progression that made me enjoy the journey even more. I didn’t feel the need to rush to the end-game biomes. The world of Enshrouded is huge, I want to take my time exploring it, and the crafting gameplay didn’t feel like an endless treadmill with shinier and better rewards down the line. I always felt content with what I had, and was excited even more when I finished a quest and discovered newer and better items available to me.

Combat is a large portion of the game. Enshrouded is advertised as an action RPG survival game, and it manages to deliver on that promise. Combat feels fluid and responsive, and both the talent tree and our own growing skills create a satisfying sense of progress as we play the game. The skill tree is a less-scary and smaller version of the ones we find in games such as Path of Exile, but it still offers a lot of variety and options to create builds that are fun to play and feel strong. We can also reset our talent points relatively easily and try different builds. Combat is a bit slower, and while we don’t have the fast-paced and action-packed dungeon grinds of a typical ARPG, we still get a similar loot system with item rarities and upgrades that give a similar endorphin rush when the number goes higher.

The enemy variety and behavior also help make the world of Enshrouded feel dangerous and exciting. I loved it when I was able to one-shot lower-level enemies, but I still panicked at level 15 when I was surrounded by a pack of level three wolves. Boss fights are impactful and memorable, and they can be very hard. But it’s also possible to manipulate the targeting and pathing using the terrain and cheese some of the bosses with arrows or magic, especially since a majority of the game’s terrain and environments are destructible. Even these janky behaviours and quirks are par for the course for the RPG genre.

The last part of the gameplay is the base-building, and it’s one of the most impressive aspects of Enshrouded. After about 40 hours of mostly focusing on combat and crafting, I only dabbled a little in the building mechanics. But even a glance at Enshrouded‘s Adventure Sharing interface shows what is possible to create in the game’s world if you have the time and creativity. With the new Sparksworks feature that introduces logic and interactions to the building gameplay, I can’t wait to see what players will create and share. I don’t know how active the community of Enshrouded will be in the future, but these options are what give longevity to the genre, and I am hopeful.

I was given a late-game save file by Keen Games to explore and try the end-game content, as it can take a long time to get there organically. It was exciting to see how different the game looked and felt at that point. I got to try different combat builds, and they all felt exciting. But I am even more excited to reach that point on my own save. I can safely say that for people who have played the Early Access and are closer to reaching the final stages of the game, the new content added to the end-game looks very promising. I didn’t get to try the multiplayer, as I am more interested in playing solo, but the potential for some interesting collaborative builds is there. Multiplayer relies on self-hosting or dedicated servers, so with a decent connection or a stable server, it should be a smooth experience if you want to play with your friends.

After about 40 hours in-game, I am totally immersed in the world of Enshrouded, and I can see I have barely scratched the surface. I prefer the slower pace of progression as it allows me to explore the world and unlock new content on my own terms. The ARPG mechanics are integrated well with the survival genre, making the combat and loot feel more engaging and exciting. The game has some flaws and bugs here and there, but none that affected the overall experience. The developers have mentioned that the 1.0 release is not the end of development, so hopefully most of these issues will be ironed out in future patches. If you have played Enshrouded in Early Access, you already know what the game does well, and the new end-game content is there for you to dive into. But if you haven’t tried the game yet, Enshrouded might be an underrated gem that went under the radar for a lot of players during the survival genre’s boom over the past couple of years.

Nima reviewed Enshrouded on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.