Enshrouded Early Game Review: That's The Good Stuff

Sadly, I don’t have or spend as much time playing games these days as I would like. So as much as I would love to get fully engrossed in deep endgame, I know that honestly I probably won’t get to see much (or any) of it. I’m still coming to terms with that and holding out hope more time will suddenly appear one day, but in the meantime it has given me some new insight into how I judge games and what I want to get out of them.

That’s a lot of words to say that I haven’t yet seen Enshrouded‘s endgame because I just don’t have the means to binge during the review window. But I really do want to, and that’s saying something. Enshrouded’s start is just so good, getting its hooks in me from the first moments and making it a real struggle to make any sort of decent bedtime.

A beautiful game, with atmospheric lighting and great sense of space, calling you to explore.

It’s tough to summarize all that is in Enshrouded: action RPG mechanics, survival, exploration, crafting and upgrading, dungeon crawling, extensive building system, animal husbandry, lore, sharing custom dungeons with a logic system, … At its core it is a third-person solo or co-op base-building survival action RPG in a vast handcrafted world to explore. What has struck me in the early hours is the freedom and balance of the many parts, with a quite good easing in through quests encapsulating this natural progression.

Too often a game falls into doing too much for too long with a tutorial or a beginning area, or going the other way and leaving essentials out for the new player. My first hours with Enshrouded hit a nice balance of immediately being able to go out and explore (weak as I was), while having enough direction from quests to get me through many of the basics.

For instance, an early quest has you seeking out a survivor (NPC for your base to unlock more crafting mechanics) which requires you to travel through a Shrouded area. These areas are dark and creepy with a different biome, including materials, enemy, and terrain. Lots of useful rewards to be found, but you have a timer of how long you can last in there, without items or finding objects to boost it. (You also get more on your timer as you level up your bases.) You can follow the path through this shroud near your starting base area, but you can also wander off in search of more goodies and experience.

Oh, and you also see you could have bypassed this if you had a grappling hook which you don’t have to start. The recipe and ingredients are found in the Shroud; two different motivations and rewards for doing exactly what a new player wants to do, exploring the nearby dangerous area.

The early progression moves along well, each new thing you want or are interested in can be found nearby. The quests are straightforward in helping you give a direction in the vast world, unlocking new elements at a pace to match, and supporting a pace of “one more level/recipe/upgrade/area/etc.” It certainly made the “just a half hour quick session before bed” into a “whoops, it’s 2am and I didn’t even notice.”

The first objectives have you learning basics about building your base, traversing the land, crafting and upgrading gear, leveling up your character and base (larger area and benefits), and learning the lore if you so choose. I enjoyed this light touch of not making me feel like I was wasting time learning something I knew already, yet giving me direction to not crash out on an open world with no idea of what I “should” be doing.

On the technical side, everything worked flawlessly on my desktop (AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 16 GB RAM, AMD 7900 XT) with the current Proton 11.0. I did have to slightly turn down an option or two (like shadow settings) from the max to keep a steady 60 fps at 4k with FSR3 in Quality mode, as well as hitting a bug where ~17 GB shader updates are downloaded every day.

A bit fuzzy on the Deck, but very playable and still looks pretty good. My screenshots from the Deck might be a bit dim or dull since I had HDR enabled (OLED Deck).

On the Steam Deck the default settings they provide (pretty much everything on “performance”) it works well enough, about 30-45 fps, though at more than 20 W. It is a bit fuzzy at those settings and I didn’t try tweaking at all, but it is very much playable. But with the beautiful visuals, lighting, and art direction, it is best on higher settings on a good resolution screen. Oh, and it plays nicely in theater mode on the Steam Frame, streaming from the desktop and using the Frame controllers as a gamepad.

The music is also fantastic, with evocative strings and melodies, very classical fantasy feeling that fits perfectly. It all adds up to a well put together production, a true joy to experience.

I’m not the biggest on survival and crafting games, so the ability to play emphasizing the more action RPG elements keeps driving me in my playtime. While there are buffs for food, shelter, and water, at least on the default settings the survival elements are light, building is not exhausting, and the focus in more on the exploring and action. There is decent sized skill tree for abilities in your usual archetypes like mage, assassin, melee fighter, and so on. Spells are found/crafted as items, and items have rarity and upgrades.

The skill tree with interconnected build directions. There are some useful utility skills in and around the center, like grappling large enemies.

The combat, at least starting off, might have you sneaking in grass to land a backstab, kiting a group of enemies to pick them off, or blowing up a set of explosives in their camp to instantly kill them. And maybe showing the entrance to an underground area to find more loot. There’s variety in how you can build out and play your character, in the loot and crafting, and the overall feel of combat can carry the game if that’s what you are more interested in, like me. Run around with a wand, swing a big axe, shoot an elemental arrow, punch a monster in it’s face, parry an attack to unleash a charged big hit, and so on.

The inventory, which quickly fills up with all the materials and loot you can find.

That’s not to downplay the substantial building system. Look no further than the shared creations you can load right from within the game (joining a copy of the world) and what people have shown off online. It is really impressive stuff. The grind for materials, at least for a basic starting base, is pretty minimal I’d say, or you can skip it and take over or repair ruins you find in the world.

Did I mention there is a glider? So you can leap off that cliff peak and fly off into the world below, landing with a roll and ready to attack an unsuspecting enemy. Along with the grappling hook (limited to set grappling points, though), traveling the world is fun.

Gliding is a lot of fun, just jumping off and spreading your body, to dive roll into action on the ground. It does cost stamina, so careful of the drop!

And what a world it is: beautiful lighting effects with clouds and weather, foggy and dark underground and Shrouded areas, pitch black caves with bats and wolves, and so much more I haven’t seen yet. Every time I set forth towards a quest marker (or, let’s be honest, often a previous body of mine from an overambitious outing) I stumble upon a new village of enemies, lore note (with great voice narration you can play in the background), chest of loot, or just a beautiful lookout pointing me to further adventure.

There are so many great views, begging you to jump off and glide to somewhere new and head towards something you see on the horizon.

This is a game where the breadth and depth draw me in more and more, the execution as good as the lofty promises. And I haven’t tamed animals, made water features, or even discovered most of the core elements yet. But I’m having fun from the first steps into the world to find its secrets (why are we here? what has happened that there are so few survivors?); I’m as happy to unlock more of the game as I am to experience more of what I already have.

For someone like me, with that limited time and interest in the usual open world survival game, Enshrouded is that much more impressive. Now I just need to get a few friends to jump into co-op because this looks like a special time with a group.

Enshrouded is on Steam and I was provided with a review key. All words, as always, are my own.