We seem to be living in a bit of a renaissance of “survival” games, and I am going to use that term loosely here. If you hate combat and want to do the comfy squishy parts of a survival game you have something like Palia. If you were a 90s kid and are obsessed with catching them all, then you have PalWorld. Then there is Enshrouded which is a bit of a harder nut to crack when it comes to actually giving you the elevator pitch. What if Minecraft but with solid combat and an actual point beyond the crafting? What if Valheim but with a clear quest progression system and actual NPCs? While most people seem to be talking about PalWorld, I was drawn to the lesser-known new survival game because what I had seen of it interested me. It seemed like it was drawing some upon classical MMORPG roots with a fixed well-designed world, quest progression throughout it, and something akin to a proper loot chase.
So the quick summary of this world is that the general populace was tempted by this magical drug called the Elixir, and dug too deep rending the world seeking it. These deep wells unleashed upon the land a curse in the form of the Shroud, which is a fog that spreads in the low-lying areas of the world and becomes fatal after too much exposure. The ancient people created the forge born… and I am not entirely certain if we are a created being or just someone who has been locked away for safekeeping. Whatever the case we are spat out of this weird cauldron-looking thing and have to make our way through the world with nothing more than a crappy pair of pants. This starts the normal sequence of events you always do in a survival game where you collect some twigs to cobble together tools and then start harvesting ever-increasingly more difficult items to build the very best of everything.
The world is divided into essentially two different areas. There are the highlands that are not impacted by the Shroud, or at least not as impacted. These serve as the relatively safe area, and it is on of these that you are prompted to build your first base. From here you can harvest the basic resources needed to get started… wood, stone, assorted plant matter, fur, and food. You are also near a number of ruined former towns where you can start to scavage things like cloth and metal bits. All of this is in theory to prepare you to delve down into the shrouded areas and get more rare and dangerous resources. The game has a day/night cycle and during the night… some hostile things spawn in like these weird shroud-infected zombie things. They are slow-moving and relatively easy to deal with and honestly serve as a great resource for dropped weapons and such.
Then there are the shrouded areas, which are more dangerous to traverse and generally have some sort of visual occlusion in the form of an ever-present fog. You are usually going to encounter more of the shroud zombies here but also might encounter more difficult things as well. When you enter a shroud it starts a timer which you can see at the top of the above screenshot. When it ticks down you end up taking fatal damage and dying. When you die you end up dropping a tombstone of a sort and lose some of your resources. I am not entirely certain what the line in the sand is for what gets dropped versus what stays on your character. It does not seem to impact your actual gear loadout, but does seem to impact a lot of the resources you have gathered. You have to find your way back to your tombstone to loot everything. One interesting thing of note… I died underground and my tombstone was spawned up on the surface. Not sure if this is intentional to make it easier to gather your stuff or just a bug given that this is an early access game, but I am hoping it was intentional.
I’ve heard this referred to as the “Dark Souls of Survival Games” which is a bit off to be honest. Dark Souls means a lot of things to a lot of different people. For me at least it is “Dark Souls” about challenging combat and some sort of mechanic that trades healing your character back to full for respawning the entire world as a result. At this point, I have taken down the first boss but it was over the weekend and I did not think to take any screenshots. Instead, I am linking to a gameplay video of someone fighting it. The only comparison to Dark Souls is that when the enemy hits you… it deals a LOT of damage, like a disproportionate amount of damage. However, you have a bunch of different ways to heal yourself back up to full health in the form of bandages which are cheap and easy to make, potions that are rarer but more impactful, and the ability to have three food buffs ticking on your character that greatly increase your natural health regeneration. Instead of Dark Souls, the combat feels more like New World did when that game was new and before we had really good gear to soak damage. Anyways the above video shows a bunch of combat if you are interested.
One of the more interesting things about Enshrouded is that it has a proper MMORPG-style talent tree rather than a more sparse tech tree as found in the majority of survival games. There is a sphere grid of a sort with different paths of evolution and the freedom to go down multiple at the same time to sort of create your own mangled multiclass. I know absolutely nothing about their magical system but I can craft wands and saves and have even seen a spell drop… so it seems to “exist” but “finger wiggling” is not my forte. I am doing what I always do and focusing down the tank tree which at least currently seems to be focused on parrying an attack to stun the target and then follow up with a massive “merciless attack”. Mostly I just want to “embiggen” my health poor and armor stats to make combat a bit more forgiving.
The progression of the game seems to focus on two things. Firstly saving NPCs from shrouded areas or from hostile camps, and then setting them up in your base to allow you to craft better items. The second is that you can destroy Shroud Roots which will remove the shroud of areas of the world opening where you can more safely travel. You can also build up your flame altar which allows you to have a bigger buildable area in the world and allows you to spend more time in the shroud before taking fatal damage. There are also other bits and bobs that you can craft that make your base more “comfortable” which gives you a much better-rested bonus while you are out in the world. It seems there is also a bit of a “Metroidvania” system in the game where certain machines allow you to unlock access to new areas of the game. For example, I have built a glider and a grappling hook, both of which allow me access to areas that were not previously.
Another thing that I find interesting about the game is that your character progression is separate from your world state. I’ve been spending most of my time playing privately, but I can flip over to “host” mode if I want to let a friend of mine join me in my world. I can also join a public server that has a persistent world state or even host a dedicated private server. I’ve not done any of these things, but when I flip over into “host” mode it seems to adopt the current state of my world, and my guess is if I joined someone else’s game I would be living in their world for the time being only bringing over what I had in my inventory. Mostly I dig the flexibility with these various options because when I want to progress on my own I can, but also then later join up with friends to do shenanigans.
I’ve only played about six hours of the game so far, but I have a spiffy “Keep on the Borderlands” to show for it. Resources seem pretty plentiful, to be honest, and everything respawns pretty quickly so you can keep harvesting the same bushes, rocks, and trees… or just start digging a hole into the ground looking for stone that way. That is my own real complaint so far is that the excavation systems seem to be a bit “squishy” and my brief foray into trying to dig out a basement was less than successful as I kept having to stop to rest after depleting my stamina. If you have tried to dig into the ground in Valheim you would be familiar with this problem and maybe that is just a thing with voxel terrain. Instead, I closed in my bottom floor and just built up allowing me to still have a basement feel.
A lot of the early game has been a progression through the normal tech tress of improving your gear. Right now I have a full set of metal gear that I have crafted which was opened up by saving the Blacksmith and then building a Charcoal Kiln and Forge. I had to spend quite of time going to a nearby hostile scrapper village in search of metal scraps which I then turned into sheets of metal to craft into armor. You can kit yourself in a full set of cloth gear pretty quickly, then I progressed into fur armor, and finally metal. My hope is that as I go forward it will start looking a little less haphazard and broken down as it does currently.
There are also world drops that follow the standard blue, purple, orange progression scheme. For example, I got this purple sword to drop when I took out the first world boss, and I was able to spend down this runic coin currency with the blacksmith in order to level up the weapon and unlock a bunch of bonus traits. You tend to get those coins from killing zombies and cultists so you could in theory farm up enough of them to fully kit out your gear. I had gathered enough by the time I found this weapon to fully unlock it, but it burned through most of my reserves of that currency. In theory if you wanted to always have the best of everything unlocked you would probably need to make a concerted effort to go farming.
Right now I am pretty happy with the game, but I am also not really paying it as my “main” game yet. I am always somewhat hesitant to dive too deeply into an early-access title. I remember going super hard with Valheim and essentially burning myself out before a lot of the later features even went into the game. I don’t really want to do that with Enshrouded, and quite honestly at some point I should pick back up Valheim and see what all has changed. This is probably something I am going to quietly play on the side and if some of my friends end up picking it up, I might dive in to see how the group play works. Right now it seems like the game has a lot of promise though. For now, I think I am staying out of the Palworld discourse because Pokemon were never really my thing. This, however, lands firmly in my wheelhouse.