Enshrouded Review – The best survival game of the year?

Enshrouded is another survival game, but it’s not quite the same as the others. Sure, you’ll collect resources and fight off enemies while building a base, and you’ll even collect a few NPCs to fill that base up. Most importantly though, you’ll need to venture into the Shroud for risks and rewards, hoping you make it back out. Oh, and you’ve got a “glider” that is actually a wingsuit as well; you don’t see wingsuits in survival games too often.

The game begins with you waking up inside a large pot. It’s not a hangover thing where you eventually get punched by Mike Tyson though, instead, it’s an apocalypse. You see, the Shroud is an unsettling mist that corrupts the environment and has taken over much of the world. You are a remnant of a fallen kingdom, secreted away in a vault until you can reawaken and reclaim the world.

How does one reclaim a world from some weird fog? With fire, obviously. You’re a Flameborn, which means you’ve been infused with a magical flame that can be used to keep the shroud at bay. This flame is the first thing you place when creating a base in the form of a Flame Altar, giving you an area in which you’ll be relatively protected from the evils of the shroud. Once you’ve placed this it, you’ll have to go looking for craftsmen. You can craft some basics yourself, of course, but craftsmen like the hunter or the carpenter will give you access to more, better stuff that you’ll need not only to outfit and arm yourself, but also to build slightly less temporary-looking structures.

Those structures can be as elaborate as you like as well. I started with a simple wooden hut but was quickly building a mansion with a balcony for all my villagers. Sure it’s a bit fiddly like any deep building system in any game, but it’s also incredibly adaptable. Enshrouded’s building system might be second to none, it’s shocking what can be made in this game. You can access people’s uploaded worlds from the main menu, where you can be either inspired or discouraged by full-scale recreations of Minas Tirith, Hogwarts, or just incredibly elaborate bases, all complete with interiors and decorations – it’s frankly a bit gobsmacking. Not just that, but it’s voxel-based as well, which means you can actually dig out areas for cellars or secret underground passages and such. It’s great! There’s plenty of cool places to build your base as well. You could build in a field, sure, but you could also build a temple atop a mountain or dig out your own cave to live in like it’s Dwarf Fortress.

But what about the rest? Well, exploring is enjoyable as well, the world is typically massive and gorgeous, packed full of resources to pilfer and enemies to fight. Then there’s the enshrouded areas as well, where you’ll have a limited time before you start struggling to breathe and then just die. So whilst you’ll want to keep up the pace or you’ll be starting it again. The tension this creates is only partially cheap – I generally dislike timers like this in games, but I’ve learnt to cope with it here because it’s not as bad as it sounds. You’ll find potions to extend it and areas where it will regenerate as well, both of which help immensely, but you’ll still want to focus on what you’re doing or you’ll have to leave/die and try again.

The enshrouded areas also look great. The game looks good generally; when you’re out of the Shroud it’s not particularly distinctive, but it’s bright, vibrant, and full of glorious, sweeping landscapes. But in the Shroud, the areas are full of an ominous, possibly purple fog that shifts and moves; it’s very atmospheric. That atmosphere only gets thicker as you get deeper in and start exploring caves. The Shroud is also where you’ll find the rarest loot and toughest enemies, as you might expect, so you’ll have to go there pretty often. Thankfully, your glider is a great help, as the enshrouded areas are often lower down so you can glide your way into them to cut off some travel time.

Combat might be the game’s weakest area, but it’s still not really bad, just a bit awkward. It’s a parry/stun bar system that isn’t particularly inspired, feeling a little bit looser than I’d like, so it can seem a bit inconsistent. Basically, enemies have a stun bar in addition to a health bar; parrying, blocking, and hitting them fills that stun bar up. Once it’s filled, they’ll be stunned for a few seconds, unable to move or attack and wide open for a good stabbin’. If you’re good at blocking just in time, you’ll do just fine, just make sure you pick up the Merciless Attack skill so you can deliver a powerful follow-up once they’re stunned.

Speaking of skills, there are quite a lot of them to choose from when you’re levelling up, and they’re quite powerful, too. It starts with things like Merciless Attack and a double jump, but quickly allows you to specialise in specific roles. The Ranger, for example, can unlock special abilities for bows and even unlock a chance to shoot an extra arrow when firing, whilst the Barbarian can unlock the special abilities of two-handed weapons, increase their damage, and unlock a spinning combo attack. There are a lot to choose from, and you don’t have to pick one and stick with it, so if you want to add, say, the Battlemage’s teleport dodge, which replaces the normal dodge ability with a short-range teleport to your Ranger build, then you can with a little time investment.

There are a bunch of useful features as well, such as placing Flame Altars when exploring, which can be used as fast travel points, particularly useful when you’ve upgraded your base’s Flame Altar as it allows you to place more of them. There are also two hotbars to fill with weapons and tools that can be switched between on the fly, which is useful for keeping all your construction and combat available but not in the way when you don’t need them. You also gather plenty of materials; a few trees can be enough to make you a decent little house, and when cutting those trees down you don’t have to slowly split them into logs before you can harvest them either, so this is much quicker.

On the other hand, I’m not a huge fan of how some of the construction works. Walls and stuff are great, all placed in a construction mode that’s accessed from a hammer. Furniture, doors, and so on all have to be crafted at a crafting bench, moved to your hotbar, then placed. It would be so much simpler and easier to just do it all through the same construction mode, but I suppose you can’t have everything. It means you have to meticulously craft the exact amount you want, have to return to craft more, or have some left over taking up space in a chest somewhere.