Every year we see a new slew of ambitious survival adventure games and each year I wonder if we will ever reach a saturation point. Yet, here we are in 2024 and there are no signs of this genre slowing down. I think what makes this type of game so appealing to upcoming developers is that if you catch that lightning in a bottle it can make you: V-Rising and Valheim come to mind. Even now as we trundle into February other promising survival games such as Pacific Drive and Nightingale are ready to join the race. 

Keen to Succeed

Keen Games is a self-published independent developer based in Germany. Just looking over their website you can feel the energy and enthusiasm these folks have for gaming. Founded in 2005 they already made a respectable number of successful games but Enshrouded is by far their biggest to date. Now with a government grant backing them up, they seem to have everything going in their favour. 

Enshrouded has just launched into early access so let us have a look if it has the chops to stand next to the giants of its kind. 

Adventure Awaits

So what is Enshrouded? You are Flameborn, created by the Ancient Ones (there are always ancient ones) and set to slumber until needed to save your home. It's a familiar concept, the ones that came before you kinda mucked things up (a bit like Brexit) by getting too greedy and all falling out over the ‘elixir’.

Once you have run through the simple character creator and crawled out of your pod it is time to get cracking. Heading toward the natural light bleeding into the cavern you emerge into a cacophony of green and a killer vista (literally if you don't watch yourself on the sheer drop). The game is played from a third-person view which lets you admire your well-animated character bouncing along to their first challenge. 

As you wander into your first cave, small prompts pop up and give you helpful hints on how the world works. Going through this tiny cave I was immediately impressed with the lighting, not only because it was beautiful but also because we have true darkness in Enshrouded. Like the wonderful Dragon's Dogma, when the lights go out your character will be faced with pure blackness. I love this and even when out in the wilds, nighttime feels like an oppressive force that is only being kept at bay by a flickering torch or roaring campfire. As dawn approaches you will see morning sunlight creeping through windows and open doorways. 

Base Down Like This

Once you have plonked down your flame altar you will start building your first settlement. Like most games of this ilk, you can do as little or as much as you like when it comes to creating a home. The system will seem very familiar to anyone who has played these games before. Small rocks and bushes give you your basic tools to chop down trees, mine ore and hunt small animals. As you progress the game feeds you quests which will lead you nicely to the next main goal. 

Each area of crafting, whether it be blacksmithing or alchemy will come with a respective NPC you must find and then summon to your base. Once in place, these experts will give you access to new crafting possibilities and further quests. While I do miss the weight tolerance in Valheim, the building system is both well-designed and loaded with options. As each item has a decorative value, like the aforementioned game, you will increase the possible rested buff from sleep. In fact Valheim seems to have been the biggest inspiration for these developers with the same food system coming across. Instead of food filling a hunger gauge, you have three open food buffs and each type of food will give you a certain advantage: meat for extra HP etc. I usually prefer survival games to have a bit more depth, but this method works just fine and keeps it light for more casual survivalists out there.

Another aim is to improve your flame altar with resources and this in turn will increase your stats such as how long you can spend in the shroud, speaking of which. 

Pea Soup

As the game's titles suggested, much of the land is enveloped in a toxic fog that blocks the way to many goals. In some instances, you must chop down a root that will lift the fog in that area. In others, you can scale huge towers full of puzzles in order to unlock a teleportation system. There are lots of different landmarks you can uncover and these can be discovered through reading the many scrolls lying around. 

I do think most games that have unrestricted teleportation feel cheap (Starfield for example), however in Enshrouded it seems to fit well. Once you have arrived at a tower you can then survey the landscape and glide down in your wingsuit. This is a fun little mechanic and apart from activating too often when doing jumping puzzles, helps you navigate the massive play area. The other handy device you must acquire is a grappling hook, which works well for swinging across gaps and up out-of-reach vantage points. It is a shame you can only grapple to set points that the developers have set out.

Class Act

So there aren't any set classes in Enshrouded and how you play depends on which skills you decide to unlock. The skill tree is very impressive and each segment has a class suggestion attached. In my first play though I went mostly Ranger, a few points of Assassin and also grabbed the invaluable double jump skill. 

You can then match these skills with the weapons and gear you use. As you might expect, as you gain access to better materials more armour sets become available for crafting. I will say the armour aesthetics for the ranger look like I stole it from a larping club. The fighter sets fair a lot better as do the wizard's robes.

Voxel Heaven

For those who don't know voxels are basically like 3D pixels and I love them. I'm a sucker for pixel-art games so I guess this makes sense. Games like the wonderful Teardown show off how clever voxel games can be and how destruction in a voxel world can be so satisfying. 

In Enshrouded it is no different and the freedom to destroy almost anything is very liberating. If you find yourself unable to scale a cliff for example you can chip away and create your own path. Or when in a deserted barn you can just use an explosion and blow a hole in the wall. In fact this freedom had already allowed the more creative players out there to make some very cool bases including Hobbit holes and sky castles.

It's dangerous to go alone!

Without a doubt, one of the best aspects of these open-world survival games is sharing them with friends: provided the game is geared up for it. You can allow people to occupy the same game space but without clever design, this can be a very underwhelming experience. On the surface, playing together with friends works pretty well in Enshrouded, until you hit two fairly big stumbling blocks.

The first is that currently while sixteen players are supported on each server, only six flame altars can be placed and so this leaves players having to shack up in the same locations. This isn't a deal breaker of course and once you increase the borders of each base there is ample room for numerous individual buildings. However I hope as the game develops, this cap is raised so people can go off and work on their own humble abodes.

The second issue is much more of a problem and that is that quest progression is server-based. This means that if one person progresses several quests while others are not present, those quests are then done and can't be repeated. So unless your group plans on sticking together like glue, this system will soon leave many players missing out on skill points and the experience of some bigger quests. At the time of writing Keen Gaming has noted this has so far been their biggest requested change so let us hope they can work it out in some way. 

Work in Progress

It always surprises me how many people complain about an early-access game feeling unfinished. In the first few hours of release, the Steam rating for Enshrouded was actually mixed, due to a slew of quick reviews complaining about this very thing. Thankfully, the idiots have now been drowned out with more thoughtful and fair reviews.

I would say that given this is the first public build of the game it is already in fantastic shape. All the major systems are working well (multiplayer aside) and I haven't seen any bugs that prevent progress. The majority of issues I have come across are finding mobs stuck in the ground and game assets floating in the air. While the game's performance has been drastically improved since the demo last year, there is still a lot of work to do. I am playing on an overclocked 3080ti system and fps has been all over the place. With DLSS set to quality and everything on max, I have been getting between 20-90 fps at 1440p. The forest biome in particular as well as dusk cause the fps to plummet, which makes playing the game far less enjoyable. 

I have also seen a good deal of pop-in when gliding over the various environments, which is to be expected. However, I am also seeing whole sections of the forest areas flashing as black rectangles before the assets load which needs some attention.

Conclusion

Enshrouded has received much praise from fans and critics alike as well as selling very well on Steam. It does make me wonder how much better it would have done if not for being in the shadow of Palworld. When I first started playing I had four friends all ready to team up on a rented server. However, within hours we had discovered the issue with server progression and so all continued on a single-player game.

I have had my fill for now and have reached the borders that currently prevent players from seeing the other biomes in the game. As this is not a procedurally generated game world the entire map is handcrafted. So while areas will start becoming familiar the team has worked very hard to make each location diverse and full of surprises. I am very happy with the current state of Enshrouded and am looking forward to seeing it develop into a full release.