Enshrouded Review — Inner Flame

There are a lot of survival crafting games out there. My very first, if you don’t count Minecraft, was Rust, and I remember playing the game for hours on a laptop that could barely run it while I struggled to figure out the core mechanics and defend my base as a stubborn solo who refused to team up with anyone. While I love the genre, it was easy to see that many of these games were built around the same destructive gameplay loop: gather materials, hoard your treasure in a huge base, and attack others to get more, hoping you don’t lose everything in the process. It is an exciting gameplay loop, sure, but one that can leave you feeling devastated when hours of work are tossed down the drain because a larger clan with more free time on their hands chooses you as their target. There are very few survival crafting games out there where the goal isn’t to follow this destructive loop, but instead to restore something and grow gradually and permanently stronger as you explore, exploit, and team up with others. That’s where Enshrouded comes in.

Enshrouded puts you in the role of the Flameborn, an alchemically designed race of heroes reborn in a post-ruin world. With a magical flame burning within you and connecting you to a god beyond this plane, you are the only one who can take the world back from the Shroud, an evil cloud of spores that has suffocated most of the world with its mushroomy corruption. As you destroy the roots of the Shroud’s corruption, you reawaken the world’s last survivors, unlock new powers and magic through their lost knowledge, and rebuild civilization.

Right away, you can see that Enshrouded has a solid foundation that sets it apart from other survival-crafting titles. The gameplay loop, building your strength, taking on increasingly dangerous areas, and cleansing local corruption, feels like the kind of exciting quest you might find in a well-thought-out D&D campaign, and it makes fantastic use of survival-crafting mechanics. Instead of hoarding loot and waiting for your base to be destroyed, every advancement feels like a tangible step toward the noble goal of restoring the world you are exploring. Clearing an Elixir Well or defeating a dungeon boss makes a real difference in the world around you, making all the time you spent upgrading your armor or collecting alchemy ingredients feel well spent.

It helps, of course, that Enshrouded is as much an ARPG as it is a survival-crafting game. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild comes to mind when thinking of a close comparison to Enshrouded‘s mechanics. As much as the game is about cutting down trees and mining stone to build up your base, it is also about discovering ancient ruins, completing quests for NPCs, and leveling up to improve your strength. While crafting matters, you can also earn much of what you craft by taking on the world like an RPG or MMO, making combat, dungeon delving, and questing as rewarding and engaging as they are exciting. Crafting will help you prepare, of course, but there is no need to spend hours grinding away at resource gathering to empower yourself in Enshrouded. The game rewards you regardless of how you decide to play.

This fine balance between rewarding the player for gathering resources and completing quests is something I noticed especially during multiplayer. When I took on Enshrouded’s open world with a small group of friends, I found the game more fun with more players involved, though I definitely didn’t feel like we made significantly faster progress than when I played solo. That is to say, taking on areas with large numbers of enemies or fighting bosses was a lot of fun with friends, and our different approaches to character builds made the party dynamic, allowing our synergies to really shine through.

That being said, having multiple people around didn’t make us progress through the game’s content significantly faster, because there is never really a point where you need to spend a lot of time gathering or crafting to get ahead. Put simply, Enshrouded progresses naturally as you choose to take on its bosses and quests. Having more people around to mine and craft can make the process smoother, but it won’t necessarily speed things up. Unlike other crafting games, you don’t need a constant supply of raw materials just to keep things from crumbling around you.

That is to say, you can have just as much fun and progress through the game just as quickly solo as you can with a group of friends, with the real strength of the game’s multiplayer coming from how different character builds interact with each other in combat.

When I first played Enshrouded prior to its Early Access release, I was impressed by the game, and though I felt like it had room to improve, I was excited to see where it went next. Now, having played the game’s 1.0 release, I can confidently say it has everything I want from the genre: meaningful, tangible progression, an exciting gameplay loop that seamlessly combines ARPG elements with a survival crafting foundation, great combat that only gets better with more players involved, and a solid difficulty curve that keeps the game feeling meaningfully challenging throughout. Combine all of this with a solid narrative, a unique world, and gorgeous graphics, and you have Enshrouded, easily one of my new favorites in the genre, if not the best it currently has to offer.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Enshrouded. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Enshrouded is available on Steam and PlayStation.