Adventures in Enshrouded

Posted on May 20, 2024 by Aywren

Our latest survival building adventure game has been Enshrouded. We’ve put over 70 hours into it, despite being early access, and actually hit the current level cap of 25 over this past weekend.

Game Difficulty

Previous to Enshrouded, we were playing Palworld regularly. I was a little uncertain about picking up Enshrouded because at first glance, it seemed like a more serious and possibly more difficult game, especially without any difficulty settings adjustments that I could find.

Turns out, while the game is a little tough in the beginning (I died to my first wolf), once you get yourself established, Enshrouded tends to be at a good challenge level for our playing style. If you die, you do drop stuff from your inventory, but only the crafting materials. Eventually, you’ll be swimming in crafting materials, so there’s rarely any true loss you can’t come back from.

You get to keep your weapons and gear when you die, which makes a huge difference for when you’re stuck on a corpse run, or if you’re up against a tough boss rush. Death doesn’t put you back a whole set of gear and weapons, so I can handle this kind of drop-on-death.

Things We’ve Enjoyed in Enshrouded

The biggest perk with this game is that it’s full of lore, quests and story bits. In fact, it feels more like an adventure game than most survival games I’ve played because of the quest system. The quests help to point you to locations to explore further across the world, and encourage forward progression.

If you don’t care anything about the lore parts, they’re very easy to skip through. But you will need to recruit the basic NPCs, which you bring back to your home base where they set up shop and help expand your crafting options.

The building system and world in general is also voxel-based, which makes for some interesting builds – and cheesing your way up the side of a hill you normally shouldn’t be able to climb by mining your way up it. You discover more building block types over time, which does open up a variety of furniture and structure styles. I’ve spent a number of hours just building, and I know I haven’t scratched the surface of what can be done in it.

Seeing that you can set up several bases, which expand in size as you level them up, I can see this being a lot of fun for anyone who enjoys the building aspect of a survival game. Thankfully, there’s no base raids like in Valheim or Palworld, so you’re safe at home to just build to your heart’s content.

There’s also a low-stress farming system, which plays into the cooking/food system. Very similar to Valheim, there’s a food system where you can stack buffs based on the type of foods you eat.

There’s also a very nice skill tree system that allows for a variety of builds and playstyles. Want to be a tank? A warrior? A healer? An archer? A battle mage? A blend of everything? You can!

And should you want to explore your options, respeccing your skills is very cheap and easy to do. Right now, I’ve been focused on building out my battle mage, and having fun with the casting system. Using single-handed wands are very nice because while the weapon is medium range compared to a staff or bow, you can equip a shield in your other hand for protection, and still go head-to-head with melee enemies as a mage.

Getting Around the World

Similar to some of the newer survival games, you have movement options such as double jump, climbing (at specific spots), hookshots, and gliders. All of these are essential for traversing the world and getting through the dungeons. I feel they’re all implemented well enough with the stamina system.

You can also upgrade your flame levels to a point where you can set a number of bases across the world – similar to Palworld – which allow for quick travel. Along with bases, once you unlock ancient spires, you will always have a permanent warp to a central location within each biome.

While you do have to plan ahead, and not all locations are as straightforward in terms of reaching them based on what you see on the map, I feel Enshrouded has set down a good system of moving through biomes and discovering new ones.

Interestingly, we’ve actually run across areas that won’t allow us to enter because of early access. The game acknowledges the location isn’t ready yet… Despite that, the map is already quite large with many interesting locations to discover even outside of questing.

Hollow Halls

One of the newer updates was the addition of the Hollow Halls. These are meant for a group of players (we’ve cleared it with two) and are at a higher difficulty than the rest of the area – there’s one per biome. While we’ve taken each of the Halls pretty much at level (we didn’t realize what we’d stumbled into with the first one until we saw MASSIVE enemy packs), we’ve been able to clear the first four so far.

There’s a blend of battle, platforming, and puzzle solving required to master each of these dungeons. This last Hall we beat was quite challenging, mostly because it required acute jumping, gliding, and hookshot skills. Also, the new boss introduced there was pretty tough for us. I think this was the first time I’ve felt a little frustrated at the difficulty of the game, but we still beat it in the end.

High Hopes for Enshrouded

While we are max level of what we can be in early access, I know my character doesn’t have the best gear, nor have we unlocked all the skill points in the game yet. So, there’s still lots of room for us to develop, and much of the map to uncover, as we’ve only just started the final biome.

All-in-all, we’ve really enjoyed our time exploring Enshrouded. Despite the world being beautiful, it’s also morbid and fairly bleak. There’s just enough lore and storytelling to keep me interested in figuring out what happened to this world – and to spark the desire to work to fix the mess it became.

The roadmap for Enshrouded has lots to be excited about. I’m sure that even if we do clear the map and cap our builds in this version of early access, we’ll be revisiting the game again as it introduces future content!

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