Enshrouded 1.0 review

High up on a mountain in the Albaneve Summits, just on the southern border of Enshrouded's new zone, I spot the perfect place for my next medieval building project. It seems safe with no nearby enemy spawns on the flat stretch of land, and there's even a cute frozen pond that gives it real Christmas-card appeal. I love it, and I'll love it even more once I've built a cliffside castle.

The only problem is I can't find a way up by climbing or gliding, so I'll have to make my own. I could build something, but that takes time, and I'm impatient. Instead, I behave like an absolute heathen—I bomb and pickaxe the hell out of the mountainside, carving a tunnel from the base to the top. It doesn't look great, but that's a problem for tomorrow's Flameborn.

That's always been one of my favorite parts of Enshrouded: you can destroy or build practically anything, anywhere in Embervale's voxel-based world. It's a survival crafting sandbox filled to the brim with handcrafted details, and every location still hidden by the fog of war could hold a new material, powerful weapon, or scenic vista. There's nothing quite like it, and just like the updates before, Enshrouded's 1.0 build keeps finding new, inventive ways to impress me long after I thought its well of surprises had run dry.

Built different

Enshrouded is a weird one. Not quite a traditional survival crafting game, but not a typical action RPG either. Its combat system and base building options are far more robust than most of its survival crafting cousins, but it's not nearly as brutal. I'm driven less by desperation and more by a desire to explore Embervale—a land devastated by a mysterious, malignant miasma known as (you guessed it) the Shroud. There's hardly a soul left in the world, so you learn more about its history from journals. Some are hastily scribbled by would-be heroes like you, while others are tragic retellings of someone's final days.

So, for what must be the millionth time in my career, I stumble out of a mystical, sleepy haze confused and poorly dressed for the world I've awakened to. I am the Flameborn—a sort of ordained-by-god chosen one and the last hope for restoring the ruins of Embervale—but for now, I certainly don't feel that way. I just feel like some guy. It's a title I'll have to grow into, but will have to wait until I've upgraded from the aptly named 'ragged armor set'. Yeesh.

Enshrouded follows most of those rags-to-riches genre basics, so of course I'll graduate from an era of fighting with sticks and eating fistfuls of berries to magic-infused swords and Michelin-star meals. I've played so many of these games that the flow comes naturally now, but what I like most about Enshrouded's take on classic survival systems is that it drops the more punitive elements like fatigue, crafting chance, and even structural integrity.

Enshrouded knows that I, much like the family Golden Retriever, am treat-motivated. As long as there's shelter, fire, and decor, I'll get a stamina-boosting buff just by hanging out at home, but I'll never die from lack of sleep. In that regard, it's more like Valheim. Unique furnishings have their own comfort stats too, so there's incentive to explore Embervale for a new rug, fireplace, or even a toilet if you want a longer, more powerful boost. It's an especially exciting system for players like me, someone who loves building and decorating bases, but rarely sees a reward for the extra effort.

All this meticulous decorating makes me wonder whether I really want Enshrouded to add enemy raids on player bases and risk destroying them, but I'm leaning toward yes. It's the one major survival mechanic I miss in its formula, and I can't help but wistfully remember how fun it is to scramble into action when Valheim warns, "The forest is moving..." Imagine that, but with Enshrouded's poisonous fog instead.

Fog of war

Repetitive tasks—another hunt for a rare material, another trek across the map—can become exasperating even in the best survival crafting games. There's a thin line between tedium and satisfaction, and Enshrouded walks it better than most. Much of that is thanks to the game's philosophy around punishment and reward, but its RPG elements add a layer of complexity that more than makes up for anything missing from Enshrouded's "survival-lite" approach.

Take my group, for example. I play with seven other friends, while that feels like a lot for most survival crafting games, Enshrouded's combat roles give us distinctly useful jobs. Rather than dumping points into three or four barebones stats, your Flameborn can specialize across 12 different skill trees. I mostly opt for tank, athlete, and assassin perks, but my allies fill other needs with mix-and-match builds for glass-cannon wizards, battlemage healers, or stealthy assassins. We also have our preferred responsibilities, like mining, woodcutting, gardening, cooking, and all those other usual genre chores.

Multiplayer is also where some of my biggest gripes with Enshrouded remain, and despite heavy reworks to its questing systems, my group still struggled to make sense of the journal when our objectives fell out of sync. Our confusion mostly stemmed from completing world progression quests without the full party, so when absent friends logged back in, their to-do list didn't look the same and they had a list of missed quests. There are separate, personal quests to do at your own leisure, but we constantly compared our journals to make sure no one had gone off course.

I'm still not sure if any of that even mattered. No one was ever locked out of crafting recipes or new biomes because of the discrepancies, so the punishment boiled down to a smidge of missed XP and simply missing out on the moment. It didn't end up being a big deal, and I'm starting to think the journal's 'missed quest' label made the whole thing feel more consequential than it actually was. I clenched my jaw in frustration a few times, but if that's my biggest nitpick, then Enshrouded is survival crafting gold.

As much as I love the genre, I can't pretend it isn't filled with seemingly eternal early access pits. I've played in plenty of messy sandboxes, a handful of good ones, and just a few great ones. Then there's Enshrouded, operating in a league of its own. But even then, Enshrouded isn't just a good survival crafting game: it's a damn good game by any measure. Its building tools reward even my most impractical ambitions, and I'll never grow tired of exploring Embervale's hidden nooks and crannies.

Few games in the genre match its distinct identity or degree of polish, and after 500+ hours of adventuring, there's little left to wish for. My biggest dilemma post-Enshrouded will be moving on from a survival crafting RPG so lovingly handcrafted. I fear Keen Games has cooked up something that has forever changed my palate.