Enshrouded is a new early access, cooperative, survival crafting game from Keen Games. You play a “flameborn”, a magically enhanced human in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The “shroud”, a deadly mist, has covered parts of the world, filling them with alien and dangerous inhabitants. Your job is to learn what happened and restore the world.

Mechanically, Enshrouded plays like other fantasy survival crafting games. You start with little but rags. You explore, find or mine materials, craft weapons and shelter, and fight enemies. There is plenty of lore to discover, mainly as glowing notes left in long abandoned places. You can craft a grappling hook and a glider aid in traversal. You can fast travel once you unlock the destinations, usually requiring light traversal and puzzle solving. There is no hunger or thirst meter – you are an immortal flameborn – but enemies are balanced to the buffs given by food and drink.

Enshrouded‘s combat is very Souls-like, at least for melee characters. Timing, parrying and dodging are critical, although the creatures are generally more forgiving than anything from From Software. Non-melee characters are easier to play. Magic operates like a bow and arrow, with a staff firing magic spells instead of arrows. There is a stealth system, allowing you to snipe enemies from afar or backstab them up close.

The quests and crafting are standard for the genre. Quests progressively take you further afield and push the lore. You can rescue other NPC flameborn survivors, who provide unique crafting recipes and quests. Completing quests and acquiring new materials provide new crafting recipes. Most crafting requires crafting stations, which takes time and encourages you to head out into the world while you wait.

Enshrouded‘s building is voxel-based. You place floors, walls and ceilings individually, mixing and matching the materials to taste. Aesthetically, crude stone or thatch rooves are easy to mass produce but intentionally look uneven and primitive. You can discover better-looking materials, which require more and rarer ingredients. Mechanically, buildings provide shelter, which gives a stamina buff. The rescued NPCs also need shelter to produce more complex recipes. 

Enshrouded‘s character advancement options follow a skill tree model. It covers the usual archetypes from a “sword and board” (melee weapon and shield) tank to a two-handed barbarian, a mage, a healer and a stealthy assassin. You gain XP from killing enemies, completing quests and gathering resources. You gain skill points when you level up or fell a shroud root, mushroom-like growths that create the shroud. Skills cost different amounts depending on their utility. You can also respec cheaply, making exploring different builds easy.

More generally, the quality and amount of content in Enshrouded is excellent. Apart from a few enemies getting stuck in the terrain and the occasional visual glitch, the game was flawless. The panoramic vistas are lovely, and the eerie green, blue and yellow lights shining through the shroud at night give it an alien, unworldly feel. Enshrouded‘s skill tree hints at something wonderfully complex and bristling with undiscovered synergies, like Path of Exile, in the final game.

Critiquing an early access game is arguably unfair. After all, Enshrouded is unfinished and has a long development road ahead. However, there is enough to hint at what it could be and where problems lie. 

Enshrouded‘s biggest problem is there is little extrinsic reward for exploration. The hand-crafted map is enormous and dotted with areas to explore. However, quests will take you to most of the essential places and get the critical rewards. The tidbits of lore are flavourful but disjointed. Flame shrines give unique rewards, but I accumulated all I needed early on. There are too few enemy types and each has fixed behaviour, potentially leading to repetitious and unchallenging combat. I was swimming in bows, staves and wands but, as a melee build, I found the first useful non-quest item in a chest sixty hours into the game. By the time I reached the Kindlewastes, the last accessible area, I had lost the exploration buzz. Walking down the next unexplored path felt like a chore. This issue is a “must fix”, particularly with so much of the map still unavailable.

Enshrouded‘s late-game crafting requires too much effort for too little reward. I was happily defeating level 30 creatures wearing low-20s gear. The only crafting you need is unlocking higher “flame levels”, which opens up previously inaccessible shrouded areas. While you keep unlocking new crafting recipes, higher-level crafting requires more tedium: more ingredients, longer crafting time, and heading back to lower-level regions. Inventory management becomes tiresome. Planting and harvesting crops is convenient, but doing so plant by plant gets repetitive quickly. 

There is little incentive to build Enshrouded‘s beautiful bases. With dozens of materials available and the developer’s apparent effort, it screams out for an in-game need to build more. Unfortunately, once you make a sufficiently large structure, usually at the starting location using basic materials, you can fast travel back to it whenever needed. Replacing fast travel with a point-to-point mechanism or requiring crops to be planted in their native biome might help.

Lastly, Enshrouded has a few balance issues. Melee characters are underpowered early on, and suitable upgrades are hard to find. Spell-casting and ranged characters are more powerful, easier to play and have more plentiful gear. 

Enshrouded has the foundations for a great game. The quality and amount of content for an early access title are excellent and hint at a truly great game. The game has what it needs at the moment: solid foundations and exposure. Now Keen Games must refine Enshrouded‘s unique solution to the survival-crafting equation. As with pinnacles of the genre like Subnautica and Valheim, this will be a lengthy process. I hope Keen Games can take the time and resources to realise Enshrouded‘s potential.