Enshrouded Review

Enshrouded has spent more than two years in early access, and with its 1.0 release, Keen Games has turned its survival crafting project into a much larger experience. What started as a game built around gathering resources, exploring a dangerous fantasy world, and constructing your own settlement has expanded into something that combines open-world RPG progression with the freedom of a traditional survival game.

After numerous updates and additions, the full release finally brings the adventure to its intended conclusion, opening up the remaining areas of its world and adding more enemies, dungeons, equipment, and systems to explore.

At its core, Enshrouded is about making a place for yourself in a world devastated by a mysterious force known as the Shroud. You start with very little, then gradually collect materials, craft equipment, and build a settlement that becomes the foundation of your progression.

However, there's considerably more to the experience than gathering wood and building a shelter.

The handcrafted world encourages you to venture into abandoned settlements, explore underground caves, climb mountains, and investigate ancient ruins. You can spend hours following a trail of resources and points of interest without necessarily feeling like you're doing the same thing repeatedly.

The full release also adds a massive volcanic region, more dungeons, dozens of new enemy types, and a conclusion to the current storyline. The skill tree has expanded, the level cap has increased to 50, and new spells give players more options if they prefer magic.

Spark Works also lets you build interactive machinery, traps, and puzzles. Combined with the building and crafting tools already available, these additions make Enshrouded feel like a substantial package rather than a small survival game that has simply reached the end of early access.

That scale is both one of the game's greatest strengths and one of its biggest problems. You can easily spend more than 100 hours exploring, building, and improving your character, and you can easily spend another 50 hours or so if you get particularly invested in construction.

But the longer you spend in Enshrouded, the more you will notice the pacing issues.

There's always another objective, another crafting material to collect, another location to explore, another system to figure out. It's rewarding, but it can also be exhausting when you realize how much of the world you still have to explore.

The story itself is pretty basic. You're in a world still reeling from the Shroud's effects, slowly learning about the people, places, and history surrounding the disaster as you progress. A big part of the experience is finding NPCs, since the people you save can return to your settlement and unlock new crafting stations, recipes, and quests. These characters give you real reasons to explore, even if the story doesn't always make you emotionally invested in the world.

Keen Games has obviously put a lot of work into dialogue, voice acting, and background information.

Unfortunately, the story hardly feels like the main attraction. Generally, the quests serve as a framework to guide you to new areas, to get you to build more stuff, and to send you into dungeons to fight enemies or collect specific items. You can find bits of environmental storytelling that hint at what happened before the Shroud consumed the land, but the central story is relatively light.

This approach works better when you are playing alone, because you can follow quests at your own pace and focus on the details. But in multiplayer, the story can easily get lost in the background. While one player explores a new area, another may build the settlement, cook food, or care for animals. It's hard to keep everyone focused on the same story moment, and the game doesn't always make its goals clear.

Enshrouded's story isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't do enough to hold your attention when the gameplay offers so many other distractions. Fortunately, exploration is where the game starts to show what makes it special.

While Valheim uses procedural generation for much of its world, Enshrouded's environment is handcrafted, with well-placed settlements, ruins, caves, dungeons, and other points of interest. This means your discoveries look more intentional, and the landscape often gives you a reason to explore a place that initially looks insignificant.

You might find a new NPC, valuable crafting materials, skill points, or a boss waiting at the end of a dungeon.

Getting around is also more fun than you might expect from a survival crafting game. You can scale buildings and mountains, use a grappling hook to access places you couldn't otherwise reach, and glide from high points to cover long distances. As you gain more movement powers, exploring the world becomes a key part of the experience rather than something you do between objectives.

It is especially satisfying to glide across the landscape with your friends when everybody launches from a mountain and takes the same route to a distant place. The world also has regions that keep exploration from becoming too repetitive. Blackmire offers a swamp environment that nicely contrasts with the rolling hills and mountains seen throughout much of the game.

The Albaneve Summits also offer a change of scenery with their mountainous terrain. Each region has smaller stories, encounters, and rewards that give you reasons to explore beyond the main quest's immediate objectives. The volcanic region added in version 1.0 further expands the available landscape.

However, Enshrouded's most distinctive environmental feature is the Shroud itself.

These murky, foggy areas are almost like underwater levels in an adventure game. You can go in, grab worthwhile resources, and fight powerful enemies, but you can't stay there forever. You have limited time and want to control how long you stay before it runs out. You can extend that time with progression, but you will still need to plan your excursions carefully.

The Shroud presents a different kind of exploration challenge. Visibility is poor; enemies are usually aggressive, and fast travel isn't available inside. You might enter to collect a specific resource, cross a gorge, or get to a place on the other side of the fog. As your time runs out, a simple expedition can quickly become a desperate escape.

These moments are especially tense in multiplayer, where everyone has to manage their exposure together. If the group travels together and cannot get away before the timer expires, the entire expedition may end in disaster. Plus, reviving a dead teammate can be tricky since they might be stuck at the same time as the person who revived them. When you die, you don't lose your gear or hotbar items, but you can leave materials in your backpack behind, forcing you to go back and retrieve them.

The Shroud is a prime example of how Enshrouded elevates its handcrafted world beyond a simple large map to walk around in.

It adds a constraint that changes your mindset about exploration without breaking the flow of movement. The problem is that fast-travel points can be relatively scarce, particularly as you move deeper into the world. You can build additional base shrines to create temporary travel points, but you're limited in how many you can place. As a result, traveling back and forth can become tedious when objectives are far apart.

Building, on the other hand, is one of Enshrouded's strongest reasons to keep playing. You can start with a small wooden shelter and eventually construct a sprawling castle, an underground base, or an entire village. You have a lot of freedom to shape your surroundings, dig into mountains, reshape the terrain, and design structures that fit naturally into the landscape.

Instead of just dropping down prefab buildings, you have the tools to make something that feels like yours. The ability to change the land is especially useful because it lets you build in and around the environment, instead of against it.

You can dig out space for underground rooms, flatten an area for a settlement, or reshape the terrain to fit a more elaborate design. The full release further improves the building experience by making construction more accessible, letting you fly while building, and adjusting material costs.

These changes reduce friction in larger projects without taking away the creative freedom that makes the system enjoyable. Your settlement also becomes a practical part of progression. Rescue NPCs to unlock new crafting stations and recipes.

Farming is a great way to stock up on resources for future projects! You can grow vegetables, mushrooms, flax, and wheat so you don't have to go to dangerous places every time you need specific ingredients. You can also fish, raise animals, cook meals, and gradually turn a basic shelter into a proper home.

Food is handled in a way that makes the survival aspect less demanding than in some other games. Enshrouded uses food more for buffs than for constantly punishing you for not eating and drinking. You can also cook meals that boost your character's abilities and make long expeditions easier. The difficulty settings also let you fine-tune the experience, so if you prefer building and exploration, you can focus on those.

The comfort system is another reason to invest in your home.

Place the right things around your base to boost comfort and how much you get from resting. This can give you some nice buffs before you embark on another expedition, so that a well-crafted settlement can be more than just a pretty place. Once you have a solid base, crafting stations, food supplies, rescued NPCs, etc., you're ready to tackle everything else the game throws at you.

Combat is also a big part of the experience, and the expanded skill tree gives you multiple ways to approach encounters. You can specialize in melee weapons, use bows for ranged attacks, rely on magic wands and staves, or build around heavy two-handed weapons. 

As you advance, you'll unlock new attacks and grow your combat combos, with passive stat boosts and active abilities in the skill tree. These additions make fights more interesting for melee characters, giving them options beyond just attacking until an enemy dies.

Defensive actions are important too.

You can block, parry, and dodge incoming attacks, and choosing the right response matters, especially against bosses. Each boss has a unique moveset and weaknesses, forcing you to learn their patterns and adapt your strategy. Some encounters require you to avoid a certain ability and attack from the side; others become more complicated when other enemies join the fray.

Stamina management is another layer to combat. You need to watch your available stamina for attacking, blocking, and dodging, so you cannot just spam aggression. You can also get buffs from food, equipment, and your home's comfort level to help you prepare for difficult encounters.

The result is a combat system that feels responsive and generally works well across various character builds.

Magic takes center stage with nine new spell types, including summons, giving players more options for full release. The level cap has also been raised to 50, which means more room to develop your character. Still, Enshrouded's combat is not as engaging as its building and exploration systems.

The melee attacks can feel a little basic, some enemy encounters are repetitive, and the weapon variety isn't as diverse as you might want. If you're looking for the depth and precision of a dedicated action RPG, the combat probably seems a little underwhelming.

Progression can also get grindy when you have to farm specific crafting materials to unlock the next piece of equipment or progress a quest. There's a lot to keep you exploring. Still, not every trip feels as worthwhile as the last, especially when you are constantly looking for resources you've already collected several times over.

One system that makes equipment progression more interesting is upgrading gear beyond its initial level.

Most gear you find is tied to your current character level, but its rarity determines how much you can upgrade it. Legendary items can be upgraded further and remain useful longer, while common gear cannot be upgraded as much. When you level up, you can take resources to a blacksmith to upgrade a weapon or piece of armor instead of buying a new one.

This creates a nice middle ground between constantly swapping out your gear and using the same equipment for the entire game. You might get attached to a really useful weapon and upgrade it a bit, but eventually your character progression will make better gear worth looking into. It gives you a reason to care about item rarity and upgrade potential, rather than every new drop being an automatic upgrade.

The full release also introduces Spark Works, a system that takes Enshrouded's creativity beyond traditional building. It lets you build interactive mechanisms with circuits, wires, and logic gates. You can make simple things like pressure plates that open trapdoors, or build more complex contraptions like elevators, traps, and interactive puzzles. The system even allows players to build their own dungeons.

Spark Works has a lot of potential, especially for players who love tinkering with mechanical systems.

But it can also seem unnecessarily complex. The game doesn't always explain this well in its tutorials, so you need to understand how logic gates and circuits work. If you're willing to learn those concepts, the possibilities are extensive, but players who simply want to build a house and explore the world might find the system intimidating.

Visually, Enshrouded benefits from its handcrafted world and the contrast between its different regions. The landscape offers varied exploration, with mountains, abandoned settlements, underground areas, and regions covered in Shroud, while the ability to shape the landscape makes your settlement feel personal. But it's not just about the scenery either.

The environment's details tell the world's history, and dangerous areas create a distinct shift in atmosphere as you move away from safer zones.

The audio presentation supplements the adventure with dialogue, voice acting, combat sounds, and environmental atmosphere. Keen Games clearly put in extra effort to voice its characters, and the world is brimming with lore. The writing and voice work don't always make the narrative memorable, especially when you are playing with friends and focusing more on combat or building than the story. The sound design does its job, but the game's strongest qualities are still exploration, building, and co-op gameplay.

Overall, Enshrouded offers plenty of content to justify its $40 price tag, especially if you're a fan of survival-crafting games where you can build and explore at your own pace. With its hand-crafted world, versatile building tools, useful farming systems, and varied character progression, it can keep you busy for well over 100 hours.

The 1.0 release feels like a big step forward, adding new regions, dungeons, enemies, spells, and Spark Works.

Still, be prepared for how much time it will take. The quest log can get cluttered, multiplayer progression doesn't always run as smoothly as it should, and the story struggles to hold your attention with so many other things competing for it. Combat is fun, but it doesn't always match the building and exploration systems. The lengthy progression can make the adventure feel more tiresome than exciting after dozens of hours.

That doesn't mean you need to complete everything to get your money's worth. You can spend dozens of hours building a settlement, exploring the world with friends, and fighting bosses before deciding you've had enough. For some players, that's a perfectly satisfying experience. Others will appreciate a world that keeps offering new things long after the main story ends.

Enshrouded shines when you treat it as a shared adventure rather than a quest checklist. Build a home, develop your character, head into the Shroud, and see what you discover along the way. If you prefer a more focused story or consistently challenging combat, you might be better off waiting for a discount. But if you enjoy spending an evening building a settlement and exploring a dangerous fantasy world with friends, there's plenty here to keep you coming back.