Enshrouded

Enshrouded, as an Early Access title, does some things well and some not so well, but it is all subject to change. We'll see how things go over the next few years. Overall, it's fun enough, and the developers have been very forthcoming with game additions and are also very open and responsive to player feedback. This game does Early Access right.

Pros:
-Gorgeous visuals
-Gorgeous world, procedurally-generated and then lovingly populated with hand-crafted locations
-Incredible, detailed and interesting dungeons to delve through, filled with puzzles and environment hazards
-Beautiful, if inconsistent, armor and weapon designs, which are fun to collect.
-A fairly robust building system, with benefits to decorating and constructing a base that you then populate with craftspeople and villagers
-Simple, but satisfying combat
-A leveling system that revolves around perks instead of stat increases (though you can still boost your stats from the perk tree)
-Dedicated cosmetic slots for your armor, with options to hide both your headgear and your gloves
-Fully cosmetic clothing sets to find behind exploration and bosses
-A food-based buff system, wherein the food you eat increases your stats and stat regeneration
-Lots of lore to discover through characters, locales, obelisks and books throughout the world
-Highly customizable game settings, including the ability to turn off weapon and tool durability or turn on starvation mechanics

Cons:
-The bonuses from armor and weapons are largely pointless, or too small to make much of a difference. Some are even entirely pointless, such as one set that offers a small 10-20% bonus to unarmed damage, with unarmed attacks dealing only 8 damage to enemies (when your mace is doing over 400 per swing, and swings faster than your fists)
-There are tons of weapons, but there are very little differences between weapons of the same class: All one-handed weapons use the same three-swing combo, regardless of what the weapon actually is, and even legendary items don't have anything to differentiate them outside of their raw damage and visuals
-The few weapons with "unique" effects are things like 5% lifesteal, 1 point of health regen, or some bonus critical chance and damage. None of the weapons are build-defining or unique in any meaningful way. For example, the "Dragon Sword", found only one hidden place and tied to a piece of esoteric lore found in your travels, just adds a flat +7 fire damage... Five times in a row. The Dragon Sword is a weapon with nothing going for it except minuscule damage bonuses that don't even interact with your perks.
-Extremely linear item and location progression: New areas are blocked off by "Deadly Shroud," a gas that simply kills you if you haven't leveled up your base enough yet (using the heads of bosses and regional materials). Essentially, your ability to explore the "open world" aspect of the game is heavily restricted by boss progression.
-Heavily reused enemies with very limited attack variety
-The magic system is bland, being exclusively ranged elemental attacks and two healing spells. There is no utility magic to speak of, outside of a single knockback spell
-The perks you gain from leveling are very restrictive in what they affect, very strictly confining their offerings to their respective stat tree (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) with very little overlap
-Every quest is a fetch or kill quest with some lore sprinkled around it. "Skyrim quest" is how I would describe them: Talk to a person, go to a place, get a thing, repeat until you run out of quests

Enshrouded, in short, is almost everything you could want from an RPG/Builder hybrid. It has some of the best building systems I've ever seen. This is where the game really shines. You even have people and animals to make your towns feel alive.

The combat is pretty decent. Nothing really new here but that isn't a bad thing in this case.
The talent tree is not too deep nor too simple, meaning you probably won't have to research your choices to be effective at what you want to be while also not being able to fill the entire tree making you have to make choices but also forgiving with the ability to reallocate your points.
The area where the game still needs the most work is the RPG/Story aspect. The story isn't bad, there just isn't much of it, or lore/history to uncover but the game is still in EA so still time to improve.
Character creator is abysmal for 2024. Please devs work on this if possible. Update: character creator still isn't great but now at least you can make changes at the barber.
Though not perfect, Enshrouded is already a great game that gets better every update, a great value even at full price, and an absolute steal when on sale. 9/10 at the time of this review(updated)
Update: New game update "Pact of the Flame" and 2025 roadmap shows the devs are listening to the players and giving us what we want with many requested features now and on the way.

Overall is a fun game to play.
However, there is no pause function in single player. Developer should consider add in this feature as some of us are parents and need to attend our kids

This is my first review on steam. And I am so excited to write it.
I am a cozy gamer- I'm talking animal crossing, stardew valley, overcooked, stray, etc. I love the zelda games, especially breath of the wild but I spent HOURS climbing mountains just to avoid enemies and bosses. So a survival game was the last thing I thought I might like but Enshrouded has won me over. It feels like the natural progression for me from Stardew and Zelda.
I absolutely loved that I could really customize the gameplay (even before the most recent update that allowed for difficulty settings) to what I enjoyed the most. So many quests are essentially optional or can be delayed, so I could wait to do a really hard one until I felt comfortable because I got plenty of XP from mining or exploring. I love the base building, and the fact that we can reused already existing buildings! Blue Goblet tavern, anyone? Honestly this has so many elements in a game that I didn't know I wanted but now I don't wanna play a game without them.
There's so much I love. But I'm going to share some things I hope they address in the future:
- The other survivors. They feel very flat. I'd love it if they had some preferences or maybe things they'd like for me to do for them aside from finding their things. Maybe they want their room to have a better bed, or a side table, etc. We all live in this space together, they can have an opinion too.
- Wtf is up with how this game was developed that I have to run this game on Performance graphics even tho I run BG3 on High/Ultra???? The lower quality visuals didn't bother me, but like seriously wtf this game is not more taxing than BG3?? I'm so confused on this.
- The hallow halls messaging says you should have friends to do it with you, which I don't have friends who play this game so I got scared that since I'm bad at combat, I wouldn't do well. So I put it off until I was way overpowered. So I feel like the messaging could be adjusted to give a level recommendation. Or maybe I'm just the only big baby who is scared of combat who would play this lol.
Last request: please keep the storyline going! I've learned so much about the world, but what about my place in it? What am I doing? Why am I clearing the shroud roots if they just re-appear? I know it's early access but I love the game so much I am dying to see what else happens in the world. I'm sold on the story, I want the next chapter :)
I just 'finished' this week and saw the new update and I am so excited to start from the beginning and experience this new update. I just wish I had friends who also played this game and wanted to do it with me.

This is the review after I just did all achievements. I got into Enshrouded in late 2024 after I did most of Palworld except for a few more difficult bosses.
Back to Enshrouded, what I like most are:
- The game has single player, private local server, hosted server option. No worry that your game will be unplayable after a couple of years.
- The Quests system are really good on guiding players what we should do next. Although, I have to look for hints on how to really get the complete set of collectible items from time to time. During the early to mid game, most can be done organically. But during late game, some quests are quite time consuming to complete without consulting guide. This also why I take so many hours.
- Even with Quests inside the game, there are Steam achievements. Some of these are activated by the same conditions. But Quests are naturally more detail. Previously, I used to have some issues with some quests not really recognized properly but it got fixed up really quickly. As we know it, some other games insist not have either of these and left the player to keep the sense of accomplishment to themselves.
- The games did add lots of new features throughout the year. Just when I thought what else can they add to it, there is a new roadmap 2025 published.
- There are lots of things to do in this game. Frankly speaking, I still have 15 quests left. The new cosmetics building blocks are really interesting. The base building mechanics in this game was quite good already since the beginning. This addition makes it even better. I'm very tempting to build my new house while I complete all remaining Quests.
- At this price point in my local currency which is at the upper-middle price point in Steam universe, I think Enshrouded price reasonably well considered game pricing level in 2025. If you like this kind of game, don't wait any further. The game is really good.
Some glitches that I found:
- When I scaled a mountain and have to jump repeatedly, I ended up stuck in the middle of the rock. Most of the time, I can twist and jump jump jump to get out of the sticky situation. But lots of time, I need to respawn since I cannot even kill myself at that point. This happens more often in Albaneve biome (the latest one) which are mountains exclusively.
- My houses, fences, etc. sometimes, just become slightly out of places leaving some gaps between them over time. I always use Snap features to make sure everything should be in place. when building. Even I demolish/recreate it, overtime, it still creeping out of place. This happens once in a while. Although, this does not effect any game play.
- I have one occasion where I cannot find one item bury under a bridge in a shroud. I think I dig through the other side of the world already. It just was not there. Finally, I have to use my character with the map from new game to get this item.
Luckily, I still carry all my progress with me.

Let me start of by saying this. If you want the short version review, skip to the last part (gameplay), otherwise enjoy my thorough review of the game.
The first steps:
If you are totally new to survival crafting games, you will be utterly lost in this game. When you start out, you don’t have any tutorial to walk you through the game, and it most certainly doesn’t hold your hand in any way. You have to figure out stuff by picking, chopping, looting, killing and crafting stuff along the way.
User interface:
The UI is very easy to use. Not much to say here, even a total noob can figure this out.
Moving about:
This game gives you wings! You can travel over land very fast in this game if you make use of your glider and strategic spires and hills. Otherwise you will have quite the adventure tracking over lands and channelling your inner mountain goat.
Combat:
The combat is in it’s way very simplistic and there are no combo’s or funny buttons and special skills. It’s just straight forward stabbing, slicing and shooting. That said, it is very enjoyable to just go into a stabbing frenzy when you duel wield (like I do, hehehe).
Skills:
It does have a skill tree where you do branch of into your three major groups: tanky, healy and damagy. And it also offers stamina and magic skills alike. It’s a fairy small-med sized skill tree, and doesn’t need any special builds or manuals to be optimum in any way. Players are free to build as they want.
Survival:
Food is a bonus to have, but not as a means to keep you from starving. There is no dying in here when you don’t find food, or having a grumpy character when you’re not eating a balanced diet. The foods boost your character stats and are helpful in surviving the great outdoors.
Farming:
Yes, there is absolutely farming in this game. If you’d like to grow your own ingredients you can easily do so, with hardly any limits, except time. Patience with farming is extremely rewarding. Where some things will be ready for harvesting in a day or so, it is best to leave others to grow for a while to better reap the benefits.
Building:
I’ll say this. If you love building in games where you have no limits, you’ll have a blast in here. It does offer a wide selection of building materials and furnishings with no caps and restrictions, so long as you build within your flame radius. It could however use a bit of a fine tweaking tool and more rotation options for blocks, but other than that, it is thoroughly enjoyable to build masterpieces in this game.
Scenery:
There are some very, very beautiful and well thought out places in this game. Even though it does have some re-use over some building exteriors, like the spires, there are equally places that are very unique and you can immediately feel the love and effort that was put in to create some of these spaces (e.g. a beautiful woodland cave when you’re heading to the tar swamp)
Gameplay:
After playing this game for some time, I found it to be very enjoyable (especially if you play with someone else who also enjoys it). There is a lot to do in this game if you love questing, building, farming, and being stared at by fellow survivors as you contemplate life choices. It does have some grinding for resources, but not to the point of having to have a second life for it.
It does have some game issues here and there where it will randomly crash and feel a bit annoying to redo some events, and it does have a slight lag at some spots.
That said, myself and my hubby found this game to be awesome and we easily reach for it to play together. If you like Valheim, you will probably enjoy this game a lot too.
Hope this helps all future peeps who are still deciding on whether to buy this game. I think that it well deserving of trying out, and definitely worth the money.

I have played for about 800 hrs. The story is interesting, and the game is definitely playable solo. I completed the game, through level 35 as a solo player with out much problem. Some things take longer (i.e. Hollow Halls), but nothing is impossible to complete. The group play is pretty good too, though there are currently performance issue, though not surprising since this in in EA. There is also no in-game chat (text or voice), but I found a group of people, and we were able to overcome it using Discord. Used basic building blocks in-game to write out Discord info.
I absolutely love the building system. Though it could use work with camera control and additional options (round shapes), the building potential is endless. Of my almost 800 hrs of play, at least 600 has been spent building.
I highly recommend this game for anyone who likes survival/building games!