Enshrouded: We are in you

There’s a common thread that runs through every survival-crafting game I have ever played. And that common thread are lands that want to kill you just for existing. I am against them.

Deep Desert in Dune? No thanks. Ashlands in Valheim? Please, no. High mountain peaks in Palworld? Count me out.

There’s got to be a good reason, a really good reason, to get me to play Enshrouded, a game that consists almost entirely of deadly zones, choked with a poisonous miasma that even the newly birthed Flameborne (of which the player is one) can only withstand for a very short amount of time before the poison takes over and leaves you dead and rotting.

Since all the bosses are in this poisonous mist, there’s a hard time limit on every boss run. Six minutes to kill it and chop down the Elixir Root that exudes the mist, clearing a small area once the boss is dead. Or alternately, the boss does not die, and now your corpse and some of your stuff is there, and you are tired and hungry and back at your last base.

It’s not a prime vacation spot. But with Guild Wars 2 winding down for Team Spode, we were looking for something to do in the interim before Guild Wars 3 completely resets our Sunday nights. We’d already done Valheim, V Rising, Windrose and Dune: Awakening, so Enshrouded was next on the list. Nobody seemed that excited about Palworld, not even me — I’ve played it too many hours.

Long ago, humans in the world of Enshrouded discovered a naturally occurring elixir that grants the user awesome powers. They used this power to create a great civilization. But, wars were started over the supplies, and the humans began to become physically affected by the power of the elixir, becoming monstrous.

You, the player, are a Flameborn, a person sent into the future in a stasis chamber. You are the first to awaken, but you soon find hints of other vaults with other people sent forward in time — hunters, alchemists, blacksmiths and other folks that need to be awaken to help you rid the land of the mists and allow normal life to thrive once more.

But of course the land will fight back.

I’ve only just started the game, so I don’t know much more about the plot. But I can compare it to other games.

As a multiplayer-capable game, game progress is shared amongst everyone on the server. The various crafters entombed around the land can only be awoken once, so there’s a big premium on everyone using the same base. This can crush the hopes of those who would rather craft a castle of their own elsewhere. They still can, but they won’t have the NPC crafters with them (or, they will, and then the other players won’t have them).

Your quest log will tell you if you’re working on a personal quest or a world quest. Personal quests are your own and you’ll get all the rewards. World quests advance for everyone once done, and if you want to be involved in the best experience and rewards, you’ll want to be on when that happens.

Crafting is fairly easy, and unlike many survival games, isn’t the path toward the best gear. Bosses will actually drop really good stuff, and chests (that even respawn) can set you up even more. So while crafting is fairly easy (requiring only the materials and a crafting machine or an NPC), it isn’t really required for advancement.

You’ll still need to be making food, though. As in Valheim, your stats depend pretty heavily on the last three foods you ate, and I’ve yet to see any cooked meals drop from enemies. Besides, I don’t think anyone would want to eat what they dropped.

The enemies are fun. The Fell are the metamorphed humans, your basic zombies. There’s Ewoks, bats of various sorts, wolves, bugs, spiders… All the favorites.

Combat is very action oriented. There are no specific classes in the game; rather, there’s a very large skill tree that lets you craft your own character, though Enshrouded does assign names to the various paths through the skill tree; for instance, I am slowly working through the Warrior and Guardian branches, hoping to build a character that slams things with massive two-handed weapons — your basic berserker.

All mobs telegraph their attacks; parrying them builds up a stun meter and opens them up to devastating counterattacks. Don’t want to deal with melee? Enshrouded supports ranger and mage archetypes as well. If you love to parry — move in and whack away. Don’t want to deal with it — pull out your wand and toss in some magic bullets… because magic takes ammunition. Which is weird. You can craft or find fireball ammo, ice spike ammo, healing ammo and so on. Nobody rides for free in Enshrouded.

As you level up, you can choose skills and craft potions that give you more time in the mist or lessen its impact on you. I’d expect that the mist becomes less of a barrier as you grow as a character, though it will always be a factor. I would imagine killing the final boss clears the mist. I would imagine.

One problem with these multiplayer survival games is that there’s always going to be people who rush ahead; our playthrough will almost certainly end with a couple of people heroically defeating the big evil, with a bunch of other players scattered somewhere in their wake. But that’s just the way these things go.

Two days into Enshrouded, I’m having some fun. You can glide around the world, there’s cool jumping puzzles, the mist isn’t as scary as it felt at the start, and there’s every chance I’ll stick around to see the endgame.

Star’s Reach came up in discussion today, and I was trying to figure out why that game didn’t take me in the same way these other games do. It occurred to me that I like games with a defined end. You adventure toward a final big battle with the biggest bad, and then once it’s done, you’re done and can move on. Star’s Reach is just an open world. There’s no reason to log on. Maybe they’ve added something, but the couple of times I played, the focus of the game was getting you to explore and make a base. Which are fine and necessary for games in the genre, but… it’s not enough by itself. Not for me.