Enshrouded Early Access Review

ign.com:

It’s been a reasonably long time since a game latched onto my innermost sense of childlike wonder – that is, until I lost 30 hours of my week building a fortress town in Enshrouded’s meadows before I even started its main quest. This action-RPG survival sim draws a mish-mash of inspirations from games like Valheim, Minecraft, The Elder Scrolls, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and all those ideas come together in a way that’s already engrossing at its Early Access launch. Its gob-smackingly gorgeous high-fantasy art style, vast open world, intelligent crafting systems, seemingly limitless base building, and satisfying character customization are impressive, but also marred by a few bugs – both literal and figurative – a lackluster story filled with decent-at-best puzzle design, and clunky action combat that’s off to a middling start. And yet, across 62 hours soaking in its rustic fantasy charm, it was easy to forgive those hitches and gleefully get lost in its depths with a friend.

In classic post-apocalyptic RPG fashion, the world of Embervale has officially ended, its human inhabitants are mostly gone, and a mysterious fungal Shroud covers much of the landscape – twisting its denizens and making everything caught within look like Xen from the Half-Life series. What exactly is the Shroud, you ask? I’m still not completely sure, but if I cared enough to find out, I might read the stream of lore tidbits I’ve picked up along my journey via scattered notes.

These notes and journal entries are interesting enough, but aside from a short opening cutscene and a few quest-related dialogues, they provide pretty much the extent of any explicit storytelling Enshrouded does after you – the Flameborn – spawn in the Cinder Vault at the southernmost tip of its expansive world and then blaze off on your own path. But hey! At least my home base is looking mighty fine. It’s complete with a working farmland where I grow crops for healing potions and crucial stat-raising food