Enshrouded

Enshrouded launched into Early Access in January 2024 and has spent nearly two years and nine months there, passing five million players along the way. Version 1.0 landed on October 15 for PC and, for the first time, PlayStation 5. You play as one of the Flameborn in the kingdom of Embervale, a land being eaten by a corrupting fog called the Shroud. The loop is to build a base, rescue survivors, hunt and farm, fight through dungeons, and push back the Shroud, alone or with friends.

The building is the point

If one thing earns the game its reputation, it is the building. The land is fully terraformable, and the voxel system lets you raise towering fortresses, carve homes into hillsides and decorate rooms down to small details. IGN’s Early Access review said it makes castle-building fun and easy with intuitive tools, and Rock Paper Shotgun went further and called it the best building system in the survival genre. That freedom sits on top of a proper action RPG: a deep skill tree where you can be an armored juggernaut, a ranger or a battlemage, or blend them, and skill-based combat that the studio says is easy to learn and deep to master.

What 1.0 changes

The finished version isn’t a rebuild, it’s an expansion across nearly everything. Reviewers describe more varied combat, a broader range of zones and dungeons, new magic, higher level caps, rebalanced boss fights and new customization and traversal options. A GamingBolt review scored it 9 out of 10, said the game finally feels complete and called it one of the best survival crafting games on the market. The same review noted the story was kept light on purpose, and singled out Sparkworks, a new Minecraft-Redstone-style system for building mechanical contraptions, as its main complaint. Early Access saves convert to the new format, though the studio suggests a fresh start since the world and opening hours were improved.

Where it’s rough

Critics love it: 88 on Metacritic across 12 reviews, all positive. Players are a bit less unanimous. In one sample of the 100 most helpful Steam reviews from launch week, 79 were positive, recent reviews are 82% and all-time reviews 87%, and the recurring theme is performance. Keen has shipped a hotfix that eased stuttering with V-Sync on AMD cards, and the studio says it worked on rendering, lighting and distant scenery for lower- and mid-range PCs, but the stated minimum of 16 GB RAM and a 6 GB graphics card is not light. There’s also no crossplay at launch, and Xbox is spring 2027.

Verdict

Enshrouded has spent its Early Access years turning a good idea into a confident finished game. The building tools are the best of the genre, the combat is sturdier and the world is bigger, and it works for a solo player or a full group. If you have decent hardware it is an easy recommendation at $35.99 through October 29 ($39.99 afterwards). If your PC is near the minimum specs, give the launch patches a few weeks to settle.