Enshrouded 1.0 Launch: A Survival Game Built for Two

Enshrouded has reached its 1.0 release, and at least one long-time player isn't putting it down anytime soon. Jill Grodt of The Indie Informer has spent nearly 200 hours in the game so far. Her account of those hours says a lot about why this survival action game seems to work for so many different kinds of players.

What stands out is that she didn't spend most of that time fighting or building. She spent it cooking.

A Chef in the Shroud

Grodt and her partner both love games, but they usually lean toward very different corners of the hobby. Enshrouded is one of the rare games where both of them find what they want.

Her own playthrough revolves around hunting down rare ingredients to expand her recipe list. She explores on foot, close to the ground, keeping an eye out for anything new to harvest. She describes the experience as oddly grounding. The day and night cycle plays a big part in that. Sunlight spills over the glens in the morning, and at night the darkness brings out glowing plants. Regions near her home base slowly start to feel familiar, while the far-off lands still feel new.

Then there's the kitchen gear. Ovens, cooking stations, butter churners... if she gets the slightest hint that a new upgrade is out there, she goes after it, no matter how far away it is.

Teamwork Makes the Loot Run Work

This is where her partner comes in. Grodt stresses that Enshrouded is a multiplayer game first and foremost, and missions go much more smoothly with at least one other person along.

The two have a routine. They scope out each location slowly, sizing up how big it is and how well it's guarded. Grodt plays a stealthier character, so she takes to the rooftops. Her heavily armored partner charges down the main path to pull the enemies' attention. Once the hostile NPCs are cleared out, she slips through the buildings looking for loot, with cooking equipment as the real prize.

Back at base, every new piece of equipment unlocks fresh recipes and processing options. Sometimes a dish is missing just one ingredient, which sends her off again into tropical forest, sun-baked desert or dense woodland in search of an unfamiliar herb. If co-op gathering on a hostile world sounds like your kind of thing, the upcoming Craterlands beta is worth keeping on your radar too.

Grodt admits her approach is a little unusual. Still, she feels it shows how open-ended the game can be. Builders can sink time into elaborate constructions. Combat fans can take on the shroud and the creatures it has twisted. Decorators can roam the land for nice furnishings and materials. And anyone who just likes a big adventure has plenty of world to explore.

The Small Change That Matters Most

Grodt played Enshrouded well before 1.0. Her favorite change in the full release is a modest one: notes now come with voice acting.

Notes are the game's main way of telling its story. Before, reading them meant standing still in silence while her partner waited and the action carried on nearby. Now the text plays in the background while she keeps moving, and she says she finally has a fuller picture of what caused the ruin all around her. She also points out how unusual it is for a survival action game to have this much story.

Despite her triple-digit playtime, she says she's nowhere near finished. Part of the appeal is sharing the adventure with someone close to her.

Our Take

Grodt's account suggests that Enshrouded's real strength is its flexibility. A cooking-focused player and a front-line fighter can share one save file and both feel the game was made for them. For relaxed gamers, that matters. Survival games don't always have to be about grinding through combat, a trend we also saw in Honeycomb: The World Beyond.

The voice-acted notes are a good example of quality-of-life polish that can come out of a long pre-release period. It will be interesting to see whether the 1.0 version keeps solo players as engaged as co-op pairs, and whether more survival games start delivering their stories this way.