After 118 hours of Valheim, it’s time for me to play the games I should be playing find another survival crafting game. Enshrouded 1.0 it is!

About two years ago, I was pretty down on Enshrouded generally. At the time, I had just came off of Nightingale, which expanded the boundaries of the survival crafting envelope in interesting ways. Enshrouded… did not. At least, not visibly. Coming back into Enshrouded after half a dozen updates and the 1.0 release, I was cautiously optimistic.

The results after 30 hours are… inconclusive.

I have rewritten this post four times already, oscillating between “X but worse” and “doing its own thing.” For example, the game has a lot of “Valheim but worse” vibes. There are light attacks and heavy attacks and a dodge/parry mechanic with bonus break/overpower; there are food buffs you can stack as long as they are different; it is important to be both rested and not wet. However, it is also very much not like Valheim in an arguably larger amount of ways. You can fast travel at any time you are not actively in the Shroud; there are no building physics, and you can easily have floating bases; there are XP and levels and skill trees and random loot and gem enhancements. So… closer to an Action RPG then? Yeah, maybe. But it does have the slower things, attacks are limited to like four buttons, and some rather cleverly hidden treasure chests (etc).

What I can confidently say is that if you come into Enshrouded with expectations, you will be disappointed. If you don’t, you won’t. Probably.

For myself, I am in the “no longer disappointed” category. It took a while to get here. One consistent bit of friction is how much of the gameplay seemingly revolves around stopping the flow and returning back to your base. Item durability is awful, your bag space is limited considering the various amount of bits it gets stuffed with, and pretty much everything seems designed around doing something, porting home to offload, and then porting back and doing something else. I suppose you could technically ignore some of those things by deleting resources instead of hoarding everything, and also bringing a Workbench with you for repairs when you plop down a new “base” (which creates a spawn/teleport point). Or, you know, just turn off durability altogether in the Settings menu.

Having said that, Enshrouded is gorgeous. The lighting, the terrain, the fine details in the grass, enshroomed Shrouded areas, the caves, the skyboxes, all of it. The vistas are particularly amazing, and even more so for the fact that you can actually travel to everything that you can see. This is less unique in 2026 than it was in Skyrim – you can go everywhere in Valheim and Palworld and ARK too – but it is still appreciated.

Also, the music is extremely good. It’s sweeping when you need to be swept, claustrophobic when claustroed, and segues smoothly between each. I especially like how the voiceover for the notes you find will pause once you get in combat. There are some games that won’t, or will start the whole thing over again, or other annoying variations.

Anyway, that’s Enshrouded thus far. I’m going to continue playing as long as I’m experiencing a nominal amount of fun, but I’m not inclined to push through once the fun ends like I did with Valheim.