I actually purchased Enshrouded on a sale prior to Nightengale and a few other games, but had been waiting until I finished those, lest I be too enraptured by what was going to be the better game. You know, eating your peas and mashed potatoes before the pudding.

As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered: Enshrouded is not fun to play.

Believe me, I’m as surprised as anyone. Enshrouded has sold 3 million copies in Early Access, and is specifically called out by the Nightingale devs as one reason why they are reengineering their game.

Let’s get this big note out of the way: Enshrouded is not an open-world survival crafting game. I had to look at the Steam store page to double-check, but sure enough, it’s billed as a “co-op survival action RPG.” It’s an important distinction because the crafting, resource gathering, and survival elements are all perfunctory at best. Do you punch trees and collect fiber from bushes? Yes. Can you craft the cloth or metal scraps you need for practically everything? No. Those come from mob drops, or occasionally from destroying tents or other objects out in the world. After a while, you realize that you don’t really need much of anything from environment in comparison to mob drops, which is textbook Action RPG with “survival-lite” elements.

One thing Enshrouded is very good for is terrain deformation. Almost absurdly so. Nearly every inch of terrain can be dug into with a pick, and setting down base marker will allow rapid mining in almost any configuration. If you ever wanted a Hobbit-style house or Dwarven palace, this game is for you. Regular mansions are just fine as well. Build whatever you want! …provided it is within bounds of a Flame Altar.

This is important to know because general movement in Enshrouded is crap. Encounter a steep hill? Sometimes you can jump and land on individual pixels and sometimes not. If you aim your pick awkwardly upwards you can sometimes dig out a little ledge to help you climb. Double-Jump is a talent you can spec into as well. Things you can’t do? Build a box and stand on it. Or use the Grappling Hook – that’s exclusively designed to hook onto metal rings in specific places. Later on, you can unlock giant towers that you can fast travel to the top of and then jump off and use a “glider” to get around. But the glider handles more like a wingsuit weighed down with tungsten anchors than anything else.

The sad part is that all of this poor mobility is likely bad by design. See, the central conceit of the game is that a Shroud has billowed out of the low places of the earth, killing those trapped inside. Venturing into these low-laying placed causes one to be “Enshrouded” and will result in death after a ~5 min timer expires. Meanwhile, poking your head outside of the Shroud will rapidly add time back onto the meter. Thus, if it were easy to grapple up hills and/or build structures anywhere one pleases, it would trivialize (to an extent) the threat posed by the Shroud. So… I get it. But I also get that Nightingale feels so immensely better being able to climb/grapple any surface and glide for ages via umbrella.

As for combat itself… meh. There are a few different types of melee weapons, but no real “moves” per se. There are block/parry and dodge-roll mechanics, along with bows and magic. I have heard the latter was nerfed recently, but I’m not sure if the abysmal magic system currently in the game is the result of that or if they made it that way on purpose. You can craft wands and staves early-on, with wands having infinite “uses” (that consume item durability) but extremely limited range. I’m talking practically melee range, for some reason. Staves, on the other hand, consume both MP and “ammo” scrolls or whatever, which can only be crafted once you rescue the Alchemist NPC. Why can you craft a staff before you have the resources to use it in any capacity?

So, yeah. Enshrouded. I have played for about ~7 hours thus far and every play experience goes the same way: sprint on a road for several minutes to some location, complete a micro-dungeon, fast-travel back to base. Repeat. Or in my case, Quit to Desktop because the play experience is exhausting. The world is gorgeous but devoid of anything interesting, combat is dull, magic is pointless, and going from place to place is skibidi Ohio no cap, as the kids say. Honestly, I should have expected something once I saw “Athleticism” as its own branch in the Path of Exile-style talent tree. Oh, and the devs are extremely miserly with the talent points and level-ups in the general.

Oh well. At least these are solvable problems that will hopefully be ironed out during Early Access.