I Dig Digging In Enshrouded – Early Access Impressions and Review
sup everybody this is Karak with ACG and once again it’s my continuing mission to bring you reviews or previews or impressions of video games around the world and today it’s going to be enshrouded if you leave a comment or subscribe you can win a free copy if you’re a fan of their survival genre video games at some point you have to inevitably ask yourself what can a new game even offer it’s the equivalent of finding the same damned can ravioli in a Zombie Survival game and thinking to yourself seriously why even stay alive if it’s
ravioli all the way down with so many titles in the genre from Arc to long dark grounded raft 7 days to die in Sons of the forest what does enshrouded offer to set itself apart that’s what I’m going to cover in this video enshrouded from Keen night games is coming out on the 24th and with it it’s bringing a huge number of survival tropes as well as a couple differences that the developers are going to hope will lift it above the constant churn and wave like releases that survival games get it’s sort of weird that
survival games and the glut of continued titles mimic so closely the idea of zombie hordes coming at you atmosphere is one way that enshrouded is trying to
destroyed almost everyone and created this pestilence that’s killed every living being well not every one of them but most of them you’re one of those who is returning and it’s your goal to explore and uncover what’s happened before actually Full Stop on that we can pretend that’s why but the last person who played a survival game for the story was probably just playing The Last of Us well many of them are nicely told for the most part it’s that triple play of construction crafting and creature killing and that matters the most to a lot of
Gamers when it comes to these titles and I have to say enshrouded does have it where it counts when you leap into enshrouded it gives you a nice brief tutorial with a small series of quests that lead you out into the darkness of the world engaging with the creatures getting into a few fights and having your first experience with the Shroud itself a floating myma of foggy Decay if you stay in it for too long it can flat out kill you and those that stay and live within it are as corrupted as you’d pretty much
assume the game has you set in your first base up just outside one of those corrupted areas learning about building crafting upgrading and getting you into the first steps of the game’s gameplay Loop here isn’t where and shrouded offering any surprises either everything is pretty much what you would expect with new items helping you craft other new items and later even more letting you specialize such as a charcoal Kil that unlocks more recipes to build and survive you need to go out and explore kill and then return home like a lot of survival games everything
in this has something useful take out a wolf and you get some skin and bones to make something else need to get through some odd location well in enshrouded you can just grab a mining pick and try to hammer your way through it tunneling all the way through a mountain if you want you just have to watch out for your own stamina as well as the pixster ability they bog standard in a lot of titles in enshrouded though construction uses voxal this lets you basically place all of the items anywhere and mix and match materials
and let me tell you it works really well my first house though would have been something that Rob Roy would have looked at and been like no it was a mixture of wood walls Bramble doors a roof that probably had to beg and plead for water not to leak through it and I’m pretty sure at least five or six holes in it but I got better and pretty soon I had my people in my shelter and my shelter protecting the people and a good construction idea of what I wanted to do with my first base
but it’s not just about that it’s about the weapons and armor and the crafting and upgrading of those homes as you’re building you’re trying to make sure that everyone is both rested and under shelter something you have to take into context with your characters as well as the NPCs but also there’s special items like a glider and grappling hook for exploration these are movement special items they help you solve puzzles and get to unexplored areas and there’s a lot of them in the game and yes a comparison and a very fair one many times is
that enshrouded can feel a little bit like other games for example the gliding does feel like Zelda it’s really hard to ignore it just feels like that and even the grappling hook can feel a little bit like other titles as well however enshrouded does have a lot of cool parts that make it feel different a lot of those puzzles that you go to in the various different world’s locations are sort of their own thing they have different ways for egress and while many were alike in some way there were also times where I went into
one and thought I was going to finish it in the same way as another location i’ gone to and it was completely different I definitely like that randomly or after completing a quest you might get a new Quest that has you traes and across the open world to find an NPC that can help you most of them are in some secret place that requires a fight or a puzzle or otherwise to get them then you can return back to your Bas and summon them there and they offer their own perks and construction speaking of perks
or in this case skills every single character in the game has their own skills that you upgrade as you level up it’s across different trees Survivor Beast Master Ranger assassin trickster athlete Barbarian Warrior tank battle mage healer and wizard a particular trait that you see right from the start within shrouded is sort of a don’t mess with it if it’s already worked mentality to a lot telling their own story and engaging in their own world without consistently unneeded trappings of confusing terms and words for expected tropes that in the end just become the same thing
ens shrouded wants players to also feel the desire to work together so your home fire this is the torch that you take with you can then be upgraded and these upgrades help everyone on the server meaning that some boss deep down and dug in tick like at the bottom of a shroud covered Valley might just be one step easier to defeat If instead you decide to do that versus say looking around and trying to upgrade your home base and get some better weapons you can sort of mix and match at your attempts try it out
see if you die too quick and if you do then go and upgrade that torch and I did it a bunch in the single player as well because hey you die a lot like many games of this kind when you die you’re stuck is pretty much left in a nice glowing Tombstone whever is you passed away and shrouded goes an extra mile at least when you died in a fire leaping over a ravine the tombstone is almost always where you leapt off to your death making corpse runs a good deal easier than they could have
been I should know because I creamed off a canyon Edge more than once thinking to myself I can make it only to panic as I scrambled at the last second slammed goddamn missile likee in the opposite Canyon face and as I slid down to my death I thought to myself there is no way I’m going to be able to get my stuff back and then I noticed that it was nicely there packed up on the edge of the Ravine like the gods themselves said dude we’re casual but we’re not cruel what would be cruel is
if this ran terribly and it doesn’t doesn’t run perfect though I played and shrouded on a PC with a 4090 and a current i7 without dlss I was getting anywhere from 75 to 90 FPS native 4K with everything maxed with the higher FPS of course inside tombs or smaller put together locations and dropping down outside the game also has support for epsr dlss daa and a large number of settings on the PC for draw distance Shadows voxal details and more and I would suggest you change some of those cuz turning down a couple I can
guarantee you’re probably not going to notice but what I did notice a lot of times is just how good the world felt to me leaving the almost claustrophobic nightmare hug of the swirling arms of the Shroud as I trudged up and out of the other side of a valley having barely escaped with my life and without the shroud timer counting down to my inevitable demise the sense of verticality rising above everything was noticeable however I can’t lie in shrouded does come in looking very much Early Access in some parts sometimes enemies didn’t seem to notice
me in the dungeons other times they reacted as expected but it did let me actually get to a couple places I probably shouldn’t have been able to also particular technical elements weren’t fully shaken out when it comes to World itself because no matter how pretty some Horizon is or how some Sunrise can make you breathe a sense of relief the issues that the game has are a ton of LOD swapping and popping as well as noticeable issues with emitters for fog and otherwise cutting into the geometry that can make it look much worse it just
depends on where you are and where those elements are it is early access that being said I love the enemy designs the first time I took on a corrupted mixture of a troll and an oak tree in the bottom of a misty dungeon was EAS a reminded of dark souls in that way I just wish that combat felt a little bit smoother no matter what skills I got it still felt like a survival game just adding in combos let’s talk about something wonderful that does exist in this game and that’s the HUD free gameplay you
can turn the HUD off and the HUD off and enshrouded while I don’t suggest it the moment you step in once you do once you become aware of the way the game wants you to interact the expectations it has for you and your own ability to track what’s going on as well there’s a hefty amount of understanding you’re going to need for which weapons you have in which spots but once you do it I thoroughly enjoy no HUD gameplay in this it’s a mix of the drappier bits of Dragon Dogma bit of Two Worlds even
and not a small amount of valheim but it felt excellent with the Hut off it was more engaging and just one of those things I love to try in every title and because you pretty much already know what to expect once you played it for a little bit being able to turn it off actually works fine I feel like it’s its own thing and then you leap off a Gorge and you Glide down into The Mists as you can hear the gurgling sounds of landscape and the creatures chattering beneath you and you realize to yourself
it is its own thing however small in that regard and each time I returned to the base I started to think myself Survival Games a long time ago a lot of survival games left that back and forth of survival and the elements versus a player kind of mentality behind to add something new there’s almost always a third tier now not just hunger or survival but some new element that games or Gamers slightly feel causes them to be unbalanced that’s the way a lot of these titles work and shrouded is no different with the Shroud this
sickening mystical layer of fog that slowly decays everything in its grasp yet of course many of the atoms you need for survival and building and exploration are within it the idea of the Shroud here as this overall entity that slowly corrupts is a profound one it’s a good one and I feel that they could use it to really keep the world feeling dynamic as they move forward as an early access title I would say don’t leap into in shrouded thinking to yourself that it’s doing anything magically or magnific L different it’s not instead it’s got
a solid idea of how it really wants to handle multiplayer skills building and its worldview and if you’re looking for something new in that realm but not necessarily new in the stable of basic mechanics and gameplay offerings it might be worth checking out now or later when it comes out now if you’ve got this far sorry if I sound off I had covid for the last 10 days I was also out of power for the last 10 days it’s been a little rough on the throat but hey I’m back hope to see you guys during
the podcast or in the Discord or Just Around the Net if you don’t like my stuff hell go subscribe to someone you do love maybe you ended up forgetting to do it in the past it’s always best to do so peace out and expect new videos from me as well as podcasts in the future also huge thanks to all the new YouTube members
