Enshrouded: where Oblivion meets minecraft!

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
A glib descriptor to be sure, but accurate.

Anywho: I have a type, I know what I like, blah blah blah, moving on.

Potato faced (and shaped!) people, a largely empty world, and a toxic cloud full of angry mushroom men. Welcome to enshrouded. Long story short: drugs destroyed the world, and the only way to get over it was to take highly trained people in their fields, and magically make them sleep till it's over. It didn't end, it got better... and worse. And you! My dear protagonist, are the only person who can rally out into the world at large and rebuild.

Rebuilding, by the by, largely involves getting jump scared by random wolf packs and charging feral boars. I don't know if it's a glitch on the sounds, or something, but they will sneak up on you.

Anyway: it's an ARPG style game, with a voxel based base building system. There is a tool/weapon crafting system in there; based entirely on which craftsman you have, which stations they have, and your general level and resource access. Find a new material, get access to new build stuff. Pretty standard mechanic. There's a weak assed weapon upgrading system, based on salvaging found weapons into runes and spending runes to open secondary traits, but so far it seems like you can only upgrade found weapons? I have yet to make one that has extra traits. But you routinely find better equipment than what you craft, and you tend to quickly out level the hand crafted stuff.

Souls-esque combat, I guess. Enemies just swarm you, so unless you can dodge well, or have a good shield, or ludicrously high DPS; YOU need to be tactical, they don't. You'll lose. A lot. You have your option between 1 and 2 hand weapons, bows, and various forms of magic. Magic comes as staves and wands. Wands are superior: they use no mana, take no charges, and allow you to move while casting. The range is fairly short, and damage is not great, but speed and literally unlimited ammo make the difference. Staves use mana, require spell charges (so fire, lightning, ice, heal, stuff like that.) and lock you in place when you cast. Swords are pretty good too, two handed weapons are just way too slow until you're well invested into the barbarian skill tree.

Anyway, the game stands out with it's base building. It's all centered around your flame altar. You can upgrade your altar in two ways: the first expands the area in which you can build (prevents enemy spawns.) and global buffs to you. The stronger the flame, the higher the level of shroud you can "safely" (for measures of safe: there are angry mushroom men with swords, giant bugs, and poison spitting plants down there!) pass through, and the longer you can stay in it. Upgrading the flame is key to opening up more of the map and pushing the story forward. The more comfortable the base you build, the longer your well rested buff lasts, and the higher your stamina cap. You can build something 1 voxel at a time, or the construction hammer lets you build prefab components to quickly knock out something. All the voxels are made of base resources at the workbench. Sometimes just finding a new material is enough to trigger a new voxel schematic, sometimes the voxel (and its build access.) are quest rewards. I went from a crude stick hut with a dirt floor, to a well bricked, timbered plastered inn, with a sunken work room and two bathrooms... cause I don't share those. Let the craftsmen fight over it.

My two singular complaints are such:

1.) there is no ******* pause button! It's obvious they meant this to be a cooperative game, because even when playing in the solo mode, there is no way to interrupt the game. Time flows even when in the menu. Which means if you have to walk away for a bit: you have to quit to main menu or desktop. And it will always respawn you at the closest flame altar, so you lose a lot of travel progress if you get interrupted.

2.) The game puts a LOT of emphasis on up and down, but it is MASSIVELY hard to go up. You can't climb (other than ladders and grillwork.), you have a grapple hook, but it only attaches to specific points in the world. Getting height, either to escape the shroud, enemies, or over come obstacles requires lots of walking away from where you were trying to go, or using the rather flimsy tools to dig up. You can't building outside your altar range, so you can't just nerd pole. There's USUALLY a way to get where you're trying to go, but figuring out the one path (in a game that went insane on the fog effects.) can frustrating and tiresome.
 


Top Bottom