// PC GAMER — GAMING
Enshrouded 1.0 review
The fog of war clears around Embervale, revealing a survival crafting masterpiece.
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What is it? A high-fantasy survival crafting RPG set in the genre's most impressive sandbox. Release date: October 15, 2026 (1.0) Expect to pay: $40/£35 Developer: Keen Games Publisher: Keen Games Reviewed on: RTX 4080, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB RAM Steam Deck: Verified Link: Steam | Official site
High up on a mountain in the Albaneve Summits, just on the southern border of Enshrouded's new zone, I spot the perfect place for my next medieval building project. It seems safe with no nearby enemy spawns on the flat stretch of land, and there's even a cute frozen pond that gives it real Christmas-card appeal. I love it, and I'll love it even more once I've built a cliffside castle.
The only problem is I can't find a way up by climbing or gliding, so I'll have to make my own. I could build something, but that takes time, and I'm impatient. Instead, I behave like an absolute heathen—I bomb and pickaxe the hell out of the mountainside, carving a tunnel from the base to the top. It doesn't look great, but that's a problem for tomorrow's Flameborn.
That's always been one of my favorite parts of Enshrouded: you can destroy or build practically anything, anywhere in Embervale's voxel-based world. It's a survival crafting sandbox filled to the brim with handcrafted details, and every location still hidden by the fog of war could hold a new material, powerful weapon, or scenic vista. There's nothing quite like it, and just like the updates before, Enshrouded's 1.0 build keeps finding new, inventive ways to impress me long after I thought its well of surprises had run dry.
Enshrouded is a weird one. Not quite a traditional survival crafting game, but not a typical action RPG either. Its combat system and base building options are far more robust than most of its survival crafting cousins, but it's not nearly as brutal. I'm driven less by desperation and more by a desire to explore Embervale—a land devastated by a mysterious, malignant miasma known as (you guessed it) the Shroud. There's hardly a soul left in the world, so you learn more about its history from journals. Some are hastily scribbled by would-be heroes like you, while others are tragic retellings of someone's final days.
A few survivors remain as recruitable NPCs for your base. I love how lively they make player-made homes feel, even if the AI is a bit dopey.
One of my favorite additions in 1.0 is the voiceover added to every journal. The same narrator reads them all, giving the whole thing an endearing storybook feel as he shifts tone and pitch for different authors.
I found my favorite journal in a tiny, mountainside cave left by an old man grieving his wife. You can wander around the surrounding area for more environmental storytelling, but I have to warn you: some details got me teary-eyed.