How do you like your survival games? A nice bit of wood chopping while the birds chirp? Gathering some mushrooms while you deflect a little goblin’s swings? Stumbling parched through a desert as a bed of scorpions prick your ankles with deadly venom? Well, Enshrouded may provide some or none of these experiences, but what its latest update does is capture their spirit. You’ll now be able to choose from several difficulty presets to dampen or spice up the game’s challenge. Otherwise, there’s new customisation options and some quality of life tweaks, too.
Across all of the game’s modes (singleplayer, co-op, dedicated servers), there’s now four standard settings: Default, Relaxed, Hard, and Survival. Default is recommended as a first-time gig for new players, Relaxed is for those seeking a chill base-building time, Hard increases the amount of enemies and makes them tougher, while Survival is “for those who seek some punishment with additional survival mechanics on top of more aggressive enemies”. We’re talking hunger and dropping your backpack on death – fun.
What’s nice is that each of these modes can be tweaked for an added personal touch. Enemy damage, boss health, duration of buffs, and many other things can be toned up or down. The devs mention a “starvation mode”, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic.
Elsewhere, there’s new improvements to blocking and parrying, as well as better transitions between weapon switches. Crafting menus also now have bigger preview images, and changes to their layout make them easier to navigate. Some points of interest have been reworked and new locations added to Blackmire and Kindlewastes, like temples, caves, and enemy camps.
In our Enshrouded review, Ollie thought it had the best building in the survival genre and reckoned it was well worth a play: “If you can get on with Enshrouded despite its early access quirks and underwhelming premise, you’ll find a rock solid foundation for what I really believe could one day be one of the most popular and well-thought-of survival crafting games out there”.
If you’re keen (heh) to check out all the changes, you can peruse them over on Steam.
