If the embed above misbehaves, the launch trailer is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp7PZXkyxxY
Early access is the gaming equivalent of a Victorian engagement. Everyone agrees it is going somewhere, nobody is quite sure when, and the relatives long ago stopped asking. Keen Games, to its credit, has actually got Enshrouded up the aisle. The fantasy survival RPG left Steam early access on 15 October, some two years and nine months after it first appeared in January 2024, and launched on PlayStation 5 (with PS5 Pro support) the same day. The Xbox Series X|S version is due in spring 2027.
The players have turned up in force. On its first weekend as a finished game, Enshrouded hit a 24-hour peak of 102,491 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB, roughly six times its September high of just over 17,000. That is still short of the 160,405 it managed in its giddy first week of early access, when only Palworld had a bigger Steam launch that year, but for a game much of the internet assumed had already peaked, it is a very respectable second wind. Steam reviews remain Very Positive, with 87 per cent of around 50,000 English-language reviews giving it the thumbs up.
For anyone who missed it first time round, you play one of the Flameborn, waking in the ruined kingdom of Embervale as it is swallowed by the Shroud, a corrupting fog you can only survive inside for a limited time before it has you. John Carpenter fans will need no further explanation. Up to 16 players can share a world, and the voxel building system, which lets you dig, terraform and raise pretty much anything you can imagine, is what has kept people coming back. Players have built everything from thatched cottages to a full-scale dwarven city out of The Lord of the Rings, without a single mod.
Version 1.0 finally opens up the north of the map with Cinder’s Cradle, a volcanic wasteland with the floating islands of the vanished Ancients hanging overhead, and brings the main story to its conclusion. There are 14 new enemy types, the level cap rises to 50, mages gain nine new kinds of spell, and Flame altars upgraded to the final level can at last push the Shroud back. Builders get a free-flying mode for those awkward cathedral spires, and a new Sparkworks system lets players wire up interactive contraptions for home-made dungeons and minigames. The lore notes scattered about the world are now narrated, in German by Dietmar Wunder, Daniel Craig’s regular German voice, so 007 is effectively reading out the diaries of dead peasants. Existing worlds are backed up and converted automatically, although skill trees are reset, so veterans will have some re-spending to do.
Keen’s patch notes deserve a nod too, because they are funnier than most games. The tumbleweeds have been temporarily removed while the developers sort out their glitches, survivors have been taught to stop squeezing through gaps that only a xenomorph could manage, and players can now name their storage chests. Keen named one of theirs Jeff. Any studio that writes a changelog with that much affection has plainly enjoyed the long haul.
Enshrouded is out now on Steam, where an introductory ten per cent discount runs until 29 October, and on PS5. If you have been waiting for it to be finished, it is. Mostly. This is a survival game, after all, and Keen promises updates for years to come. In Embervale, as in life, the fog never quite lifts.
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