Maybe because I hadn't spent the last week gathering many of the same resources, when I popped into Enshrouded it got me pretty cranked up. Also, my damp larvae have brought back another January illness, the second one this month, so I'm kinda goof troop right now.
I can't imagine what it would be like to release a game in the same genre as Palworld, which has apparently sold eight million copies now. It has many munchkin, munchkin plural, and co-op games that hit have this crazy force multiplier for sales built-in. Enshrouded is currently at number three on the sales chart, just under Tekken 8, so I suspect there's a significant delta. But still! Not absolutely blown out.
A lot of people are gonna be mega locked-in to (pal) worlds they've spent building, engaging in a few of the self-same obsessive rituals. It reminds me of MMOs back in the day, where they were all just trying to WoW as fast as their little feet could carry them. The sound of someone skinning a kill in World of Warcraft makes my teeth itch. I developed something like an allergy to the loop itself that can assert itself even today. I sorta have to save myself for them if I don't want to just immediately bounce off.
Here's the things that I really liked about Enshrouded.
- Character progression doesn't exist along a class axis in the traditional sense - it has an element of the Path of Exile ultrapervert sphere grid thing that suggests roles out at its extreme edges, but roll your own is very real.
- It's a building game where the building experience is very clean and very nice. Surprisingly, that is not always the case in the genre.
- Combat and world interactions feel very good also. It's possible to die from something that just feels sorta jank very often in games like this, so common that you sorta tolerate it; it feels like an ante you have to pay to receive the rest of the experience. But blocking, range, movement, dodging, and even position all feel really solid.
- The aesthetic works for me, these ruins make me want to check them out, and the "enshrouded" areas - wait, that's the name!!! - enforce mysterious areas mechanically, limiting the time you can spend inside.
It really feels like a videogame, in essence. And I know that there are lots of things that the term applies to, but sometimes in this genre you get a lot of things inside and outside of Early Access that we might call Experiences. I'm not sure I would play it solo, but I have in my intimate circle many who are familiar with the axe.
(CW)TB out.
