How do you like your survival games? A nice game of chopping wood while the birds chirp? Gathering some mushrooms while dodging a little goblin’s blows? Stumbling through a desert where scorpions pierce your ankles with their deadly venom? Enshrouded may not offer some or all of these experiences, but what its latest update does do is capture their spirit. You’ll now be able to choose from a variety of difficulty presets to lower or raise the difficulty of the game. There are also new customization options and some quality of life tweaks.
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There are now four standard settings across all modes of the game (singleplayer, co-op, dedicated servers): Default, Casual, Hard, and Survival. Default is recommended as a first-time job for new players, Casual is for those looking for a relaxed base-building time, Hard increases the number of enemies and makes them more challenging, while Survival is for those “looking for a bit of punishment with additional survival mechanics on top of more aggressive enemies.” We're talking starving and dropping your backpack to die – fun.
The nice thing is that each of these modes can be adjusted for a personal touch. Enemy damage, boss health, the duration of buffs, and A lot other things can be increased or decreased. The developers talk about a “hunger mode” if you're feeling particularly masochistic.
Elsewhere, there are new improvements to blocking and parrying, and better transitions between weapon switches. Crafting menus now have larger preview images, and changes to their layout make them easier to navigate. Some points of interest have been reworked, and new locations such as shrines, caves, and enemy camps have been added to Blackmire and Kindlewastes.
In our review of Enshrouded , Ollie thought the game had the best structure in the survival genre and was worth playing: “If you keep playing Enshrouded despite its quirks and lackluster premise in early access, you'll find a solid foundation for what I truly believe could one day be one of the most popular and well-thought-out survival crafting games on the market.”
If you want to see all the changes (heh), you can check them out on Steam.