Build some sick castles in the demo for fantasy survival game Enshrouded

A demo for fantasy survival game Enshrouded has hit for this October's Steam Next Fest, and the action-RPG survival adventure is looking pretty good for fans of having cool fights, surviving the wilds, and building sick castles.

Announced earlier this year, Enshrouded quickly caught our attention for the developers' pitch concept. They wanted to make a co-op game that was "Valheim meets Zelda" in a larger RPG framework, one where you'd build an entire town with NPCs inhabiting it rather than just an empty outpost for you and your friends.

We didn't just like the voxel-y building mechanics that enable you to pretty much just smoosh stuff together into a cool house, though those look really sweet, we also liked the look of its exploration. Early trailers showed off leathery gliding suits used to soar above and through the fog of the world, as well as grappling hooks to climb trees and ancient ruins.

"The demo will offer a wide range of gameplay possibilities that players can customize to suit their personal adventuring style: building, fighting, befriending the first Legendary artisan, the Blacksmith, exploring, terraforming, tearing down, leveling up, and more. Within the pre-defined demo area, eager players will be able to construct, combat and craft in, either co-op or solo gameplay," says developer Keen Games.

Enshrouded is set in a devastated world where your character, the Flameborn, has to try and built Altars in order to rediscover and reclaim a realm shrouded in very dangerous monster-making mystical miasma.

The demo's decent, if rich with reported technical bugs that I don't see on my rig but some performance and optimization issues that I do. The Steam discussions are pretty much the usual mess of people for any highly anticipated game demo, split between begging for immediate release and catastrophizing about technical issues.

You can go play the demo of Enshrouded on Steam, where it doesn't yet have a release date. It's made by Keen Games, the company that previously made Portal Knights.

Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

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