Just days after the success of Palworld’s initial release, another adventure game — Enshrouded — had its Early Access release on January 24. This Keen Games offering has been getting many flattering glowing reviews on Steam, with its similarities to another highly successful game, Valheim, not going unnoticed.
Enshrouded is set in the land Embervale, where players step into the shoes of Flameborn, the last ember of hope of a dying race. They must survive the terror of a corrupting fog and reclaim the lost beauty of their kingdom by venturing into a vast world, vanquishing punishing bosses, building grand halls, and forging their paths. Most intriguing, this co-op survival action RPG can house up to 16 players at once.
This third-person crafting title has been praised heavily for its building mechanics, with many fans and pundits calling it the best in the survival genre. Such responses from the community have ensured that this title has become the tenth most popular one on Twitch this month and in eight over the past week, even higher than usual suspects like Genshin Impact, Valorant, and Call of Duty: Warzone.
For those unaware, the selling point of Enshrouded is its namesake, the Shroud, a magical fog where multiple enemies reside. It covers large parts of the map, and when players enter it, a countdown begins, with their death certain when the timer runs out.
Of course, the game has seen its fair share of bugs and other issues that have required constant hotfixes, but the overall reaction has been very positive. One of the reasons for this is the caliber of content creators who have taken to it since its Early Access came out yesterday.
The likes of elxokas, alanzoka, CohhCarnage, and 우왁굳 have picked Enshrouded up and racked up heavy airtimes within its massive open world. Another prominent name, shroud, has also been busy learning its tricks and trades, with his experiences playing Valhiem during the height of its pandemic era popularity sure to help.
The names above show just how far and wide this building game has reached, and there's lots seemingly more to come. English and German were its most watched languages at the time of writing — similar to Palworld — with Chinese coming in third.
Moving to comparisons, we start with the obvious one, between Enshrouded and Valheim. Intriguingly, there was minimal build-up for the release of the latter, which only blew up around the summer of 2021 — a few months after its release — thanks to its sudden explosion among prominent online personalities.
The likes of Quin69, GRONKH, AdmiralBahroo, and ZeratoR all racked up watch times in the hundreds of thousands when it came to playing this offering from Iron Gate Studio. Their efforts helped the game rise from a pretty silent start of 61.6KK Hours Watched and 9.6K Peak Viewers to reach pretty dizzying heights by the time life returned to normal.
Meanwhile, Enshrouded notched 1.6M HW and 218.4K PV on its first day, so there's definitely a head start it has received. Someone like zackrawrr, the alternate channel of OneTrue King co-owner Asmongold, must also be mentioned as it remains one of the game's most popular channels.
Some other games that can be compared include Palworld, which registered 4.8M HW and 433.8K PV on its first day of Early Access. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, a much-hyped game from the legendary franchise that was released last October, did 3.3M HW and 200.4K PV, which were pretty underwhelming considering the excitement among fans pre-release.
To conclude, Enshrouded has had a pretty remarkable Early Access release for a game of its standing, and its developer will be pleased with the results so far. With much still to be fixed and tweaked before the final version launches, including on consoles (sometime early next year, as per estimates), many are hopeful the actual game lives up to the expectations created, as they believe it can be one of the most successful games in the open-world crafting and building genre.
