Early Access games are often a difficult beast to wrangle with because of how variable the process is between different releases. Some undergo irregular updates and incremental improvements, while others drop huge patches only a few times a year. A poor few have a disastrous period throughout compared to other devs that make the whole process look smooth and easy.
Tentatively, survival action RPG Enshrouded has managed to trend consistently upwards, adding new and well-received features in close conjunction with the game’s sizeable community. The next step for them is the Wake of the Water update, which is arguably the biggest in its history to date, adding a ton of features that do a great job bringing the game forward with meaningful, logical and tangible changes that make the world feel so alive.
If you’re totally unfamiliar with the game up to this point (where have you been), Enshrouded puts you into the shoes of one of the final members of a dying race. You’ll venture out into the world in order to fight enemies, explore the darkest corners of the realm and build your own little slice of civilisation.
The game supports up to 16-player co-op and it’s there that the real strength of the game lies. In conjunction with the genuinely impressive base building tools, you can form structures on an epic scale with friends, and the voxel system the game utilises is one of the best you’ll see in any genre entry.
This latest update, as the title might suggest, focuses on the addition of water to the game, along with a whole new biome that suits the increased moisture levels. It’s a sizable content addition that’s extremely ambitious in scope and, for the most part, it’s one that the development team has pulled off.
To start with the headline act, the water is voxel based and logical in terms of physics. Run water from up high? Gravity will do the work and water will travel downwards, ideally guided by you. Got some kind of containing wall? You can fill it up. It’s a really nice execution of an often mishandled feature that feels much more at home here than it does in most of the other games in the genre.
Your Flameborn character is able to redirect existing flows of water or create entirely new ones, and it’s an impactful addition to your toolkit. Whilst the base building is already excellent, this teeters on the edge of proper, fully-fledged terraforming, and that isn’t an achievement to be sniffed at for a game that is yet to reach its 1.0 version.
As another example, water can be used on the new water wheels to get them spinning in order to power automated crafting factories. Equally, water gates are now also available, allowing you to control exactly how much water flows in and out of your base.
The point of the water being added goes much deeper than a simple party trick or piece of set dressing. The new biomes, making up the region of Embervale, are covered in rivers and lakes that start small as you begin your explorations, before quickly graduating into huge bodies of deep water. As well as making the map feel a lot more varied, you’ll spend plenty of time swimming around for various reasons.
The underwater areas are surprisingly interesting to traverse, with new enemies to confront and treasures to be found. As a mortal, you’ll have limited oxygen to manage, which can be increased with certain consumables and items. It adds a whole new layer to the exploration element of the game, having the knock-on effect of forcing you to change your routes around the map if you’re looking to avoid a swim.
Unlike many games, the developer has gone with the realism-focused choice of making it impossible to just swing your weapon willy nilly whilst underwater. That makes you a sitting duck to some of the creatures that dwell in the deep, so you’ll either have to avoid them, or hop onto dry land in an attempt to shoot them down and kill them off before you get back in.
As you might expect for a survival game that has just added water to proceedings, you are now able to fish to your heart’s content. It’s a relatively simple new activity that allows you to fish for common varieties in any body of water, while you’ll need to follow context clues, and bring your best gear, for a chance at securing the rarest creatures.
The new biome adds a ton of visual variety as well, leaning heavily into the green and verdant to deliver a very different aesthetic to what we have seen in the game thus far.
The final big change is the addition of greatswords as a usable weapon type. As you might be able to get, swinging one of those around is one of the better power trips in the game right now, and it’s worth trying out if only for that.
The Wake of the Water update is live now and totally free for those who own the game already, as part of its Early Access development process.
