Image: Keen Games

Hot on the heels of Valheim, another big survival crafting hit graduates from early access today. Enshrouded has been one of the more popular games in its niche for nearly three years now, eschewing gritty survival mechanics in favor of a focus on co-op action RPG adventuring in a highly modifiable world. Today marks the day that players can grapple-hook and glide their way through its entire fantasy setting, and finally finish their quest to push back the titular Shroud, a cursed fog that's been flooding the world with evil monsters and causing trouble for the few non-undead folks still living in the region.

For those who hadn't paid much attention to the game until now, Enshrouded feels like a rich stew of the developer's favorite ideas from across the genre. Yes, there's a deformable voxel world like Minecraft, with some impressive fluid dynamics, but mining and crafting aren't the core of the game, and neither is basic survival - only the very highest difficulty adds hunger mechanics. Like Terraria, you build a town to house an assortment of NPC villagers who'll give you a safe shopping and upgrading hub to return to between adventures.

The world is also hand-crafted, rather than procedurally generated, and built for exploration and questing. This means more structured dungeons and some genuine level design going on, with expeditions into the enshrouded areas both limiting your visibility (it's magic fog) and your time there. Unless you can get to a magic light-source somewhere within the fog, you'll be keeling over and looking at a stressful corpse-run. The game also has a VERY good grappling hook. While you don't have full wall-climbing freedom like in Breath of The Wild, there's plenty of points to swing from, and the rope physics are satisfyingly convincing too.

The launch-day patch notes are, unsurprisingly HUGE. But the biggest addition is the completion of the main game's map, featuring a two-part final zone. Cinder's Cradle contains both a lower region filled with lava, ruins and spicy monsters, and an upper area - an archipelago of flying islands. Plus, of course there's a big bad final boss to throw down with, but you'll probably want to be at or close to the newly-extended level cap before that.

There's more to the main quest than the new zone. The patch notes detail that many existing areas have seen expansion, including two new big dungeons added to the Albaneve Summits and Veilwater Basin areas respectively. The latter of which is every Zelda fan's worst nightmare: A water temple. They recommend bringing a snorkel. I recommend bringing enough explosives to drain the entire dungeon dry.

There's many more monster types to tussle with, with 37 new enemy types added in total, 14 of them found in Cinder's Cradle. And plenty of new ways to blow them up, especially if you're playing as a wizard. Mages get nine new basic spell types, plus more tiers added to existing magic. This includes a whole new necromancy line, letting players raise their own skeleton army, making this a true action RPG.

There's a whole lot of hand-crafted adventure stuff that Keen Games (previously of the cuter adventure sandbox game Portal Knights) have crammed in here, but the v1.0 update also comes with upgrades for the user-made content. Using the new Sparkworks logic system, players can create scripted events and more reactive gameplay in their custom worlds, which can all be shared and accessed from within the game. It's always great to see this kind of power given to a community, and I can only hope great things come from it.

There's a lot more I could ramble about, but those patch notes are BIG. While they've apparently made efforts to transfer from the early access version to v1.0 seamlessly, it might be worth starting a fresh game, as they've also made some improvements to the early game, making this the best time for new players to get on board. Enshrouded is out now for £35/$40, with a 10% launch discount.