Palworld vs Enshrouded: Which Survival Game Should You Play?

It is an unprecedented time for survival crafting game enjoyers. Palworld and Enshrouded have launched within days of each other. While they have some big similarities, they also couldn’t be more different. So, between Palworld and Enshrouded, which survival game is worth your time?

Before we continue with the answer to the important question above, let’s break down each game a little bit for better context.

What Is Palworld?

Image Source: Pocketpair

Almost no introduction is needed for the Early-Access game that has sold over 6 million copies in the first 5 days of its release alongside a record-breaking peak of 2 million concurrent players on Steam. Beyond those insane numbers, Palworld is an open world survival crafting game that revolves around the finding, capture, and continual labor of over 100 cute creatures in the 5th Unreal Engine.

It’s Pokemon meets Ark Survival in a lot of literal ways. Additionally, there are many parts of Palworld that feel rather uninspired and could be interpreted as nearly directly copied from other, more focused games. However, it is the smartly created sum of those parts that has made Palworld a phenomenon capable of infuriating Pokemon fans.

What Is Enshrouded?

Image Source: Keen Games

On the other side of the survival crafting coin comes Enshrouded that was released earlier today at the time of this writing. While Enshrouded doesn’t have any cute creatures to capture and make things for you in your base, the game does have a large and interesting world to explore. This is because Enshrouded’s focus seems to be on its large voxel world and the things you’ll find in it. All while giving you many different tools and resources for very in-depth building and crafting that eclipses what Palworld seems to offer.

It feels safe to say that if Palworld took out its creatures and used the focus that came from that feature to build out the rest of Palworld’s systems, that the result of that refocus would be something closer to what Enshrouded is and delivers.

Round 1: Survival

Image Source: Pocketpair

When it comes to the survival aspect of these two survival crafting games, Palworld opts to go a bit more old-school with its survival design. Unlike Valheim and Enshrouded, Palworld’s food mechanic doesn’t focus around buffing health or stamina. Instead, you’re going to want to continually eat something to keep your hunger gauge full, because when it empties, you’re going to start taking damage and possibly eventually die.

Thankfully, eating in Palworld is really easy to do on the fly from found berries or killed pals, and can even be made automatic. As previously mentioned, Enshrouded’s survival system allows you to craft different foods that give you different buffs to your health, stamina, and other attributes. However, they aren’t strictly needed like in Palworld, which makes Enshrouded’s system more engaging by encouraging you to experiment with foods and potions for different useful buffs. Compared to Palworld’s hunger bar which can be largely ignored once your base automatically makes tons of food, and you have a feeding bag in your inventory. It just becomes too automatic.

On the other hand, keeping your base alive and well functioning in Palworld is incredibly engaging when your pals become overworked, injured, and sick. Which then prompts you to research and develop certain cures and medicines for their afflictions. Or, if that becomes too difficult you may need to permanently shelve your favorite pal or even butcher them. Both games have interesting and engaging survival mechanics that fit their own unique design strengths.

Winner: Draw.

Round 2: Building

Image Source: Screenshot by Twinfinite

Building and crafting is another staple of the genre that both these games find themselves in, and both games have their own strengths and weaknesses. In Palworld, the focus is less on building a detailed home, and more about building an efficient series of workstations, storage chests, and other production lines that your pals can easily navigate with their pathfinding AI. Part of the purpose of this is so you can populate your base with pals and defenses that the pals can use because your base will be raided by wild pals and human factions with guns. This gives your base a strong sense of purpose and placement within the open world.

Whereas with Enshrouded your base is less of a series of production lines and more of a labor of love with lots of personal touches. Your home in Enshrouded also acts as a place where you can house survivors that you find out in the game’s large open world. However, your base won’t be attacked regularly so it is a bit more of a chill, creative building experience, even more so than Valheim. Because of this lack of urgency, I would argue that Palworld’s building system, while less fleshed out, is more engaging with all the upkeep you need to do regularly.

Winner: Palworld

Round 3: Visuals

Image Source: Screenshot by Twinfinite

This is an interesting category because both games are gorgeous in their own advanced ways. Palworld uses Unreal Engine 5 so a lot of what that engine can do is on display: rich textures, gorgeous lighting, long draw distances, detailed shadows, and other modern visual amenities. Additionally, the world, character models, and the Pals themselves are stylized and cute more than they are realistic and cutting edge in regards to fidelity.

Still, Palworld is far from ugly, but there are many aspects of the world itself that, when traveling off the beaten path, feel rather simple and unrefined in its visual design. Much like a first-year college student whipped those sections of the map together to pad out the areas around what feels more hand-crafted.

Meanwhile, Enshrouded uses its own homebrew engine that looks to be just as visually advanced as what Unreal Engine 5 can achieve. While Enshrouded’s visuals are also stylized, it feels less early access with the extra effort the devs put into their world on a visual level. More corners of each part of Enshrouded’s world have that much more detail, while still maintaining detailed textures, advanced lighting effects, and copious modern post-processing effects. This cumulates to one being able to claim that Enshrouded looks like a near generational leap beyond what Palworld currently provides.

Winner: Enshrouded

Round 4: World Design

Image Source: Pocketpair

This is quite the interesting section for two survival crafting games to face off. I say this because both games purposefully avoid using procedural generation when it comes to world building. In other words, both games take an entirely hand-crafted approach, down to every point of interest, chest, and interactable. Both games’ worlds will be the same for each person that finds themselves in them.

Both games also have a variety of biomes too: from green plains and forests to bodies of water, to desert areas, and snowy mountains. Where the differences begin to emerge are in how Enshrouded has crafted their world. Because there are two big distinct differences between Enshrouded and Palworld that are important. Enshrouded’s world is voxel based, which means you can technically destroy most, if not all, parts of Enshrouded’s open world. While Palworld doesn’t allow for any such feature.

The other distinct difference lies in the verticality of both game’s worlds and how Enshrouded utilizes it as a unique form of gameplay. Like its name, half of Enshrouded’s world is shrouded in fog below a certain vertical level. While in that fog, you have a certain amount of time to either escape or find certain objects that can extend your time in that zone until you find and destroy the thing causing the fog—which can be protected by a boss. It is this kind of layered world design, and the fact there aren’t any instanced areas, that makes Enshrouded’s world more fun and rewarding to explore by design.

Winner: Enshrouded

Round 5: Difficulty/Combat

Image Source: Keen Games GmbH via Steam

Both games certainly have their own unique approach to combat. Enshrouded takes a more classic role-playing approach to combat with a focus on melee combat, ranged attacks from bows, magic, and skill trees. While Palworld, on the other hand, is far more of a third person shooter with simple melee mechanics (barely any blocking, no parrying, and only dodging).

That said, a lot of Palworld’s combat comes from watching your pals fight other pals (and human NPCs). While also using the occasional pal ability like letting your monkey pal whip out a gun and shoot enemies for 10 seconds or riding your flying pal and using its abilities. Both games are engaging and give you a variety of tools, but by the end game in Palworld, you’re going to be using automatic guns and huge cannons that lay waste from riding your large, legendary pal. Whereas in Enshrouded, you’ll be using sneak attacks, double jumps, parries, heavy attacks, movement-based attacks, and magical spells to down enemies and bosses.

Both games are fun and have equally viable content in their own unique ways. Additionally, difficulty is largely tied to level differences and weapon and armor tiers for both games. Which leads to encounters being much harder if you are under leveled and under geared, as if you’re supposed to have certain gear by certain points for the difficulty to feel fair. It’s too close to say whether one game does combat or difficulty better than the other when both are so much fun and interesting in their own unique ways.

Winner: Draw

Round 6: Multiplayer

When it comes to multiplayer, both games do a decent job of allowing more than just a few friends to join in on the fun. Palworld’s dedicated online servers and public servers support up to 32 players, while Enshrouded supports up to 16 players. In this case, more isn’t always better. However, what’s important is that when choosing and playing online with friends in Palworld you can’t take your character and use it on another server. You are stuck to that particular friend-hosted, public, or dedicated server if you want to keep your progression.

Meanwhile, Enshrouded allows for you to take your character and move it across servers where you will maintain various important things. Things like:

• Equipment and inventory
• Levels and skills
• Map memory
• Personal crafting recipes
• Previously collected Shroud roots
• Found tutorials and lore texts
• and Towers you found by yourself

This alone is far and above what Palworld offers, unless you are the friend hosting the server for your other friends. Only then will the game allow you to use your single player character in the multiplayer server that you host. The same sadly does not apply to your friends.

Winner: Enshrouded

Overall Winner: Enshrouded

While both games put up a good fight, Enshrouded comes out on top as the better open-world survival crafting game largely in thanks to its amazingly well-designed voxel world, visuals, and gameplay loops that ties back into that intricately designed world. Palworld is still a very fun game and shouldn’t be ignored just because Enshrouded won here today.

Finally, Enshrouded, likewise, shouldn’t be overshadowed by the great success that Palworld has found. Both games are worth your time, it’s just Enshrouded that has a stronger world design and compelling visual exploration.