Steam’s next big hit is yet another survival game, but with ARPG combat

Steam Next Fest is one of the best ways for game developers to expand the potential audience of their games before they're even out. The point of the fest, of course, is all the free demos, and the most recent (October) edition had over 900 of them.

According to a new report, one game in particular captured the hearts and minds of Steam users more than any other: Enshrouded.

That name likely won't sound familiar to you, and it certainly wasn't to me. According to the Game Discover Co newsletter, however, Enshrouded was Steam Next Fest's biggest hit. The way this is calculated is based on the number of followers a game gets after the release of its demo as part of the fest.

In this case, Enshrouded attracted 14,300 new followers, which is almost double that of the next closet game. According to the data, Enshrouded already had a healthy following even before the festival.

Enshrouded also attracted the highest number of concurrent players for any of the demos, at 5,347 players. The game's demo is actually still available, and you can get it off the Steam store page.

So what is it? Well, Enshrouded is a co-op survival game. It blends the survival elements of many, many popular games with action RPG combat. Anything with group survival in it, as we've recently seen with all the positive buzz around Bellwright, is bound to be a hit on Steam.

Enshrouded is different, however, in that it leans harder into its action combat. You still get your typical rock-and-stick gameplay of gathering ingredients, crafting, building settlement and so on, but the main hook appears to be what happens when you venture out of your camp to hunt monsters.

Enshrouded shares a few similarities with Valheim, which also had more interesting combat than your typical survival game. The game does not yet have a release date, but it will arrive through Steam Early Access first - as most of those games tend to.