Impressions: ERENSHOR (Burgee Media, 2025, Early Access, Demo)
Playing video games in front of a camera and then writing about it? Why, that's almost as novel as a single-player MMO!
Click to watch me play Erenshor. People aged thirty or so and up call this a "Let Us Play."
I log in to Erenshor with a username and password that don't actually exist. I connect to servers that are located nowhere. And when I create my character, Arnold Shore (I've been playing Death Stranding, can you tell?), the chat interface nestled in its familiar spot in the bottom-left corner of the screen fills with communiqués for trading, grouping, and socializing. WTB, WTS, LFG, LFM—the gang's all here.
"brb pizza's here," shouts Cyndara.
Except Cyndara isn't real. Or at least, she's only as real as any other non-player character, as any other simulated social entity in this simulated social world. She's definitely not real enough to eat pizza. But I'd bet, if I found her, she'd stop moving for a little bit, anyways.
The world of Erenshor is designed to appeal to players like me: lapsed aficionados of the once inescapable, yet now increasingly niche, genre of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game. (MMOs, MMORPGs, whatever you want to call them.) It's pitched as a return to a simpler, but deeper kind of gaming, with rich character customization, mechanically simple but strategically nuanced combat, and perhaps most importantly, environments filled with mysteries to uncover.
It's precisely this latter aspect that has, for players like me, so regrettably fallen by the wayside in proper—that is, actually online—MMOs. As soon as any new content releases, a loud and very presumptuous segment of the playerbase inevitably crunches the numbers and quantifies the ideal strategies for dealing with its challenges. Moreover, as Dan Olson of "Folding Ideas" has discussed at length, this same bunch then expects everyone else to follow their lead.
Why wouldn't you want to play the game in the optimal way? Why would you want to figure anything out yourself? And, sure, even if you'd rather play the game your way, if you find yourself stuck or lost or sub-optimal, you're not 14 anymore, pal. Do you really want to waste your valuable free time running around without a clue? Why not just hop over to Reddit and see what you're supposed to do. . . ?
(The title of this newsletter is, to some extent, a play on this exact style of play: theorycrafting. Here, I just do it critically!)
It's a tricky problem that I remain hopeful some enterprising and ingenious developers will someday solve in a multiplayer environment. Until then, Erenshor simply takes away the tension, by ousting the other players.
As you'll see if you watch the playthrough video above—which I encourage you to do!—I had a good time playing the demo here. I liked getting lost and puzzling out how to complete the quests I encountered. (Even if I didn't actually complete all the quests I had available to me in the demo.) And I even got a little sad when a glitch prevented me from grouping up with the gang I'd been rolling with since level 2, whose names, just as in a real MMO, I couldn't help but mispronounce. (Sorry, Leliril. You'll always be Lerril to me.)
At the same time, it just doesn't quite scratch the itch. Call me old fashioned, but I think there remains a certain spark to loading into a tutorial zone for the first time and seeing even just a couple other people there, too. They might be bots, they might be alt accounts of experienced players, or they might be noobs, just like you. But the important thing is they're there, even if you have nothing to say to each other.
It makes me wonder if, as Erenshor continues through its Early Access development, its designers might do something more interesting with its simulation. What avenues for estrangement open when you imagine what can be done in an MMO if you don't have to worry about, y'know, the Massively Multiplayer Online part? Everybody who wasn't there, but knows about it, wishes they'd been around to see the in-universe server-crash that ended The Matrix Online, or to catch the Corrupted Blood plague in World of Warcraft that infamously inspired actual epidemiological studies. Maybe something like this is already in the game and—here's the exciting part—I just don't know about it!
Lots of games these days will simulate real-life activities like driving a truck, running a farm, or powerwashing your deck. Others, more fantastical, might simulate a different kind of media interaction, like a police database, a bizarro internet, or an alien television network. But I'm especially intrigued by the idea that Erenshor proffers alongside stuff like UFO 50 and, hell, maybe even Madden. A game that simulates another game.
POF
