Erenshor

The online RPGs of the late 1990s and early 2000s demanded two things modern players rarely have to spare: long evenings and other people. Corpse runs, camp spots, pickup groups and guild drama only worked because a server full of strangers shared the same slow, dangerous world. Remove the strangers and most of the appeal goes with them. That is why so many single-player “MMO-likes” end up as empty theme parks with hotbars.

Burgee Media’s answer is to keep the server and fake the population. The studio pitches Erenshor as a love letter to that era, and its defining mechanic is the SimPlayer: a simulated companion, driven by state machines and decision trees rather than a large language model, that lives in the world persistently. SimPlayers level on their own whether or not the player is logged in. They buy and sell loot, form guilds, send group and raid invitations, and remember how the player treats them. Around them sits a substantial RPG skeleton: six classes, more than 36 zones, over 1,200 items, respawning enemies and factions that react to violence.

The game is in Steam Early Access. Content covers levels 1 to 35, with an estimated 80 to 130+ hours for a first playthrough. Raids and endgame content are planned ahead of a full release targeted for 2027. Burgee Media has also committed to no microtransactions, ever. That removes the monetisation anxiety hanging over most games that borrow MMO structure, since the genre’s grind loops are exactly where storefronts usually get bolted on.

Reception has been strong, with a Very Positive rating on Steam. GameRant called it “MMO comfort food for busy adventurers”, and GamesRadar and NicheGamer have also praised it. The recurring caveat is scope: Early Access ends at level 35 and the endgame does not exist yet.

The positioning is narrow and smart. The core audience is veterans of early online worlds who no longer have the schedule for a live raid roster. A second audience is players who want to understand what the fuss was about without applying to a guild.

• SimPlayers: Rule-driven simulated adventurers who level independently, trade loot, form guilds, invite the player into groups and raids, and remember past behaviour.
• An ungated world: More than 36 zones, including cities, dungeons, tombs, caves and mountain ranges, all open to travel regardless of whether a character is ready for them.
• Deliberate, deadly combat: Fights reward positioning and strategy, and the design treats carelessness as fatal.
• Consequential factions: Settlements respond to player actions. Wiping out a town closes some doors and opens others.
• Loot-driven progression: Over 1,200 items, including rare and legendary drops. Every NPC respawns and drops loot.
• Alt-friendly character slots: Multiple characters share a bank, and later characters receive XP bonuses.
• Six classes: A compact roster that anchors party composition with SimPlayer companions.
• Clean monetisation: No microtransactions, as a standing commitment.

The SimPlayer Bet

Everything in Erenshor depends on whether simulated players can do the job real ones once did. Choosing state machines and decision trees over a language model is the most important design decision in the game, and we think it is the right one. An LLM companion can talk about anything and commit to nothing. A decision-tree companion does fewer things, but it does them inside the game’s rules. A SimPlayer selling loot moves an item through the economy. A SimPlayer forming a guild or sending a group invite creates a structure the player can act on. A fake MMO population is worth what it changes in the world, and Erenshor builds for that.

Persistence matters just as much. SimPlayers progress whether or not the player is logged in, so the world refuses to wait. That reproduces one of the defining sensations of early online games: a server that moved on without you, where yesterday’s peers might now out-level you.

The memory system gives conduct a cost. In most single-player RPGs, treating a party member badly is consequence-free. Here, SimPlayers remember, so social behaviour carries forward. That is the closest a solo game can come to building a reputation on a server.

The risk is legibility over time. Rule-based agents are predictable by construction, and long-haul players reverse-engineer predictable systems. If SimPlayer behaviour becomes readable as a set of triggers, the illusion of a population thins. With a first playthrough estimated at 80 to 130+ hours, that illusion has to hold for a very long time.

Combat and the Open Map

Combat is built to be deliberate and deadly, with positioning and strategy treated as requirements rather than refinements. That fits the source material, where one careless pull could wipe a group. It also gives SimPlayer companions a reason to exist: a group only matters when a solo character cannot brute-force the content.

The world design is more contentious, and more interesting. Zones are traversable at will regardless of readiness. There is no level gate, no soft wall of scaled enemies and no guarantee that the next valley suits the current character. Burgee Media’s own framing is to expect to get lost and learn hard lessons, and that tells players exactly what kind of game this is. We think it is the correct call for this audience. Danger the player chose to walk into teaches a map better than any quest marker, and it restores the sense of geography that level-scaled modern RPGs flatten. Players raised on guided onboarding will hit heavy friction early, and Burgee Media treats that friction as the point.

Respawning NPCs that all drop loot complete the old-school loop. Camping a spot for a rare drop becomes a legitimate strategy rather than an exploit, and a 1,200-item pool is deep enough to sustain that grind as a hunt. Factions add the counterweight. Wiping out a town reshapes which doors are open, which turns violence into a branching decision rather than a line of moral flavour text. Paired with respawning enemies, the result is a world that restocks its monsters but keeps track of what the player has done.

Progression and the Alt Loop

Six classes is a lean roster for a genre that sold itself on archetype breadth. The shared bank and XP bonuses for later characters show where Burgee Media expects replay value to come from instead. Passing gear from a main to an alt was an MMO ritual, and Erenshor builds it into the save structure. A new character can draw on banked resources and levels faster. That is a sensible incentive while the content ceiling sits at 35, because the obvious thing to do at the cap is start again with a different class.

Early Access Scope

The content ceiling is the main caveat. Level 35 with no raids means the game currently delivers the climb and not the summit. In this genre, the summit was where social systems paid off: large, coordinated encounters that only worked because dozens of people showed up. Raid invitations from SimPlayers are part of the design, but dedicated raid and endgame content is still planned rather than shipped, with full release slated for 2027. Buyers today get an estimated 80 to 130+ hours, a substantial amount of content by any measure. They are also buying a promise about the second half.

Erenshor’s aesthetic brief is nostalgia for late-90s and early-2000s online worlds, so the fair test is mood and readability rather than modern fidelity. The zone roster of cities, dungeons, tombs, caves and mountain ranges gives the environments range. The insistence on unguided exploration also puts heavy weight on landmark design. A game that wants players to get lost needs terrain distinct enough for them to eventually find their way.

The interface carries an unusual load for a single-player game. Group invitations, guild membership, loot trading and companion relationships all need to surface information the way an MMO client did. SimPlayers only work as far as that information is legible: a simulated population the UI hides is indistinguishable from no population at all.

On the technical side, the single-player structure removes classic MMO pain points by design. There are no server queues, no shared-world latency and no maintenance windows. Running SimPlayers on state machines and decision trees also points to a lighter computational footprint than a language-model approach would need, with no dependence on external AI services.

Steam is Erenshor’s only platform, so there are no parity concerns between versions. Positioning-heavy, ability-driven combat in the classic MMO mould maps naturally to mouse and keyboard, the input method the genre grew up on.

The Early Access label shapes the purchase more than the platform does. Content arrives through updates, raids and endgame are still to come, and the full release is targeted for 2027. The Steam review history reflects a build that is still changing, and reception has been warm. The no-microtransactions pledge means the store listing is the whole transaction, with no cash shop layered on top.

Every single-player MMO-like runs into the same problem: the genre’s best moments were social, and the player is alone. Erenshor’s SimPlayers are a credible, systemic answer. They are rule-driven companions who level, trade, form guilds and remember, and they give a solo world the texture of a populated server. Burgee Media pairs them with a world that keeps the era’s hardest edges: open zones that will kill an unprepared character, respawning enemies worth farming, and factions that close doors when a town burns.

The limits are clear. Six classes is thin, unguided design is a filter rather than a welcome mat, and the endgame that would give SimPlayer raids their full meaning does not exist yet. Even so, 80 to 130+ hours of content with no microtransactions is a fair offer for the audience it targets. We rate it Good. We recommend it to MMO veterans and solo loot hunters who can accept an unfinished endgame; players who need a finished raid scene can wait for the content planned before the 2027 release.