I must add currently VMware Player can open encrypted VMs created from Workstation Pro.

So if you would like to give it a whirl, you can download a Workstation Pro 30 day evaluation. Player is also installed. When the 30 day eval expires, the Pro UI will not be able to start any VM. VMware Player still can run the VM(s).

Given that encrypted VMs also encrypts the virtual disks, I would suggest that the virtual disk(s) of the VM have preallocated storage. This is one other feature Player can't do (create preallocated virtual disks). Haven't tried using encrypted virtual disks without preallocation myself, but my thinking is that given encryption would not allow for contiguous bytes of zeroes, it would be impossible to shrink encrypted virtual disks and these would keep on growing without preallocation.