Big game today. Ranked #210 on Steam by reviews. It's a bit of an insane game. It's Kenshi. I hear it was developed over 13 years by a small team, maybe just a couple of people, and honestly, it feels exactly like that, in the best way possible. Well, aside from the part where you will feel incredibly lost at the start of the game, as almost nothing of this complex world is explained.
It's a bit difficult to pinpoint what exactly Kenshi is. It's a bit of everything. An open-world sandbox management survival RPG. There's a lot you can do in this game, and full playthroughs that let you experience everything take about 300 hours. While there are definitely different ways to play the game, it may be a bit more narrow than I initially thought. Let's go through my expriences of the game, and explore it that way.
There are a few different starts to the game, claiming to offer a different gameplay experience. I wouldn't agree with that, because you can change literally everything that makes your start unique. And that's part of Kenshi's pitch - you're not special, you're just another nobody in a big world. Many starts are with a single person of a certain race, perhaps with existing relations to other factions. You may indeed get attached to your starting character and the faction they initially support, but it's easy to just recruit someone new and start over if you so wish.
I wanted to have a fresh start so I started naked in the middle of a desert, hiding from hordes of bandits and giant bugs that could all outrun and kill me. I stayed alive by scavanging the aftermaths of battles. Basic gear from dead bandits, meat from the bugs, grill it over a fire, stave off starvation. I grabbed as many valuables as I could carry (and still manage to run away from threats) and made my way to the nearest town. Most likely in the interest of balance, equipment and weapons are expensive to buy, cheap to sell, and whatever the bandits had was near worthless. Still, I got enough for a small backpack so I could bring in more next time, and set out towards the next town, unsure where I was headed in the long-term.
Towns aren't very different from each other. Smaller ones may not have all the shops, and sell worse gear, and outposts may only be dedicated to military or slavery, and be of little interest to a lone adventurer. The desert I was in was a huge area controlled by the largest human faction that heavily practiced slavery. Both the giant murder bugs and the lack of potential to grow crops made me think this isn't the best place to settle down, so I continued on. Slowly, I got better gear from scavanging, enough food to be well-fed, and got better at running and carrying things, allowing me to start picking fights with smaller groups or ones half-dead from a fight. Attacking any major faction was a bad idea, but most things in this game wouldn't kill you. They'd knock you out, loot your food, and if you were tough enough, you'd wake up in a few minutes instead of succumbing to your injuries.
This might be a great time to talk about the RPG elements of the game. Kenshi is very swordfighting focused, with a beautiful combat system. Characters actually swing their weapons, and attacks usually have to physically connect to deal damage. A bit of it is faked by characters "taking turns" in fights, but regardless, it's beautiful to see blades clashing, attacks being blocked, sometimes a hit going through, the enemy getting staggered. Health is limb-based, with your head and torso being vital organs, causing unconciousness and death upon damage, but otherwise relatively useless to combat. Limbs are quite the opposite, becoming useless if damaged, but not threatening your life. Cuts need bandages, lest they continue to get worse, and recovering from wounds takes a long, long time. Every skill, combat or not, is trained by using it. Even just a 10 level difference is a huge advantage, and after 20-30 levels over your enemies, you may be able to start taking down entire squads alone. But the same is true for your enemies, and the game doesn't scale to you. It will throw level 70 enemies at you at the start if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Anyways, I played the game as an RPG for a while, roaming the world alone, seeing new and wonderful new places, people, and animals. I think the joy of exploration is the best part of the game, so I won't spoil what I found, but generally the playable and friendly (as in, won't kill you on sight) races are in a diagonal from the bottom left to the top right, and the other two corners of the world are increasingly hostile areas. But the one thing I found during my travels was that just about every piece of this godforsaken land was near-inhabitable. There was no "good" place to settle, only bad or worse. The only area with any greenery was controlled by religious zealots who hated women, and unluckily for me, I was playing as one. But after seeing a lot of what the world had to offer, and being mauled and cut unconcious and half to death what must have been close to 100 times, I finally chose a place to settle near an acid river with torrential blood rain and unsettling bug people. Despite their appearance, they are the friendliest race in the game and the only one who will never be hostile towards you unless you straight up attack or rob them. They are also poor and have only the most basic things up for trade.
Settlement building is the other large part of the game, and while it's not stricly necessary, it's by far the best source of large quantities of food, quality gear once you learn how to make it, and money from selling everything you make. After setting up some rudementary mines, storage, a research bench to learn how to make new things, and earning enough money, I went on a search for my first recruit. They're somewhat expensive, but manual labor is terribly slow, and an extra pair of hands makes all the difference. After finding one and carrying her unconcious ass sucked half dry by blood spiders she was too weak to fight and too slow to outrun back to the camp, I set up automated tasks for her to tend to all the farms and prepare food while I went out to find more people.
Progress was very slow at first, as better methods of mining and processing are locked behind research, and research needs books, which cost money, which I also needed for more people. Luckily, the area was rather safe, aside from the occasional gorilla mauling my entire camp and then leaving. Slowly but surely, the town grew to over a dozen people and money started to become somewhat abundant. I wondered if the rest of this game would be this colony sim, but I soon hit another block. Research wanted more than just books, yet no one would sell them. While playing without a settlement is possible, playing without exploring is not. I gathered a small squad of my best fighters, outfitted them with my best equipment, packed rations, and set out to explore yet again, leaving the rest to tend the outpost.
I was about 50 hours in by this point, and this was where my patience started to wane. See, almost no matter how strong you are, you will take a hit in fights, exponentially more so if fighting against many enemies. My original character was strong from tens of hours of exploring the world, but I didn't have the time to invest that much into everyone else as well, and so most fights they got knocked out, and I was left fighting most of the battle. They slowly got stronger, but recovery after each fight took so, so long. Waiting for everyone's wounds to heal, so that they could properly walk, properly fight again, that was the first time I wasn't having fun. But there was no other way. The rest of the game was about the exploration of these hostile areas (and upsetting the balance of power in the world, but that was an even more grand task). Despite the interesting world, and still progressing through the game, I eventually decided it wasn't worth it.
I played Kenshi for a total of about 90 hours, and I generally had fun for the duration. There are a lot of bugs that I didn't mention, and the art and general production quality is very indie-level, but the game itself is unlike anything I've played before. While I would usually say that it's near impossible to make two different games and do them well, I almost feel like Kenshi accomplished this task. I still have the feeling it might have been better if it focused solely on the exploration RPG part, but then again, I'm not sure how to do that without the vital base-building aspect.
There is also the small issue that the game is technically unfinished. I suppose the developer saw the huge interest in the game (and the income from it), and decided to hire a team and start making the sequel, instead of tinkering on this for several more years. It seems to be going well, if equally slow to the first game, so far, and I will most definitely try that when it comes out. But Kenshi itself? It's far from perfect, but it not only gets a recommendation from me, but also earns a spot in my favorite games of all time list. If you like at least most of the genres I listed this game as being earlier, go give it a try. You'll get over the janky and confusing start, and you will love it for a good many hours.
