once you get dismembered enough times and nearly starve to death and do nothing but drug runs across one of the biggest fucking maps in games with no fast travel for 100 hours you can kick back and play this shit like animal crossing and i decorate my little houses and hang out with my little guys in the village i made except i also grow weed and have to fend off man eating spiders made of flesh and im also a wanted fugitive so the GOP always comes into my swamp and beats my little guys to death with the sword because they hate funky little alien guys (also bc i endlessly lay waste to the holy farmlands the holy nation will pay for what they have done!!!!) and then i go fishing too sometimes bc i have mods for that

Admittedly, I’ve lately been struggling to find a game that fully captivates my attention. Luckily, this all changed with an impulse buy - Kenshi - during the Steam Winter Sale.

Kenshi was made by Lo-Fi Games for PC and is their only product to date, although Kenshi 2 is confirmed to be on the horizon. It was released into Early Access in 2013 and then as a finished game in 2018. It was also, to my understanding, largely the effort of one person. Kenshi roughly translates to swordsman in English, but at the start your character will likely be either a punching bag or food. Yes, food…

Somehow Kenshi has achieved being a rather inspired blend of a single player Runescape and Fallout (no, not the modern ones: I mean, 1, 2, and Tactics).

Perhaps the true beauty of Kenshi is that it is an open Sandbox. There is no main quest, side quests, essential characters or overarching plot to follow; no no no, just like every day life, you are stuck on a rock with what skills you have and make the best of it… Or you can do what I did, and make things worse for everyone else! Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t a history. There is, should you choose to seek it out. There are some characters, books, and even environments that will enlighten you as to what came before.

There are also optional house building mechanics where you can build up your own base, trade hub, or even city. Furthermore, you have crafting which allows you to make your own clothes, armor, weapons, and food. To try to give you some idea of how expansive your options in this game are, I’m going to list all of the skills that I can think of off the top of my head without looking them up: Weapons, Athletics, Swimming, Cooking, Engineering, Armorworking, Weapon Smithing, Science, Assassination, Stealth, Robotics, Lockpicking, and Thievery. To further illustrate, you know the Weapons skill I just mentioned? That’s not a single skill, it’s actually 8 or 9, I couldn’t remember them all without looking them up.

On the weapon side of things you’ve got: Polearms, Bare Fists, Katanas, Sabres, Giant Cleavers, Crossbows, Turrets, and more. By the way, if your strength is high enough, it is entirely possible to punch someone’s arm off… It’s… pretty crazy.

There’s a multitude of stats that affect how good your character (or characters, should you decide to recruit/travel with others) is at combat; there are a few hidden ones too like what species you choose for them. That said, like I stated earlier, you will start the game out weak - regular goats will give you trouble. Somewhat ironically, getting beaten to a pulp - which will increase your toughness stat, should you survive - will make you stronger and more effective at combat. You level up your stats by doing them over and over, although there are some caveats to what works and when.

The combat is really simple, your character handles all of it theirself; no abilities, specials, or anything like that. All you can do is click on who you want them to attack or click away from them to have them flee while praying that they don’t get cut down in the process.

The health system in Kenshi is REALLY interesting. Each extremity has its own health bar and when a certain threshold is reached your character will go unconscious (it’s different for each species). The best thing about this, and I won’t let anyone convince me otherwise, is that it is possible to lose limbs from combat or lack of treatment. Fortunately, it’s possible to get robotic replacement parts should you be skilled enough to buy, steal, or make them!

Also worth mentioning is the inclusion of a blood/oil (depending on if you are a robot - err, sorry, the game calls them Skeletons) and a hunger bar, so it’s entirely possible to bleed out or starve to death as well. I’m going to be real with you, when I saw that there was a hunger bar, I was worried this was going to be The Sims in the desert, where I’d constantly have to stop what I was doing and search for food, but as luck would have it you can actually change how frequently your character or characters get hungry at the start of the game.

Although cruel, Kenshi is generous in the aspects that matter. You can tinker with a lot of settings at the start of the game, like the aforementioned hunger frequency, you can also change the frequency of dismemberments, enemy base spawn rates, squad size, global population, death chance, and things to do with towns you might build like their raid frequency.

You are also provided with a large list of starting states during character creation. These don’t lock you into any one playstyle, but can make for an interesting intro or help you get started toward something you are hoping to achieve with the character. For example, you can start out surrounded by hostile cannibals, traveling in a group, traveling with a dog, or as a slave; just to name a few.

I’ve had a lot of harrowing and funny moments with Kenshi. I think the one that stuck out the most to me was when I tried attacking a wild animal to level up my combat skills, only for it to completely wreck my character. As fortune would have it, it was merciful and left me to bleed out in the middle of the desert. After regaining consciousness and bandaging up my legs to prevent bleed out, I had Stork - my character - begin to crawl to town (his legs were broken), about halfway there I was reminded of the SeaBear from the Spongebob Episode ‘Campfire Song’ as it came back and attacked me again… FOR NO REASON!

There was also a time where Stork was traveling through cannibal territory and after knocking out and mortally wounding tons of malnourished cannibals, he was knocked out by a cheap shot, but luckily his vitals were fine and he was going to make a full recovery… or so I thought. You know what that remaining cannibal did? He picked up my unconscious character and started carrying him back to his camp to eat him. By complete happenstance, a traveling nomad saw and killed the cannibal; thus granting Stork another day at life.

There was even an instance where Stork came across a slave trader colony in the desert and witnessed some bandits that wandered too close to the colony’s wall get set upon by slavers. Taking advantage of the slavers' impending victory, Stork patched up a few of the bandits to prevent them from bleeding out, and he and his companions carried them into town and sold them into slavery. Hey… building an army isn’t cheap!

So yeah, Kenshi is a lot. It’s ultimately what you choose to make of it and how you decide to play. There’s also an active and very healthy modding community whose mods are easily accessible through the Steam workshop.

My praises having been sung, there are a couple of things to be aware of. Firstly, while you can interact with every single character/creature/whatever in the game, it is important to note that you cannot talk to every single one. I’d say that dialogue is limited to a select few characters in each area; somewhere between the 10’s and 20’s, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a negative. It just means that the characters that can be conversed with tend to have something of actual substance to say or some sort of purpose behind their words, whether that is segueing into selling you something, being recruited, checking you for illegal goods, or something else.

The other thing probably goes without saying as to the open-ended nature of the game, but it can be buggy at points. I haven’t run into anything gameplay ending or egregious yet, but I did end up having to leave behind a companion because he got stuck operating a turret and wouldn’t get off it. Granted, I could have reloaded an older save, but his stats were garbage and overall I didn’t deem him worth the effort. There is another answer of sorts, game importing!

Game Importing was made as both a work around for bugs and a new game plus of sorts (should you check the right options). Importing keeps all of your characters, gear, and stats, while also giving you a wide range of optional things to import like: research, buildings you’ve made, major NPCs statuses as alive or deceased, and relationships with factions.

For a game that I’ve seen go on sale pretty frequently for around $15 and having managed to dump 30 hours into whilst barely scratching the surface; I’d say the Kenshi was definitely worth it and I am looking forward to diving further into it after I clear away some of my backlog.

From roving cannibals to beings that emerge from the fog, a variety of enemies await those who attempt to tackle the world of Kenshi!

I mean it with complete sincerity that Kenshi's gameplay loop is great because it is built upon one of mankind's greatest hidden truths: that it's actually fun as hell to play with dolls. Kenshi doesn't have any clear objectives and pretty much every system is designed around creating emergent stories as you puppeteer a legion of little action figures, dress them up, and have them fight battles and eventually build their own GI Joe Command Center. This probably sounds mean but don't get me wrong: Kenshi absolutely rules, and that is because in addition to being extremely imaginative, the other kid you're playing Action Men with is an absolute bastard who will stop at nothing to mercilessly kill or mutilate your favorite guys. He's crafted an intricate and beautiful fantasy world filled with a billion things that want to pull your characters apart. And it's that danger and struggle that sucks you in- you root for your characters, you feel a genuine sense of tension when they're bleeding out and you're unsure if you'll be able to rescue them in time. You want them to succeed so desperately, and it makes it extremely rewarding when they do.

Everyone was unconscious and my lead scientist, Bombingham, was dying. Beep, the iron-willed childlike Hive drone, who Bombingham had always looked after and made repairs to the robotic limbs of, had been crippled, but by the skin of his teeth he managed to crawl through a sea of corpses to patch him up before collapsing himself. It genuinely made me feel something. That's the appeal of Kenshi- the most harrowing playset money can buy.

Hey Hey people, not Sseth here...

Bem-vindo a Kenshi, o jogo que faz você se perguntar se seus olhos foram transportados de volta para a era do PlayStation 1. Os gráficos são tão "charmosos" que você juraria que o desenvolvedor era fanático por polígonos pixelados. Mas calma, porque em Kenshi, a beleza está nos olhos de quem sabe apreciar um visual retro chique.

Sobre a jogabilidade? Ah, ela é mais desengonçada que uma girafa patinando. Controlar seus personagens é tão intuitivo quanto tentar ensinar física quântica para uma galinha. Mas não se preocupe, porque em Kenshi, todos são meio que desengonçados, e isso faz parte do charme. É tipo aquele baile estranho onde ninguém sabe dançar direito, mas todos estão se divertindo.

O mundo você pergunta? Bem, os canibais são tipo vizinhos que sempre querem te convidar para um churrasco... onde você é o prato principal. Os fanáticos religiosos são persistentes como vendedores de seguros. E os bandidos estão mais interessados em roubar sua comida do que qualquer outra coisa. É uma espécie de dieta criminal.

A experiência em Kenshi é como uma obra de arte abstrata: pode não fazer sentido à primeira vista, mas ao se aprofundar nesse universo complexo, uma maravilhosa tapeçaria de desafios, histórias e conquistas se desdobra diante do jogado, uma jornada inesquecível, onde a brutalidade, os gráficos feios e a jogabilidade estranha se entrelaçam para criar algo verdadeiramente único e extraordinário.

Beep....

A very fun game where you can make & meet very wonky looking people and die in the wilderness together.
No story except what you make of it, though there are logs and books to read and (bosses?) to fight.

The repetitive short loading times are very annoying, and most characters have next to no personality. This is part of it being a huge sandbox.

Resource availability makes sense but imo is just really annoying and makes it so that even though one can settle wherever they want*, it's impractical in many locations.
It's cool to be able to build my own settlement, but annoying to have to babysit everyone in it rather than being able to have passive civilians. I'd rather manage guards to keep randos in my settlement safe than manage guards to keep my workers (that I had to equip and assign every job to) safe.
Some objects that should have collision inexplicably do not. When settling an area, one should test large objects (large rocks, uninteractable ruins) to see if they may be pathed through unexpectedly.

Pathing is often broken. Sometimes pathable objects such as walls or bridges are simply not recognized by the AI, leading to some normally accessible areas being inaccessible, or making the AI go very long roundabout ways to get to your settlement.
Moving long distances often requires countless course adjustments, as the map will continually load while your party moves through it and the previous course will become invalid, making your party stop. Invisible loading walls also do this, and can result in your character being killed/wounded/critically injured if evading enemies.
This also leads your characters to sometimes move one direction, provoke the map to load a little more, and then make your characters move the opposite direction since the previous course just became invalid. Even when moving small distances.

The skill gain is neat, but can really drag. Unarmed combat is reasonably weak at first and then becomes ridiculously powerful very quickly.
Stealing is absurdly profitable and significantly reduces game difficulty at first.

The acquisition of wealth becomes pointless after a threshold, as there comes a point not far in where one does not need to spend much money for anything.

Despite all of my complaints, it's a wonderfully fun game with sometimes repetitive scenery and a cute bug named Beep. I am very much looking forward to Kenshi 2.

Kenshi is a janky, clunky and ugly RPG that, for all of its flaws, I still think is one of the best open-ended RPGs I've played. It doesn’t have a storyline to follow, you just get dropped in and have to figure out the rest by yourself. This can make for a difficult early game in the beginning, until you understand how the different mechanic’s work. Due to this, I can’t recommend it to anyone looking for a peaceful and stress-free gameplay experience, nor can I recommend it for an expansive storyline. Kenshi is, for me at least, the definitive make your own story type game. The possibilities are many, and this goes for replayability as well. Many will bounce off Kenshi for the problems mentioned above, but those who aren’t bothered by it will find a truly amazing game.

Story
The world of Kenshi does the heavy lifting, as there is no main narrative to follow. It’s set in the post-apocalypse; however, the apocalypse was very apocalyptic, and it happened very far in the past. Technologically, it’s a weird mix of medieval era and modern day. Like, the most effective ranged weapon is a crossbow, but there are also fully functional autonomous robots. There are also remnants of the old world, like long abandoned ruins or a space lase that randomly fire down to Earth.
That’s one of the four races. The others are: humans obviously, Sheks like humans but more stupid and brutish, and the Hive who are bugmen that make for great manual labour. In addition, there are also many factions, all of which have their own relationships with one another and their own rules. Like the Holy Nation will kill you on site if you have any mechanical part.
As I said it’s a make your own story, the game helps with this by being so cruel, you can’t help but bond with your characters and the suffering they are being put through.

Mechanics and gameplay
It's an RPG, and it has all the elements you would expect. There is combat, base building, skills, and so on. I don’t want to spend the next 10 paragraphs describing all the mechanics, so instead I will give a short summary of one of my playthroughs.
My journey began with my two characters already enslaved by the Holy Nation and working in the Mines. Their names were Eon and Shem. My immediate goal was to obviously escape, and for that Shem was the promising one. He was faster and stealthier. So, one fateful night, I plotted my escape. While the guards were sleeping, Shem would unlock his cage and knock one of them out, take their armour and disguise himself. Everything was going well, until a guard walked in while Shem was stripping the downed guard. Shem was promptly beaten up and put on the cross, he lost an arm. Eon was in the same building while this was taking place, and he managed to escape.
The next few days were spent in hiding, avoiding anything and everything. Eventually, Eon travelled beyond the borders of the Holy Nation. There he made new companions, started a base, smuggled drugs and made a lot of money in the process. During that time, he was also training, he didn’t forget Shem’s sacrifice, and he wouldn’t leave him a slave.
He gathered his strongest warriors and led them through the Holy Nation undetected until they reached the Mines. A great battle took place, Eon’s warriors were strong and their weapons powerful, but the Holy Nation had numbers. Eon underestimated his foe, but he could buy time, just enough for Shem to limp to safety. After the dust settled most of the warriors were dead or met an even worse fate, Eon was back in his chains, and Shem brought himself back to Eon’s base. He would return the favour.
The cycle will continue.

Graphics/Artstyle
This won’t win any awards for good graphics. If one were to zoom in far enough, the difference between Kenshi and an asset rip on Steam wouldn’t be that big. There are mods to improve it, but I find it oddly fitting.
It's an ugly world, can’t have it looking pretty.

Atmosphere/Immersion
I find Kenshi very immersive. Throughout my playthrough I got very attached to my characters, more so than other games, even though they had no actual personality. I believe this is due to the cruel and unforgiving nature of Kenshi, that gives a sense of realism and validity to the trials and tribulations that the players characters experience.
In fact, this can be applied to the whole game. The world is interesting because it doesn’t care about you, the player is just another small part of it. Thus, it feels more real, almost like it could actually exist.

Soundtrack
It’s a nice tribal-like ost that leans into the desert part of the game. My biggest problem with it is that it plays very rarely. My favourite part is “Scorching Wind”.

Final Thoughts
40 km/h seems like a reasonable pace for someone to be travelling for multiple days, without rest, sustaining themselves entirely on 3 loaves of bread. Right?

It's good, very addictive and it has great moments. Also annoyingly hard which is part of the charm, you're gonna get beat, imprisoned or eaten alive a lot.

Sadly, a lot of features feel really poorly implemented and need to be modded for them to function properly. There's not much of an end-game, once you finally get strong and gather a small group, there's not many things to do, the game has a great journey and a dissapointing payoff. There's barely any dialogue so forget about that.

Kenshi 2 is in development and I'll sure keep an eye on it. I hope they add more stuff like armies, taking over cities, and more interaction between you and the world, so it reacts to what you're doing. Kenshi is a solid foundation for something great, I hope it'll get there.

Tinha muito potencial mas acabou estragando tudo... propaganda de que você pode ser tudo mas do que adianta se o mundo não reage de acordo com o que você é? Não importa se você é um líder com um exército gigantesco, mercenário sanguinário ou um simples ex-escravo, todos vão te tratar como um bosta como no começo e as relações não mudam, o game na questão de dificuldade e realismo é muito bom mas tirando isso é bem medíocre e até mesmo tendo gráficos de um jogo de 2006 ele tem problemas de otimização.

Kenshi's a great game, brought down a little by its vision greatly exceeding its grasp. Kenshi allows you nearly absolute freedom in a massive and hugely varied open world, with tons of small surprises to discover as you explore.

The game does suffer a little in the performance department - While each member of your party can be anywhere in the world at any time, operating completely independently of each other, expect to spend a lot of time waiting for assets to load if you actually try to keep track of people in more than one location. Pathfinding over long distances can also be finicky.

Still, sometimes all you want is a huge sandbox to survive in, and Kenshi provides one of the best available. Many of its locales are bizarre and intriguing enough to keep you eager for more of the story behind the world you're exploring, and its systems all integrate with each other wonderfully.

This game is ugly, runs like hot garbage, and is as wide as an ocean with the depth of a puddle. It’s not really a survival game, or a simulator, or an RPG, or a strategy game. Despite cannibals existing, good luck trying to eat people. The build tools are ultra simple and lack customisation. Economy and trade aren’t systems at all, there’s no market to tank or corner. Characters are one dimensional and story nonexistent, so you only get what you project onto the mostly empty world. The biggest strategic choice you’re presented with is where to build your base, if you choose to build one at all.

Yet I am still recommending it.

One day, I ran past multiple groups of slavers on my journey. They all ignored me, a fine specimen to be captured and sold as chattel. This offended me so I did what any rational human being would do: track down key figures in the slave trade and assassinate them, plunging the area into chaos and doing in less than a week what Tinfist has had lifetimes to accomplish yet was too cowardly to see through.

If I wanted, I could have knocked them out and left them for cannibals or hungry animals, or brought them back to a base to be imprisoned forever and used as practice dummies. These are all viable options. And the world reacts to these things more often than not, sometimes in small ways, other times large. With the death of a handful of nobles, I brought entire towns to ruin while famine swept through what little was left. Anti-slavers sang my name at the end of the day, not Tinfist’s, unaware a bruised ego had motivated me and I don’t really care about slavery at all.

This is a “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em game.” You’re given a few pieces of LEGO from disparate sets and locked in a room to figure out what you can do with them. You may become frustrated or bored, but once you come up with something, the game excels until you’ve reached the bottom of the container and have to come up with something else. If you don’t like the pieces you have, just use the modding tools it comes with to make your own. Difficulty or tedium can be easily solved in a few clicks.

Beep.

Kenshi is very special to me. Ever since I laid eyes upon this weird masterpiece, I've been obsessed with its world and gameplay. The character creator is pretty unique, letting you choose things like how crooked your character's back is and in what pose they stand, as well as offering very interesting races that all have their own lore and interactions. Depending on what race and/or gender you choose, different factions within the game will treat you differently and you'll often find that making friends is much harder than making enemies.
The world within the game is a cruel wasteland, populated by fanatics, bandits and slave traders, as well as scary monsters and giant lasers shooting from the sky. I can't even begin couting the amount of times my little troop of misfits and I have run for our dear lives, trying to make it to the next city without getting eaten or kidnapped.
Success is not handed to you and making enough money to pay for your next meal can be quite stressful, especially at the beginning. You'll have to train long and hard, if you're decent enough, you can make a living as a hunter or by turning in criminals. But desperate times will need desperate measures and selling people into slavery or getting others killed by guards to loot their corpses is often the easy way out. Generally speaking, it's always more difficult to be a good person rather than taking advantage of poorer and weaker people around you.
The world is constantly changing, whether you're around or not, with faction fighting their own wars against each other and patrolling through the areas, and you're most definitely not the chosen one who they'll turn to. You'll have to prove yourself first, make a name for yourself and do favours, just so they even consider your existence. If you're really strong and have the right people behind you, you can actually change the political climate within the game and go as far as banishing some and advancing others. And, if you're organised enough, you can even establish your city and become your own faction.
This and more awaits you within this game and I can't recommend it enough to anyone who's hungry for something new and refreshing. That being said, here come the cons.
The graphics are not good, and I mean, really not nice to look at. They do the job and I personally have actually grown to appreciate them, but it's a fairly new game and it looks like it came out in 2005. The gameply is extremely slow and hard and while that should be considered a feature, it definitely makes it a game not everyone can enjoy. The learning curve is steep and even after playing for 70h, I've still not learned everything there is to know and honestly, I'm not even close to becoming a proper faction member. The game is as brutal as its world and being sold to slavery has happened to me more than once, often setting me back, and I sadly have lost many companions in my pursuit of greatness.
If you're out for a hardcore adventure with no quests and an alien world, this game might be the next big thing for you. If you don't have the time or the patience, it's probably best if you look for something else to play, because it's as pleasant as eating nails for breakfast, yet so addicting.

I should make a list thats called "Video games I play while listening to Chat Pile" and this would probably be number 1.

I love being a shitty robot who stole the holy sword so the holy kingdom is out to rip me to shreds. So I hide in the middle of nowhere, growing hash with my cool holy sword that I totally stole. That's my favorite run.

Anyways this is one of the best RPG settings that have ever been conceived. Bible day, the angry muscle monks, flesh robbing robots, BEAK THINGS, and more!

One day I wish to write a world thats this hilariously cruel and fucked up.

Despite how simulated the world is, your ways of interacting with it are quite narrow — you cannot even ask random strangers about the weather... I don't really know what I was hoping for, but this game doesn't really seem to have many compelling roleplaying mechanics, and the actual click-and-wait gameplay is both bothersome and boring (micromanaging troops can be interesting enough, but is also frustrating due to all the usual issues you encounter when managing a group in games).

At the end of the day, most of the game seems to be spent running to and fro, or reacting to the world in fairly uninvolved and predictable ways. Maybe I just don't get it.