Genuinely a real indie gem, and frankly deserves more love.
It's a massive game by a small studio, which is impressvie on it's own, but the world, the aesthetics, the charecters and the lore are all fantastic.
It's not flawless, it's got kinda clunky controls, low graphical fidelity(although the aesthetics more than make up for this), and some of it's mechanics have issues.
But
If you get this, and you persevere through it's unforgiving approach to difficulty, you will be able to live free within a brutal, grim, yet expansive world, with political dynamics and real measurable decisions and impacts you can have.
There are many ways to play Kenshi, and all of them fun.
I really cannot recommend this game enough.

Another game where it's hard to rate objectivity vs opinion.

I want to like this game SO bad. The player freedom is unprecendented, the world design is phenomenal, the ideas present in this are some of the best fuckin shit i've ever seen


But for me, it's just missing fun. i could forgive the repetition if it just made more sense. I could forgive the lack of direction if it was funnier. I could forgive the lack of explenation of systems if it had more to offer. Sadly it's too "make your own way" and not "make your own fun"

... Wieso hat das Spiel so viele gute Bewertungen?
Das was in den Bewertungen steht ist so wahrheitsverzerrt, dass ich mich nicht wunder muss, warum Open World Spiele tot und leer sind, denn offenbar wollen Leute genau das.

Was ich immer wieder lese:
Die Story schreibt sich von selbst, du kannst deinen eigenen Weg gehen.
Korrekt.. aber .. ist das bei Elder Scrolls nicht auch so, wenn ich einfach keine Quests mache?
Da kann ich ebenfalls farmen, Monster jagen und die Weltablatschen. Warum macht man es bei Elder Scrolls nicht so? .. weil es langweilig ist.
Es gibt 2 Gesprächsoptionen:
Handeln oder tritt mir bei.
Das wars. Mehr gibts von NPCs nicht zu holen.
Dann..ist doch sicher die RIESIGE!!! open World voll mit Dingen, die man tun kann, oder?
.. nein.
Die Welt ist komplett leer. Selten laufen Monster herum und ab und zu findet man Erz zum abbauen.
Und das wars.
Ich habe euch soeben ALLES erzählt, was man bei Kenshi erlebt.
Langt euch sowas für ein gutes Spiel?
Ich kanns einfach nicht glauben..

What a weird and wonderful game! Seriously, there's nothing quite like it out there. I put more than 22 hours into it past the last week and I will definitely come back and put some more into it. Since we are talking about Kenshi, a game that is impossibly expansive and the narrative is unique to each player (since you create the story via gameplay) and 22 hours are rookie numbers when it comes to this game I looked at some other reviews on Steam and Backloggd and compared notes to write this one.

===The Start===
First things first: SsethTzeentach convinced me to buy this game with his amazing review, from a distance it looked impossible to get into. Bad graphics, the seemingly incredible depth, the controls, the memes surrounding this game, it was all enough to put me off at first. I just assumed it would be complicated enough not to be fun (like that one time I tried Space Station 13).

This is completely unfounded, and if you are anything like me please give this game a shot, it goes for so incredibly cheap and it's NOT all of those things. You pick a starting scenario, which honestly only affects how much time you have to invest into getting on your own two feet. I started with the wanderer, the recommended basic scenario, but would recommend the trader or any of the "easy" ones, not because they make the entire game easier but because they really speed up the early game stage once you get your bearings. Despite their names, there is no true difficulty select, the scenario affects your starting gear, spawn point, and condition of your character, the world of Kenshi will always run on the same rules no matter which one you pick.

After this the game starts feeding you pop-ups explaining basic mechanics, despite knowing nothing about how you actually play Kenshi these were enough to explain next to everything I needed to play and "progress", everything else you just pick up organically or if you really stuck, just google! Shockingly enough I only had to resort to this sporadically. I literally had to whip out Google more often for games like Elden Ring for example.

===The Gameplay===
This game is basically Runescape, or Skyrim if you don't know how Runescape plays. When you do something, you gain exp and eventually a level for that thing, stealing, sneaking, attacking (bundled with mastery of different weapon types), doing labor, crafting armor, farming, etc.

This is the interesting part. I don't know how the start of your gameplay will look! I started immediately gathering copper ore to sell as it earned me food and some labor exp for example. A pretty common thing to do as a new player from the reviews I have seen. After not even an hour in I saw a dude running across the dunes, I approached him to find out he was an escaped slave, and he decided to team up with me. We literally became blood brothers by the end of my playthrough, the dude was my right-hand man for the job, any job!

Shortly after I tried to settle down with my copper mining money and start my own lil settlement. This is where that lack of difficulty setting came back to worsen my time with Kenshi for the first (and probably only time). You see, as soon as you put down a building you start an outpost, and the game will start generating random events for that outpost, and the ONLY thing that influences those events is the place where you settled. This means that no matter if you have a single building or already set up fort knox, the same things will happen to it, which I find extremely fucking stupid. Anyways, this caused my base to get raided within 5 minutes of it being built by Black Dragon Ninjas that wiped my guys in seconds. I reloaded a save and decided to hand over my single building to them, which they took over and left around 10 minutes later. I did not expect to get raided so quickly, otherwise, I would waited to set up my base, and I did not know most raids essentially do not do anything (they don't break buildings unless something is locked behind a door or a gate, they don't touch crops, valuables, weapons, no raid in the starting area ever tried to take my guys as slaves). I wish the game actually told me some of that via those pop-up tutorials tbh. Once you have your base for some time you will realize how extremely fucking annoying raids are for a new player, I spent 90% of my time building in Kenshi simply fighting off another wave of raiders which got real old real fast. A couple of hours in I dialed raids down to their minimum frequency in the game options despite being able to deal with them because of this, and it's weird that it isn't the default and then scales up with how old your base is? As in the longer you have it the harder the raids become.

After some farming, building, and character development (healing and fighting the bandits that attacked me over and over to raise skills) I got a little bored and set out to explore, I bought the service of some bodyguards and we went to the swamp, deleting bandit camps along the way which quickly lined my pockets with money. Any money I earned felt a little worthless since my character was an excellent thief by that point and I could have anything the shop had for free. Then I bought some animals and realized just how useless they are, goats and bonedogs, in particular, have no gameplay mechanics you can interact with other than skinning them and telling them to fight, they get folded in any significant fight, and... why would I buy an animal to immediately skin it for less money? And I think that's kinda how every aspect of Kenshi breaks down at the end. Someone described this game "as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle" which is apt. There is always less to a mechanic than you imagine, there's probably way less variety in the things there tan you imagine, but there's still A TON of stuff to see and do in the game.

Man, I didn't even say anything about the combat and that could fill out another 1000 words easily, so I won't do all that. Just know that like the rest of the game it is unique, despite controlling like a real-time strategy where your units will simply attack units you click on, there are in-depth animations for each weapon type and every attack has to physically connect with your character, that's fucking nuts for this combat type and it allows you to mico-manage each fight to weave between attacks and attack from places your enemy is less likely to defend themselves from.

===Conclusion===
Kenshi's great! For the price it often drops to on sales, it's absolutely worth your money, a passion project of a single man that will be developed and iterated on for years to come. It's got some bugs and you will kinda wish there was more to it but you will never regret spending your money on it. And the modding community goes absolutely crazy so a lot of things can be adjusted with mods.

Kenshi is a fantastic game where you genuinely make your own story and can do anything in a huge open world with a post apocalyptic samurai aesthetic.

In the same vein as Mount & Blade, UnReal World, and other similar sandbox games; Kenshi has no main story, no pre-determined path to follow. This game is truly a story generator, you will become attached to characters, despise certain factions, genuinely feel affected when someone dies or loses a limb or becomes enslaved. You will make allies, enemies, friends, bases, do anything you want to. You wanna play a lone wandering samurai who bounty hunts? Do it. You wanna be a trader who runs a caravan and makes money selling things at higher value? Do it. You wanna renovate houses in cities and run businesses or training facilities out of them? Do it. Mining operation, hunting guild, farming plantation? Do it. You can ignore so many systems in this game or use all of them. There is an entire city-sim in this game you can choose to not do and not truly miss anything because you are still getting an amazing generated story the way you want it. Group-based rpg. Bounty hunting sim. Solo RPG. City builder. Guild organizer. Thief simulator. Business simulator. All of these things you can do or not. Your choice.

The gameplay is satisfying, very similar to Morrowind in the way of early on you will be missing and getting hurt a lot, but by the end you can feel the grind pay off, your characters becoming skilled and useful. If you enjoy the power gap in games you will enjoy this one, it is not a game about being powerful at the start as you won't be. You need to train. You need to lose fights. You need to get better gear. And it is all so satisfying.

The world is gorgeous and unique, the cities and wilderness and just overall design is so alien and fun and horrifying and beautiful. The music too is just outstanding, the Main Theme in particular makes me feel so emotional, the same way some of the most memorable tracks in gaming like Ezio's Family for AC2 make me feel. Its so good, the mournful yet adventurous and bright sound of the world is hypnotizing and invites you in.

Also, Beep is my truest love.

In the first 20 minutes of playing this game, I tried making my character (Plank, my beloved) mining some rock for resources only to immediately get killed by bonedogs with no chance of fighting back.

After restarting and playing for another half hour, I saw some bandits get wacked and enslaved by the Holy Nation and figured if I could free one while they didn't see I could get a new team member. That didn't happen and Plank was immediately crippled and enslaved too.

I then spent actual hours in the Holy Nation prison Rebirth training up Plank's lockpick, sneak and assassin skills by freeing and knocking out defenseless fellow slaves. Two slaves tried to escape, only to get caught and get the shit kicked out of them, eventually after enough times getting their legs sliced off. I created an escape plan myself by knocking out the guards at one of the entrances and putting them in slave cages which shouldn't have worked but it hilariously did because Kenshi is janky as fuck. I had a team of 3 at this point, and carried out those two legless slaves who refused to join me and just crawled back in the dust to Rebirth.

I then spent actual hours just trying to have my guys survive, trying to find items I could sell just so they didn't starve. The default hunger speed is crazy so I lowered that I won't lie, and I found a nearby town to live in and buy a shitty little hut in. Eventually after scrounging up enough I got a bigger house for all of my guys, and got some mods so I could do some farming inside the town to create hemp, so I could make fabric, so I could make bandanas, so I could then eventually level up one of my guy's clothing skill to make enough high quality bandanas so I could sell them and become crazy rich.

I then spent actual hours just levelling up combat skills and recruiting new people. I got a mod that increased skill level up speed because the default is agonising I won't lie. To train combat skills your best bet is just to throw your guys at bandit groups and get the shit kicked out of you, and do it over and over until you need someone stronger. When training my group against some aggresive escaped slaves, one of my characters - called Plop - severed an arm off a slave, and then brutally chased her down as she fleed to cut off the other arm just for fun or something. I felt so bad man, I patched her up and let her heal back up in my base. When she was healed she speedily ran the fuck out for obvious reasons, only to run into another one of my team outside the town who I had returning and then basically recruited herself onto my team upon seeing him. I think events like this happen with injured NPCs, but it probably isn't intended for contexts like this lmao.

I think you get the point. Kenshi can be jank, grindy, tedious, and hard to even approach, but its an incredible RPG sandbox that can give you insane and unique tales with all the freedom it has. Its really satisfying struggling so hard at the beginning, taking forever to do anything, only to finally be able to fight back in the cruel world of Kenshi. My boy Plank ended up toppling the Holy Nation that once enslaved him, with a lot of difficult and bizarre stuff along the way. I highly recommend you give it a go and just see what stories you end up with.