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....

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?

Finally, a game that actually lets the player play around with freedom.

Kenshi is a very unique and I don't even know.. I'm very bad at the game I have pretty much just been running around exploring and mildly "roleplaying" for myself. But I've also had very fun even though i don't know what I'm doing.

The game is kind of hard to understand though.

Amazing game, it's in my top 3. Perfect world building with charismatic factions that interact with each other (mostly aggressively xd), incredible weapons, armors, this game even have limb prosthesis! The character progression is really authentic and rewarding for being a very long process and also for starting as a shitty Lvl 1 Crook. And if we are talking about its lore... there is a shit ton of it which its really unique and interesting.

The worst aspects of the game may be the performance issues while travelling or switching between characters that are far from each other and also not having a polished player-faction interactivity.

Please, play this game.

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.

I bought Kenshi because I saw a Reddit conversation asking about games where you are not "the chosen one." Kenshi fits that description perfectly. You wake up as a poor outcast in a desert community. The world cares nothing about you and you have little to your name. I figured out that I needed to recruit some of the locals if I wanted to get anywhere. Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a bug where the population of neighboring towns would not load. Unfortunately, this is where my play stopped. The early game had a lot of grinding, and I expect the rest of the game to have grinding as well. I did not want to start over after the bug, and all internet sources said I needed to start over.
The game looks like it has a lot of potential, especially with mods to improve quality of life. I want to try again once I install some mods that make bugs like the one I encountered less common. It seems like such mods are out there.

Bro why is this INDIE GAME so fucking big??????? I have 87 hours and only have explored like half the map because going further than that means beak things are going to get a little angry for some reason. Not only is the game massive, it is more realistic than AAA titles, fuck I even think this game is more realistic than the last cod, you can interact with everything, everyone and everywhere, and all the choices you make are permanent (kinda), lost an arm? bummer, lost a leg? bummer, everyone in the party died? make a new one, EXCEPT YOU DON'T HAVE TO, you can buy robotic legs from the hive that are even better than your flesh, and if everyone dies the game is not gonna delete your file like a rouge-like or charge the last save as other games, it will stay moving until you leave the game.

It's so massive that it shouldn't be possible for an indie game.
10/10