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!
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!