My first week with Kenshi

 A new world: Fresh and terrible

A couple of years back I made a discovery. I wish this was one of those stories in which I could trace back it's totality for you, where I could recount everything from the brand of cereal I inhaled that morning to the exact amount of brushed strokes it took to clean my teeth- but the truth is that the day in question just wasn't that memorable to me. Another dull thud in this persisting monotonous march towards my dank empty mausoleum, soundly punctuated by one brilliant glittering spark in my way. For that was the day I somehow found myself on the Steam page for Kenshi. Now the fact that I read through it all is incredible, given that the marketing of this game does the one thing I utterly despise; it leads off by telling me what the game isn't. God, never do that when writing your descriptions! It's confrontational, argumentative and, crucially, doesn't tell me what the game is about! Yet somehow, despite myself, I kept reading.

Yes this isn't a game where you're the chosen one, yes you navigate a world we're you're just as weak as everyone else- but what was the game actually? Well as I read further I learnt about a post apocalyptic world with heavy simulation elements imbued in it's skeleton to create a world that feels breathing. I learnt of shifting tides of factions and unstable pillars of a wobbly world that could be dynamically toppled down by a callous player. I learnt of a game with a hands off approach to agency- where you are the one who decides what you want to become and the goals you need to set to get there. A game that seemed eager to offer total autonomy to those that worked to wrest it. And to this game I said- "huh, sounds pretty interesting" and put it on my backburner. But I have a long memory. Last year it became apparent that my excuses had run out, I'd played so many other games from my extensive back catalogue that I needed to get around to those I'd promised myself to sooner, and so I picked up Kenshi.

And to slightly out myself as a liar, I actually played it last year too. (This past week wasn't technically my first) Albeit, fleetingly and never for more than an ingame day. Because for every other Sandbox RPG I've played, (Note: I mean actual 'Sandbox RPG', it's funny how few internet sites know what that genre is even defined as. Google lists Red Dead Redemption 2 as an example? What are you on?) I think I'd have to crown Kenshi as the densest. Not in content, but in approachability. The game gives you nothing to get your bearings, which one might argue is sort of the point but heck, even Rimworld gives you a tutorial to guide you through your first colony! Kenshi drops you in the middle of nowhere, doesn't tell you how to make money, how to eat, how to even fight and makes none of those things intuitive enough to not require an explanation. Whatsmore, the 'tutorial' system that the game does have is... spotty. (It only gave me the dropdown menu on Bounty Hunting when I was in the process of turning in my third warm body. I appreciate the thought, but the ship had sort of sailed at that point.)

That barrier to get involved really soured me to this game, because Kenshi just oozes like the kind of thing you want to go into blind, without having it's delicate secrets splayed out and ruined. I didn't want to just look it all up on the Steam forums, and I wasn't invested enough to read thee incredibly long, divided by topic, database which Lo-fi Games provided. This is supposed to be a game about exploring. In this instance, exploring an incredibly creative, wild and dangerous dark fantasy world in which sticking your finger on the burner flame just to see if it'll burn you is very essence of the experience. (Note: 9 out of 10 times: it will.) It took a lot of coming to terms for me to realise that if there was any way I'd get into this game, it would be through swallowing my pride and preconceptions and watching a tutorial youtube video (How far had I fallen as a gamer?) just so that I would know how to control the damn thing. And I think that is a pretty big problem with first adoption of Kenshi- some sort of tutorial mode would do wonders for player retention.

This past week, after getting a basic schooling, I finally came around to playing a somewhat serious campaign of Kenshi just so that I could discover the secrets of it's special open world for myself. I began strong by immediately deciding I'd play as a religious zealot called 'Sublime Intent' (10 points for guessing which series I recently discovered which inspired that choice and naming convention) before even learning that this world had a ready-made theocratic monocracy called The Holy Nation. So that lined up accidentally perfect, now didn't it? Of course, as per Kenshi starts, I began my life as a nobody with no skills in a wasteland of a town called The Hub. The prototypical start for any Kenshi journey, and not exactly a springboard for greatness, given how every building in the town is blowout except for the bar.

Fearing first for securing my food (Which in hindsight was quite foolish, Kenshi is rather lenient with food consumption requiring about one bit of food per day) I immediately took to mining with my main man Sublime and starting off as a lowly wage slave. For literal days I dug and dug and sold my earnings until I had enough to buy the biggest ruin in town (who even sold it to me? I don't know.) and then I came to the realisation; there was no way I could go this alone. You see, Kenshi is a game about building squads of people and managing them just as much as it's about struggling to survive a harsh and brutal world. And even though I had yet to explore more than 15 feet around my spawn town, I knew having people to watch my back would eventually become an unavoidable necessity.

It was somepoint here, between setting up mining routines, stocking up on raw meat, and slowly training my swordsmanship skills on the crippled cannibals and bandits who were melted by the town guard, that I started to devise what my role in this world would be. I didn't really come to it, but in that way so indicative of a Sandbox RPG like this one, it came to me. I would use this dingy little junk heap of a town as a staging area to create my own thriving community in Holy Nations land, from there I could work as a free agent- furthering the holy word in a typically zealot-like brutally clandestine campaign. A guild of farmers on the surface with darker political aspirations underneath; fuelled on a meta level by a destructive desire to see how much I could demolish this already-fallen post apocalyptic world. "Is that society I see these people trying to re-establish? Time to stamp that out nice and completely!"

The past few days have been working up to that, gathering materials, building up that base, researching technologies and scouting out potential spots for serious gains. My dreams are big, and one of the things about Kenshi is that it really knows how to humble you without dashing those aspirations. Much of this week was spent collecting the tools and training to be able to stand up to bands of roving Bandits without needing a 2 day recovery coma afterwards, only to find out that the second I left 'Dust Bandit' territory, everything else is significantly more deadly! Through scouting I've found regions that constantly spew face-melting acid rain, and one desert-stretch in which a laser from space randomly strikes the land throughout the daytime like some astralgeological event from hell. These are just the broader strokes of the endlessly atypical dark fantasy Kenshi world, without even going into the insectile race of Hive, the spiky Shek or the robotic Skeletons; nor the expanded lore of how their societies, races and factions function uniquely and in conjunction to one another. I imagine I have a lot of world to discover and pitfalls to tumble into, but that's just the experience of getting into Kenshi and to be honest; I freakin' love it. It took some time, but I'm honestly truly falling in love with this hard, tough world and it's quirky inhabitants. So much so that I can't wait to do something crazy and drastic to the delicate balance of the world state and screw it all up!