Kenshi is special

 

We tend to overlook some of the weirder and less 'mainsteam' games that float around the recesses of the gaming ecosystem, as though if we peered too deep off the cobbled road we risk tumbling off into the untamed wilds of the indie market. But it is within these little niche hideaways that some of the most striking and memorable gaming experiences lie in wait, just begging to snatch chunks of your freetime out from under you in an errant unfocused second. Such is the way with Rimworld which I, regrettably, appear to have picked up again. (Goodbye Weekend) And such is also the case for a game which goes criminally underappreciated across the modern gaming landscape- the RTS survival roleplaying simulator game- Kenshi.

I've spoken at times about Kenshi before, but that little bit here or there was hardly enough to satiate my burning fascination with the kind of game that is totally happy shoving it's players within a slave camp and leaving them to just... figure that whole thing out. See that's the thing with Kenshi, it values it's role as a 'simulator' for this long fallen vaguely Bushido-inspired techno-rustic world above all else. Above the fantasy of roleplaying as some sort of post-world samurai or robotic-skeleton assassin. On one hand is the expectation that the player should 'earn' their right to wield all that power and status, but on the other is just the reality that in this world few people can manage to even stumble upright, let along become master of their destiny. There's a frank realism to this stark view of game design which taints the world of Kenshi in a style you rarely see from competent games.

Kenshi's setting alone is something I've lauded endlessly for how stark and creative it is. A post apocalypse is as common a setting as one could hope for, and with endless iterations on the idea by the likes of Fallout, Mad Max, RAGE, World War Z, The Last of Us, Lisa The Painful, Horizon Zero Dawn, I Am Alive and on and on. Coming up with something that feels unique admits all of that requires either genius or derangement, and I'm not sure where the Kenshi creator's lie on that spectrum. Ugly insectoid-like hive-worshipping humanoids, robotic-bodied 'Skeletons', exoskeletal 'Shek'- all stretched across a world even more unyielding than your typical From Software game world. It isn't a tapestry waiting to be pulled apart and studied, it's more like a rubbed-away stencil from the neolithic era requiring half guess work as actual examination in order to interpret. In some ways it's a genuine shame how reticent the Kenshi world is to show itself of, but I guess that's kind of part of the charm of the world too.

Because Kenshi is not an amusement park. It's not some holiday destination wonderland escapist dream. Even the 'worst' fictional worlds designed to be unappealing for the modern man, such as Cyberpunk 2077 carry the wonderment of the 'other', a veritable exotic dish of curious tastes and succulent flavours which draws in the wierdos like me. Kenshi isn't like that. It tastes like a tough boot rubbed in desert dirt. Its world is an unyielding dust bowl camped on the vague ruins of seemingly despotic warhound civilisations that ground themselves into dust millennia beforehand. It's various post-society societies run on cannibalism, xenophobic warfare and slavery. Mutant monstrosities roam the wastes picking flesh from the bones of those dumb enough not to cower within the sandstone walls of the last bastions of sentient life. If it weren't so matter-of-fact, Kenshi's world would be a circle of hell in itself.

Of course, the fact that the world is Kenshi's most loyal influence does come at the cost of some of it's gameplay coherence, and the fact that Kenshi is rarely discussed in conversations about the most interesting indie games of all time probably comes from the fact that few are willing to put up with the game's frustrating eccentricities. The RTS gameplay structure is a bizarre fit for an open world survival post apocalyptic game, particularly with the strange half-committal towards micromanagement that the team decided to go for. All the tutorials are text boxes that stubbornly refuse to explain anything substantially. Difficulty scalling is practically non-existent once you leave the middle settlements and step out into the badlands. There's no actual systems in place for taking on jobs or simulating your own life- you kind of need to 'Frankenstein' together an living from the basic gameplay cycle of scavving and selling- but stick through it all and the game will simply refuse to let you forget about it.

Maybe it's part of the time investment required to get into Kenshi which makes the game such a head worm for those that get into it, because as much as you'd expect an unforgiving world to spit you out, instead it won't let go. When I think back at the several days (actual days) I spent grinding one of my characters to be competent at melee fighting (not even proficient) I can't help but shudder in slight terror. But darn it if we don't 'earn' victory in those wasteland scuffles and the paltry odd loot we get as reward- because in the after world it's small trinkets like that which sell for a pittance that we live for. In the world of Kenshi, that is everything. And when you build a world full of barbaric standards of life and living, and a player becomes invested in that world, it becomes pretty easy to get locked into that addictive gameplay loop.

For the past few years Lo-Fi games have been threatening to take everything they've learned from Kenshi and put it into a prequel follow-up game tentatively known as 'Kenshi 2', which would take place in an era when the civilisations that were were not quite as run down as they are by the current game. Unfortunately with bi-yearly updates the product is looking about as tangible as Silksong. (although I guess we've actually got gameplay for Silksong, Kenshi 2 is a ghost.) But I can't help but shake the wonderment of what a game like Kenshi would look like in a second go around, with a firmer grasp of design and perhaps even a bit more intelligent world building to flesh out the blanks and perhaps give a bit more purpose to those blood-spider infested ruins, or the giant automatic space death laser which regularly eradicates parts of the map.

Kenshi is a special and extremely niche title with an extremely bizarre RPG RTS gameplay system which not enough players are brave enough to give a shot. Lovers of the post apocalyptic and the bizarre may find themselves curious, but without genuine dedication to getting involved with the game it's hard to break through to it's heart. But those who take the time, who see Kenshi for what it is, know they've come across a special little nugget of something that no one in the polished side of the industry would dare create. Something rusty and ugly and malformed, something genuine and organic and memorable. Kenshi is a game unlike any other that exists in the world, and given the absolute over saturation of games out there- I'd consider that high praise all of it's own.