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.  

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!