It's much more a game of (very slow) exploration than it is one of spinning plates and seeing what shapes they shatter into. Kenshi feels fundamentally different, however, and not simply because it has much more of a WYSIWYG interface. I had experiences.ĭwarf Fortress is a natural touchstone when discussing Kenshi, in that both concern the free-form management of a potential empire in a desolate place, the assigning of tasks and suffering slings, arrows and outrageous fortune. I wondered and wandered, only setting down roots temporarily, building way-stations to prep myself for further forays.
I roamed or battled my way to new places. Some will have done little but hours of mining.įor me, I played it like some mutant, no-pressure RPG. Some will have died, lost and alone in the swirling sands, a few short hours or even minutes into trying to figure out how to find or buy food. Some of them will have taken a year, will have built that empire. Or none of them.Įveryone's Kenshi story will be different. Or a dream of all of these things, at once. Wherever I lay my slightly goofy metal rice-hat, that's my home. Or a dream of solitude, never taking my focus beyond a single character, getting by on a diet of thievery, simple trading, subsistence farming and tense evasion of those bandit packs. Or a dream of an endlessly nomadic life, a roaming gang of heroes clearing the vast sands of bandits and thieving iron skeletons and murderers in hiding, feeding my ever-growing, supremely-scarred army with food bought with the armour and weapons I looted from my foes. Industry and a certain comfort restored to a dead and shattered world. My mind swims with the possibilities presented by long-term play, a dream of cities in which I laid every brick, planted every crop, recruited and dictated the fate of their every inhabitant, who now man a vast network of mines, factories, shops and defences. Given the opportunity, I'm confident I would play it for a year - more, even. Kenshi just is.īefore I proceed any further into existential hand-wringing about the amorphous nature of sandbox survival/management/roleplaying maxi-game Kenshi, which just left early access after a half-decade of open development, let me make something clear. You might as well ask me to review atmospheric pressure, or continental drift. I could, I suspect, dash myself against Kenshi's wind-bleached rocks for a full year and still feel ill-qualified to pass judgement upon it.
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