The Sandbox RPG Where Robots Deglove You Whole
Trying to make my way in the wastes of Kenshi. Should you try it too?
About 5 years ago I caught wind of a little game called Kenshi.
Developed almost entirely by a single man: Chris Hunt, a part-time security guard in the UK, Kenshi was born from his dissatisfaction with the rampant hand-holding in a lot of modern roleplaying games and a desire to evoke ancient tales of wandering ronin,
This is one of those games that spread through incredibly positive word of mouth by a passionate community of fans and high-profile YouTube coverage, now? I think it’s safe to say Kenshi has gone mainstream, the game regularly clocks in around 9000 concurrent players, which is roughly double that of Starfield and it even hit is all-time peak the day after I began writing this review.
As I said, I first bought the game about 5 years ago, I put in around 12 hours and enjoyed my time with Kenshi but life got in the way, now, with a renewed interest and a desire to play something relatively low-commitment, I’ve returned. I hope you enjoy my review of this brilliant, brutal, batshit video game.
Sand In My Eyes
First impressions are everything and unfortunately for Kenshi, this is a game with a ‘great personality.’
The title screen is hideous, the character models and graphics look ancient, the game doesn’t seem to properly fit the 2560x1440 resolution of my monitor and you launch it through one of those old pop-up windows where you pick your resolution, language and stuff like V-sync before the software boots up. The UI is hideous and takes up way too much of the screen as well.
Now, the reason for this is that the game simply is ancient, in a round about way. Kenshi started development in the mid-2000’s and was a passion project for years, so by the time it arrived on the market it was already long outdated, however, once you get past the initial shock of the dated visuals you will start to realise that Kenshi has incredibly strong art direction; nothing else looks like it. I cobbled together my character, selected one of the starting scenarios and found myself dropped into The Great Desert. Overwhelmed by its vastness, I panned the camera outwards to take in the oppressive grimness of the world.
Bands of roving slave traders prowl the dusty wastes armed with rusted old weapons and rudimentary plated armour, beating any emaciated soul they find half to death before clapping shackles on their ankles and dragging them along as human cattle. Samurai guards walk the periphery of a walled city to the north, stopping only to cut down peasants who obstruct their path, deal with wild beasts or to duel the starving bandits who eke out a bitter existence in the sand dunes. On your way to civilisation you stumble across the mangled corpse of an escaped slave laying in the path of animal tracks, red lashes of blood wetting the parched sand, legs broken, laying face down to be bleached by the sun and trampled into dust.
This is sword-punk, this is Kenshi.
Live to See Another Day
Kenshi is a game with no objectives or goals to speak of; nowhere in this game will you find a quest log or an objective marker. It is a true sandbox. Of course, there is plenty to do, so much in fact that that it would take an entire article to summarise but the only agreed upon objective by its player-base and the denizens of this world is to survive, normally, this would make for a boring and simplistic game but Kenshi is very difficult. Not in a Dark Souls kind of way where you might come up against a wall and have to fight the same boss for a few hours, no, Kenshi is extraordinarily punishing and the price of failure is steep. No bonfires, no Estus, no healing potions, if you are mortally wounded or lose a fight you can lose limbs, break bones and even fall into a coma, taking days to recover; starvation is always a looming spectre.
There have been moments in my time with Kenshi where the brutality of this world, the common, fleeting goal of survival and the oppressive feudalistic governance of the United Cities: the faction who’s territory I’m living in, have provided emergent stories more impactful than anything most developers could write.
One time, as I was mining a copper deposit outside the city gates and being a bit too careless with the fast forward button, I was knocked out cold by a bunch of NPC’s labelled ‘Starving Bandits’ I had a lot of ore to sell on my person and had finally worked up enough money to afford some clothes, so I stared at my inventory in horror, anticipating the worst when one of the bandits mutters something about his belly and steals only the few scraps of dried meat I have left before sprinting off straight after. Everyone just wants to live a little bit longer.
Another moment came where I learned just how corrupt and negligent the local leadership were. Firstly, I was incarcerated for the great crime of… using a training dummy in the police station. The guards beat me so severely that I fell into a coma before they dragged me upstairs and tossed me into a conspicuously stained cage. I lay there for about a day as other NPC’s of every creed, species and crime were dragged into cages like mine; some began to starve, others never escaped their coma and died, attracting swarms of flies and one had even been mangled so badly her severed arm was left a few inches ahead of her cage. A few days passed and I realised I was marked with ‘Awaiting Release’ under my character’s bounty, I wondered if I was free to go and picked lock of my cage and escaped… I was. The guard meant to be posted to the prison cages was downstairs milling around a table with the rest of the constabulary and just watched me leave. From that night on, he was at his post more reliably.
Conan the Libertarian
As open and vast as Kenshi’s world is, however, I do feel the game funnels you into the ‘right’ way to play; the game’s players and community insist you should do what you want but all roads lead to the game’s settlement building, trade and management systems. This came as a big disappointment to me. I wanted to join the local guard and change the system from the inside: get rid of the loiterers and corrupt guards and stop shaking down the poor while bandits mug you metres outside the front gate but alas, in a game where faction relations are a big focus, you can neither join nor destroy factions which comes across as very half-baked to me. I want to hunt down the Cannibals in the North, I want to wipe out the Skin Bandits: flesh-wearing androids that peel your flesh off and dismember you alive in big machines, but alas, Chris Hunt says no. Mods can remedy a lot of these issues but at the same time, I’m sure a V8 engine would make a Ford Focus a lot faster but that’s not the product you bought or the intended experience.
As cool as it is to build a settlement in the wastes, employ NPC’s and manufacture products then sell them to other settlements, or to get deep into all the crafting systems… that’s just not what I want to do but it feels like the inevitable end-game of the entire experience: get rich, then assist your chosen faction in dominating the world.
You can go out into the wastes and hunt bounties, bandits or escaped slaves but combat is so difficult and it takes so long to grind the skills to get good in Kenshi that most players just hire mercenaries, again, pushing you towards delegating tasks and managing a party or workforce. I have to stress, I’ve played countless hours of Morrowind and even Daggerfall, I’m accustomed to obtuse, stats-based combat but Kenshi takes it to a whole other level. You have to take into account and level up in your skill at defending, general melee attack, then specific weapon types and then, to top it all off, you need an appropriate level of strength, toughness: which can only be acquired by suffering injuries and dexterity and ideally equipment and prosthetic limbs (yes, you can replace them) that compliment your preferred choices. Don’t be hungry or injured either.
Levelling up skills in Kenshi works a lot like the popular Project Zomboid: you use the skills and practice, in real time, to improve. This turns the ‘gameplay’ into leaving the game on the highest fast-forward setting while you browse YouTube on the Steam overlay. I watched a whole 5 minute video on full speed and trained for 48 in-game hours and still didn’t level up.
Sometimes, it feels like you can do anything you want in Kenshi apart from anything fun.
Lost the Plot
Kenshi might be incredibly immersive and atmospheric but it severely lacks in a lot of worldbuilding and lore. There is a lot of environmental storytelling but if you want to learn more about the game’s canon then prepare to browse the Wiki, because acquiring this knowledge in-game more or less relies on random dialogue. I don’t at all mind cobbling together bits of lore through tiny shreds of information: I’ve been a Dark Souls player since the first game, but the amounts fed to you in Kenshi are so small they’re barely existent. What this means is that it’s difficult to really connect with the setting of Kenshi, the lore is so obscure that most players, myself included, don’t even know what to call the continent the game takes place on.
You’ll notice so far that I’ve praised the game’s environmental storytelling and vastness without talking about exploration itself too much, that’s because, in all honesty, there is barely anything of worth to find in Kenshi. There are different biomes with different factions and enemies but the only real items to find are scientific books in ruins which feed into, you guessed it: the crafting and management systems.
Dialogue is an aspect of Kenshi that is also very restrictive. Apart from predetermined vendors, workers for hire and certain important NPC’s you can’t really talk to anyone. How useful and immersive would it have been if I could ask those caravan guards at the bar where they’ve come from? How dangerous was the route? How well-off was the town or city they came from? But alas, Kenshi is so sandbox you also have to invent reasons as to why the city in the desert surrounded by slaves is richer than the one next to fertile farmland.
A Farewell to Arms
The struggle to survive in Kenshi is so fierce that for the first 5 or so hours of my playthrough, I never really had a goal in mind beyond clothing myself, replacing my lost arm (I chose a scenario where I began unarmed and wandering the desert) and filling my belly each day. Soon enough though, I was working as a miner, I had my own set of clothes and some bandages saved up; the worst had passed. Having grown tired of the oppressive rule of the United Cities’ Samurai and the harshness of existence in The Great Desert, I decided I’d make an attempt to cross the dunes West to the rocky valleys of The Holy Nation.
I wasn’t playing a character per-se, I just became another traveller in the wastes seeking a place where the food is cheaper, the bandits are weaker and the sun is kinder.
I set off West at sunrise armed with a rusty old sword: the best I could find and hoped to reach the next city along, at that moment just a dark puddle on the horizon, before nightfall. The journey pottered along well at first, I avoided a large group of slavers and slipped past a hungry herd of beasts but things took a turn for the worse when I encountered a few other wanderers out in the dunes.
The game told me these people were ‘Sand Ninjas’ I have no idea what distinguishes a Sand Ninja from the garden variety, or why a bunch of stealthy ninjas were wearing sheer black clothes in the orange-yellow sand but seeing how well-armed they were, I decided I’d be safer tagging along with them and told my character to follow. For a few minutes we travelled together, they talked between themselves and all was well… until one of them screamed the order to attack and suddenly all three started to beat the ever loving shit out of me. I had very little combat experience or weapons training so I tried to defend as best I could but inevitably, I was struck in the chest and wound up caked in my own blood and choking on sand.
We’d caught the attention of something worse.
The moment I hit the ground a large monster came barrelling over the crest of the dune, slavering for a meal, locked on to the group of ninjas. They stood their ground and fought hard suffering broken bones, a casualty and heavy, bleeding cuts while I lay on the ground playing dead. After they’d dealt with the animal and limped away I rose again, bandaged myself up and chased after the 2 surviving, heavily wounded ninjas looking for a slice of revenge.
I caught up, locked blades with one and a second time got put right in my place, this was becoming a vendetta.
Genuinely a tinge irritated, I rose once again, applied some bandages and chased the pair once more until they engaged a whole camp of free peasants in combat, the second of the 3 ninjas fell but it wasn’t the one I’d made my nemesis, again we fought and again he polished off me, 3 peasants and a spare roll of bandages before limping off into the sands.
You know what comes next.
My mad quest had consumed almost all of my supplies for the journey and I was barely halfway to the city I was aiming for, so this time would be our last showdown. I trundled along after him, limping now too and caught up to the bastard by a few rusty old bits of scrap, he seemed to ignore me, content to limp back home but we had a score to settle. I drew my sword and smacked him in the back with it; at least this time the ninja would have a scar to remember me by. The inevitable happened and I was left unconscious once again but this time, I would suffer a worse fate than mere injury.
While I was lying on the ground, a group of roaming slavers spotted my crumpled body on the ground, they patched me up, gave me some food then clapped shackles to my legs and carried me away. Hours and then days passed. They took my weapon away and kept me fed and bandaged while at the same time knocked me out once again when I came to. Over time I was led into parts of the desert I didn’t recognise, my heart sank and I began to realise my playthrough, or at the very least my freedom, might be over for good.
Then nature once again intervened on my behalf, at least the wilds were on my side.
History repeated itself and a beast attack left the band of slavers wounded and low on men, the one who was supposed to be hauling me abandoned me to the sands, choosing instead to save his wounded comrade, after a struggle to unlock my shackles, I finally managed to break free and sprint full-pelt back across the desert to Heft: the city I started this whole failed pilgrimage from.
I arrived, was yet again beaten within an inch of my life for being an escaped slave and tossed into a cage to serve my sentence, which ended up taking about 40 minutes of real time.
It was in that time I started to seriously ponder about what I wanted to do next. The grind to level up my weapons and melee skills would be long, arduous and boring, I had little interest in the base building and management systems and hiring mercenaries would mean more grinding for money, which was the single activity that had encompassed the majority of my playtime at that point. By the time I was freed from prison I’d remembered that you can buy property in Kenshi and I had the idea to open a shop selling ore; instead of doing the heavy lifting myself, I could do what I wanted while my employees did the back-breaking task of mining and transporting the copper ore.
The moment I was released, I dropped 4 grand on a small shack in town, only to discover that you can’t craft almost no furniture by default and so the next 4 hours were spent yet again on grinding money for crafting and research supplies, because even researching recipes takes resources in Kenshi. I did all of that just to discover that I’d never be able to furnish my shop/house properly: a level 2 crafting bench requires a level 2 house, a level 2 house can’t be built in a city (neither can you upgrade an existing one) and I couldn’t buy another building because I spent all my money on something just for the game to throw up an arbitrary wall.
I could still set up a humble shop though, so I crafted a merchant’s counter for my house and went out to hire a labourer… who ended up demanding significantly more than the price of my property for her services. I’d read online that the economy in Kenshi was a bit of a joke but I wasn’t expecting to go full-on Weimer Republic so quickly. “I’m not paying that!” I said to myself, remembering some freed or escaped slaves wandering outside the walls I though “Why not hire them? Give them a place in society?”
This was the mistake that would end my save file.
I freed a couple of slaves outside the walls in the hopes of exploiting a slim chance that they would join me; none of them did, instead they vanished into the desert. “That’s annoying, but worth a try.” I thought, saving my game then returning to town to grind out more money, except when I was walking down the street, I was run through, mortally wounded then taken to the cells again on terrorism charges.
Nobody had seen me free the slaves. The slaves had not returned to the city. There was absolutely no way the guard could have become aware of what I’d done and now, since I’d already saved, my playthrough was over.
I watched on, pissed off as my adventure ended with my character succumbing to his wounds at the bottom of a rusty cage in prison.
A Harsh Verdict
Kenshi is a really cool game. It’s not like most games out there but if I had to draw comparison? It’s like a mix between Mount and Blade, Project Zomboid and Conan: Exiles with a dash of Fallout 1 and 2. That being said… it isn’t for me.
You can do anything you want in Kenshi as long as it’s management, base-building and grinding.
In Mount and Blade, the monotony of grinding for money and building an army is softened by the spectacle and fun of large-scale medieval combat and the variety of things to do, its factions can be wiped out, joined or even controlled by the player if they work up to such heights. In Project Zomboid, skills don’t take so long to advance and even once they do, there are enough dangers in the world and things to craft to ensure that you are always on your toes and always need to use these skills to keep living. You aren’t completely useless still after an hour of grinding. Both Conan: Exiles and Zomboid have multiplayer which makes the crafting and base-building tolerable, because I can get a more interested friend to shoulder the burden and if one of us is particularly weak then the others can make sure they get home.
Kenshi’s grind takes forever, has next to no short term reward, the combat isn’t fun and none of this can be softened by the inherent joy of multiplayer, the game is single-player only.
The phrase ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ comes to mind, I don’t like handholding in my games either but Kenshi has zero quests, would it have been so bad for the player to be able to pick up missions?
I wanted to review Kenshi in part because I’ve always felt misled by the coverage you see of this game on YouTube. These videos focus on building trade empires in the game, fighting large battles or some of the dark oddities in the world like the Skin Bandits, the Shrieking Bandits or the Blood Spiders but truthfully? The average minute-to-minute gameplay of Kenshi is monotonous and irritating with unexplained cripplings and charges for laws nobody saw you break. Kenshi feels like a mid-2000’s Eastern European game, except it’s British and came out in 2018. For a lot of people, this will all be part of the charm and why they love the game but for me? Once the Switch 2 comes out in a week, Kenshi will almost certainly find itself consigned to the Tartarus of my Steam Library for another half-decade.
Positives:
Thick atmosphere
Deep, stats-based gameplay
Extensive management and base-building systems
Enormous world to explore with many different factions
Negatives:
Incredibly grindy
Hideous graphics
Lots of jank
Half-baked faction mechanics
Not much to do outside of faction and settlement building
Verdict: Not For Me but Worth Checking Out
I hope you enjoyed my second foray into long-form reviews. Be sure to leave a like and subscribe if you want to see more and I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.
I will be going on a short hiatus from the 1st of June until the 12th but will return with more reviews from then-on.
Thanks for the review. I've had this on my wishlist for a while, but couldn't decide if it's for me.
Excellent review for convincing me that this is not for me at all! I have been wanting to play Project Zomboid for ages tho.