Kenshi – a prickly game with a kind soul

Hi all! Sullivan is here and we’re talking about games again.

Today on the “cutting table” the game, which has become a cult among players, has gone through 12 years of development and is preparing for the release of the second part.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Kenshi!

I am sure that many of you have heard, but not many have decided to try this delicacy. In this article, I will try to talk about my personal impressions so that you will have the desire to cast aside doubts and plunge into the cruel world of Kenshi. Which definitely deserves your attention.

Personally, I started it several times and only at the tenth hour “the game opened up”. I felt excitement, a thirst for adventure and accepted the rules.
All the romance is in the motto that I came up with for today’s review – “There is no justice in this world".

As always, I thank the readers for their fair assessments and opinions in the comments.

Happy reading.

About the game

Development was carried out by one person – Chris Hunt.

He’s on the screensaver. For about eleven years, Chris developed alone. In 2013, he managed to attract like-minded people.
Together they started a small indie company Lo-Fi Games.
Behind the studio, there is only a small store with clothes based on the game, the beloved Kenshi herself and rumors around the continuation.

But what kind of Kenshi is this, what does he “taste” like??
The game world is truly cool, brutal and huge. The area is 900 square kilometers. For clarity, the scale of maps from other games:

– Death Stranding – 846 sq. km
– The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – 136 sq. km
– GTA V – 120 sq. km
– Red Dead Redemption 2 – 75 sq. km
– The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Quarter 39. km

(Data taken from various open sources)

The author was inspired by the first parts of Fallout, the Mad Max film franchise and stories about a wandering ronin who forever wanders the scorched lands. Hunt simply called the style of the game “Swordpunk.”.
That’s how it feels. Chris managed to convey the mesmerizing spirit of a wasteland in which there is no life. Tumbleweeds fly across the sand, hungry raiders howl in the distance, and finding a safe place to stay for the night is another challenge.

The game still, five years after release, regularly maintains contact with the community. Sometimes these are small fixes and minor patches, but mostly they are weekly reviews of the creativity of players who send their creations directly to the developers.

Kenshi is a purebred sandbox that does not limit the player and allows you to do everything that is allowed. Do you want to be a slave trader?? Look for shackles, victim and bind! Or maybe you like to plow fields and chip stones, so as not to feel sideways glances behind your back?? Hold!

Problems begin as soon as you decide to implement your plans.
Literally everything is trying to kill you. The world is populated by dangerous animals, mutants and even carnivorous plants. Not to mention the various castes: fanatics striking against other races, savages, cannibals, killer robots who dream of pulling on your skin and much more.

Traveling lightly, nomads, at first glance, can pass for ordinary urban rabble who, in their old age, have succumbed to the call of adventurism. But if you turn out to be weaker, show your wounds or move like a patient, a dubious company will be interested in you. And after that, it turns out that they were:

A) Fugitive convicts from a nearby quarry who wanted to profit from other people’s goods.
B) Slave traders who are not averse to taking an interesting specimen to their collection.
IN) Knights of the “Holy Nation” who cannot stand other races and are ready to kill.

Kenshi is great at generating interesting situations in the first hours of the game, when everything seems new and unknown.

Chris Hunt himself said in an interview that he wants to act as an enemy for the player.
From the first minutes, they force you to fight for existence. Depending on the chosen background, the game will appear differently. It can also be an economic simulator, when you start the game as a wealthy merchant with a personal retinue. Or it may surprise you and seem like a cRPG, choosing a background for the “Freedom Seekers” with team interaction and the desire to subjugate everyone to your will.

We’re done with theory, let’s move on to practice.

Meet Kenshi

A couple of years https://sky-vegas-casino.co.uk/games/ ago I came across strange videos about the game on YouTube, with different stories: someone had his leg cut off in battle and became the emperor of mankind, someone crawled the entire desert and survived, and someone started the game as a slave without limbs. And the like.

Opening such content, I was greeted by an antediluvian interface, eye-catching graphics, and after a minute, I returned to my previous business.
But the video became more and more, and the desire to try the toy only grew stronger. At some point, I accepted the challenge and bought Kenshi.

The hardest thing was to overcome the inner minimalist who strives for perfection. The first step after installation was a nice mod for a black interface.

The find was so successful that it fixed the scary fonts, darkened the interface and added a little desire to touch the dangerous world of Kenshi. Yes, The game fully supports workshop mods Steam, which adds replayability in the vast expanses of this wonderful world.

Among other things, the Lo-Fi Games project knows how to surprise.
From unique races that personally seemed unfamiliar to me, to interesting and original lore, which is presented very meagerly and greedily. No one will lead you by the hand. You will have to get acquainted with the flora, fauna and sights on your own or in the company of faithful partners.

Having launched the game for the first time, having created some kind of crooked resemblance of a person, I was spat out on the outskirts of a nameless city. After wandering around the ruins, I found a local bar where, if you have khat, the local currency, you can hire bodyguards or companions for your squad. Drink nuclear wasteland swill, eat local snacks and spend the night, restoring strength and health.

Nearby there was a store with various goods: backpacks, second-hand clothes and everything necessary for the first foray beyond the city walls. In the north there is a high tower of one of the local factions – some ninjas who can become friends and will provide a special choice of equipment only if I win their trust. By coin or actions.
Creatures of all stripes, colors and colors roamed the streets. There weren’t many people. I came to the conclusion that it was better not to rock the boat and took a free sleeping bag for the first night in one of the destroyed buildings.

In the middle of the night, my character woke up from blows to the belly. Some drunkard imagined himself to be the owner of this flophouse and not very hospitably tried to prove it to me. A fight ensued, in which the entire local rabble was drawn into. I was driven out of the city in disgrace.

This is how my acquaintance with Kenshi began.
Where to go and what to do is unclear. In the first couples, I had to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. During the day it was bottles, garbage and surviving dishes, and at night I practiced breaking into remote huts so that the guards would not throw me in jail. But every time the character died from wandering raiders or wild animals. I had to go crazy – squat down and crawl through the bushes without attracting too much attention.

Any attempt to be a hero and pretend to be the chosen one was punished quickly and harshly.

After 50 hours

The game has opened up. Sorry.

I felt all the excitement already on the third restart. In the first two, I will either be devoured or captured as a slave. Burnt like a match, but couldn’t drop.
I began to understand what opportunities the game offers. As a lover of open-world role-playing games, I didn’t raise my hands to quit – I continued to play, overcoming.
Kenshi was encouraged for perseverance and time invested. The stronger a character became, the further he could run, the more he could see, buy, sell and find.

For example, if you appear in the South of the map, then to the North, to the Valley of the Cannibals, the path is blocked. It is necessary to prepare for travel, both mentally and physically. Character death is common and not the end of the game, provided you have others.

So, on one of the forays to get supplies for my camp, I sent the fastest but frailest character. A few hours later he was already surrounded by raiders, flogged and captured. I had to switch to the main character, quickly move to the city, hire a dozen guards and knock on the invaders’ door with them. From your feet.
Only on the way, our convoy was met by a flock of wild half-birds, half-orcs, who swept away the detachment in one go. There were blood stains on the battlefield, limbs were rolling down the hills, and I sat on the other side of the monitor and, with my mouth open, watched what was happening.

When I realized that open encounters were not my style of play, I decided to play a little differently.

Set up a new transshipment point near the city. It all started typical. Any hearth begins with fire. For me, this fire became a fire, where on cold evenings the characters settled down with sleeping bags and could rest after a hard day.
After all, every day is a lot of work, grinding and a push for survival.

After clearing out abandoned shacks, he sold all sorts of garbage, bargained for food and building materials. Sometimes it was possible to witness bloody battles, and then, like a scavenger, to pick up the remaining loot from the bodies of the dead. In the camp, it was possible to organize the extraction of local minerals. I figured out the formation of a work schedule for my wards and watched how the work of mining stone and iron was in full swing.

Everything mined was then sent for smelting. It’s not a dusty occupation, but with honest work I managed to earn my first capital. The finished products were picked up by a courier who ran from the camp to the city every hour. The settlement blossomed, there were more cats in your pocket and the gameplay began to look more like a fun farm.

Management in the squad is unpleasantly implemented.
It’s already becoming difficult to have more than ten companions. Everyone needs supervision. Each needs to be assigned a specific task pool with which it will work. But even competently set orders cannot be repaired by the truly stupid AI that pervades every NPC here.

Even dividing the entire composition into small squads, each of them still needs supervision. Taking time away from business and leaving your tribe won’t work. One will either get stuck in the textures, or shit himself from illness, or do something else. And the one who stayed next to him will have to answer.
If the person in charge doesn’t clear up the mess, get ready to send in the rest of the hounds. Or dig graves with empty coffins.

The world lives by its own rules, and the game reacts to the player’s actions.
Kenshi perfectly demonstrates the sandbox genre, when the player unwittingly witnesses interesting encounters or situations. She herself initiates clashes between cities, settlements, camps and even races.
But the behavior of the heroes under the player’s control is off-putting. It sometimes looks stupid and awkward. Forgetting to set the settings for one of the characters, you can watch how he stands, watches and suffers a beating from a goner who is many times weaker.

Having played enough in this style, restart again, a new character and start from the bottom. Victim of slavers in the holy camp. It was real hell.
The first half of the day you have to break stone, and in the second you have to sit in a cage. At this moment, the veil of adventurism began to roll away from my eyes and I noticed one of the disadvantages – grind.

At any stage of the game you will have to grind.
Progression in Kenshi is as follows: To knock out with one hit, you need to train on level 1 dummies. Having reached a certain skill level, you will need to look for a “cooler” dummy. And so on until the training dummies end up on the half-possession plate, then only training in real battles.

To be fair, I saw different options, specifically in combat training. Someone managed to kidnap people, lock them in a camp and kick them half to death, nurse them back to health and torture them again. Tough, but the method works.

In the case of my character, a slave, I had to sit in a cage at night, picking the lock with my fingers. I don’t understand why the game doesn’t implement the mechanics of disposable or reusable master keys.

When the locks began to be opened the first time, the hacking skill exceeded level 60. To make the long-awaited escape, all that was left was to learn how to run fast. It took another few hours for the surreal moment in the form of the instant opening of the cage, an alarm going off throughout the entire camp, and an attempt to escape further away.
Each time they caught me, kicked me and put me in another cage. And so in a circle.

The more you practice a craft, the better your performance and proficiency in that activity will be. This allows you to choose your play style and focus on mechanics that are interesting to the player. But the problem with Kenshi is how long it takes to master the skill. Even more quickly, how should you do it?. Not many options.

But there are enough options in crafts.
There is mastery of various types of weapons: Katanas, rapiers, axes, ranged combat, fist, even the ability to use stationary turrets. Implants like from Cyberpunk 2077. Farming, survivability level, stealth combat skills, a lot of crafts.
And also – an interesting wound system, unique types of NPCs, pleasant and smooth animations. Everything can be spiced up with an abundance of existing mods from the workshop.

Play with anyone and in any quantity.
This brings down the tower. I was able to try out the game in my own commune, with several characters – nomads, but settled on a lone traveler. I had to live with all the dangers on my own. There was nowhere to wait for help, so the playstyle was extremely cautious, with a predominant leveling of stealth and an emphasis on loot from already dead opponents.

I liked wandering alone. Monitor only your indicators and travel endlessly. Run anywhere to learn something new, find expensive treasures or meet interesting characters. Kenshi allows you to choose your playstyle. Awesome gameplay with a few mods to fix mechanics you don’t like. Mine was the change in grind difficulty and quantity.

Game problems

Of course, if there was no “but” for everything written above, it would be strange. We will talk about this in a separate paragraph.

The main problem of the game is poor optimization.
I’m not a techie, I can’t guarantee to speak facts, but experts from Reddit explain this misfortune with the development period.

The game has been in development for 12 years. It turned out that the engine was no longer ready to work with the new hardware. Funny paradox.

Reddit user

When accelerating time in the game, on an Intel i9-9900KF processor, Nvidia 2080 and 32 RAM, Kenshi manages to slow down in order to have time to load the environment.
Despite the fact that I don’t play on ultra. And at the same time, Kenshi is not able to produce a juicy, lively or simply beautiful picture without external intervention.

The image seems faded, torn, and the vanilla interface is a generally disgusting mixture from the 90s. The panels look strange, not attracting attention and clearly not pleasing aesthetes.

In this game you will not learn the history of the world, but write your own.
At least that’s how it was for me. The entire narrative ended on the character creation page, when choosing a backstory. The premise itself sounds interesting, the ancient world with its own languages, writings, myths, legends and history.

And the whole story can easily be filled into a small book with an interesting art book included. But the game won’t tell you that. Those nuggets of information that Kenshi allows you to find out will be contained in books scattered throughout the entire continent.

Without third-party intervention and a wiki, it’s hard to understand what’s going on here. There is no training either. I was helped by videos from YouTube and the above-mentioned wiki on the game. I think this approach is not entirely correct.
My desire to study history immediately disappeared; I would rather talk with someone at a roadside bar, listen to interesting stories, and not read tons of text from lost teachings and collections.

Chris Hunt’s project is full of bugs.
The gradation is wide: from minor to visual and critical. Characters may stop responding to your commands, some get bugged and become immortal, and sometimes artifacts from an already poor picture fly into your face. Graphic mods or ENB help with the latter very well. I don’t know how fair it is to say this about the game if most of the problems are fixed by mods from the players. What do you think?

It’s getting boring.
My experience in the game stopped at 56 hours. I don’t regret the money spent and I’m happy with the experience, but I got bored and left.
Kenshi kept his mark throughout my entire journey – he was a silent observer who humbly followed the player’s actions without interfering. Because of this, I give the Lo-Fi Games project a five-star rating and remove it from the Steam library shelf.

Afterword

At the moment, things are going well for the project.
By October 2020, total sales exceeded one million copies. And a year before that, Lo-Fi Games studio announced the development of a prequel game – Kenshi 2.
Its action should take place a thousand years before the events of the first part, during the time of the Old Empire. According to the developers’ plans, this part should use the same game engine as the first part, but later it was announced that it was being created on Unreal Engine.

Personally, I would like to recommend to passing, or trying to pass and try out Kenshi. This is an interesting project with its own style, presentation and mechanics that immersed me in the atmosphere of post-apocalypse and hopelessness. He considers every day he lives a feat, and every defeated enemy increases his sense of self-worth.
The game gives pleasant emotions and settles firmly in the heart.