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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