All can be assigned to any task, and made to improve at it. Some have combat specialisms, some are better suited to farming, researching, building or mining. Some of them joined for adventure or personal motivations, most for a princely but achievable sum. The pack will be made up, essentially, of people you met at bars. But after a few days with it, you too might control a roving pack, finally able to survive those onslaughts - be it to protect your traders and caravans as they shuffle mined or made resources between towns, be it to dispense justice or be it to slay and rob anyone you encounter. Another remarkable shift - and perhaps Kenshi's defining feature amongst a sea of remarkable freedoms - is quite how many NPCs you can optionally recruit.Īn early foray into Kenshi's arid world, which is both post- and pre-technology, has you alone, poor and unspeakably vulnerable to the roving bandit packs. You can, in theory, reshape this broken desert world as you see fit, rather than being a mere bit player in it. Kenshi is, of course, a singleplayer affair rather than an MMO, which if anything swings open the doors of potential even wider. (And both have slightly insufferable interfaces). Be a hero, be a villain, be a trader, be a manual labourer, work your way from absolute anonymity and poverty to wealth and reputation or any number of stops in between. Both offer you a whole world, and shrug at any attempt to divine purpose from it. What it most reminds me of is Ultima Online, the MMO grandaddy whose back-of-the-box precis still reads like a game from the future, despite its age-dictated shonkiness. 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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