Kenshi

There's a very popular take on Kenshi that I think misses the point: that it's "Mount & Blade meets Fallout" or "Dwarf Fortress in third person." Both of those labels are convenient shortcuts and both of them get the essence wrong. Kenshi isn't a genre mashup. Kenshi is an experiment in stripping away almost the entire grammar of modern game design and then watching to see what a player does with the rubble that's left.

No main quest. No protagonist. No levels. No XP. No mandatory named character who has to survive — including you. In my first run, my character named Klara died forty minutes in, eaten by a Beak Thing near the Hub. The game did not display a Game Over screen. It quietly switched control to another squad member and kept going. That was the moment I understood what I was actually playing.

Kenshi's Difficulty Is Not Difficulty. It Is Indifference

People say Kenshi is hard. That's true but incomplete. Dark Souls is hard. Nioh is hard. Kenshi isn't hard in that particular way — Kenshi is indifferent. This is an important distinction.

Dark Souls designs each encounter to be learned. Nioh hands you tools to overcome it. Kenshi drops you into a world that does not measure your strength, does not balance encounters, and does not soften anything. You walk out of the Hub with a rusted sword and 200 cats in your pocket, you walk east for four minutes, and you meet a Holy Nation patrol of six armored men, each with a katana and leather cuirass. They do not care who you are. They kill you if you're a runaway slave (the default fate of certain starting classes). Or they walk past you if you look like someone else. You don't know which until it's already happening.

In my third run, I started as a Hive Prince (an insectoid caste in whose society he is nobility on the run) with exactly one set of ragged clothes. I walked for three in-game days, slept under trees, ate wild flowers, avoided every patrol. When I finally reached Squin, I went into the tavern, met a battered old soldier named Beep — a Hive Worker who can only say the word "beep" (this is real) — and hired him for 300 cats borrowed from the innkeeper. We became a two-person squad. Twelve real hours later that squad was eight people, we had an outpost on the edge of the Great Desert, and I had lost my left arm to a cannibal ambush in the north. The arm was replaced with a robot prosthetic bought from a market in Mongrel.

None of that story was written in advance. It happened because Kenshi lets it happen.

The Grim Beauty of a World That Doesn't Need You

Kenshi's map is roughly 870 square kilometres (a figure Lo-Fi Games has cited) split across nearly forty distinct biomes — salt flats, acid plains, swamplands, forbidden jungles, radioactive lowlands. Each region carries its own factions, its own weather patterns, its own wildlife capable of eating you in region-specific ways. In the Fog Islands the fog is thick enough that you can't see fifteen metres, and Fogmen — mutated cannibals — will drag your unconscious squadmates away while you lie bleeding out, forcing you to either mount a rescue or accept the loss.

Kenshi does not look good. The engine is dated, the animations are stiff, character models resemble clay figurines. But the art direction has a real vision to it — sunset in the Bonefields, when red light streams through the ribcages of enormous long-dead creatures the size of small buildings, is genuinely beautiful in a way that transcends the technology carrying it. Wilberg's score is spare, marks moments lightly, never forces emotion. This is a game for players who don't need a constant dopamine drip.

The skill-through-use system — Skyrim and Morrowind followed the same lineage — means your character advances in exactly what they do. Run a lot, get faster. Get hit a lot, toughness rises, meaning you fall unconscious less quickly when wounded. Get shackled repeatedly, strength rises because you're dragging chains around. This "train by getting beaten" logic produced one of the community's legendary strategies: deliberately start as a slave, deliberately get captured, deliberately level through suffering. No other game rewards this. Very few even permit it.

Kenshi does not design each encounter to be learned. It does not design anything. It simply exists.

Faction Politics and the Long Game

Once you accept that the game has no goals for you, the second layer opens up: the world is a network of factions with their own goals, and you exist inside their politics whether you want to or not. The Holy Nation is a theocratic patriarchy that enslaves anyone who isn't a human male of the correct genetic stock. The United Cities is a slaver oligarchy of nobles and merchant princes. The Shek Kingdom is a warrior culture of horned warriors who respect strength and despise cowardice. The Anti-Slavers, the Flotsam Ninjas, the Machinists — dozens of smaller factions with their own agendas, alliances, and grievances.

You can side with them. You can fight them. You can ignore them and build in the wilderness. You can play middleman, running goods between hostile territories. In one of my saves, my squad became the primary caravan route between the Shek city of Squin and the Holy Nation's Blister Hill, carrying medicine and iron plates while never revealing to either side that we were also selling weapons to a small Anti-Slaver cell in the north. That was a hundred hours of gameplay, and none of it was quest content.

Base building is the third layer. Find an unclaimed spot on the map, drop a construction beacon, start assembling walls, generators, farms, research benches. Your outpost will be raided. Repeatedly. By whichever faction owns the closest territory, or by wandering animals, or by roaming bandits. Defenses matter. Turret placement matters. Whether you built on high ground matters. And there's no fast travel — every attack means your caravans and expedition squads have to physically walk home, meaning you learn to leave a garrison behind at all times. This is one of the more punishing settlement-management systems in any game I've played, and also one of the most rewarding when it works.

Where the Machine Runs Out of Fuel

I need to be honest: Kenshi is not friendly. This is implicit in the purchase but still worth saying plainly.

The tutorial is barely there. A few starting popups, and the community wiki — the Kenshi Wiki is one of the largest fan-made resources on Steam. You will read it a lot. The UI is dense, buries important settings in submenus, and some crucial information (for instance: how long a character can go without food before dying) is never surfaced anywhere. Combat controls are, mechanically, real-time strategy with pause, but the camera and pathfinding will occasionally make you want to throw your mouse.

Performance is a real issue with the base game. Lo-Fi's custom engine does not scale well for large bases, and if you build a fortress with twenty inhabitants, multiple turrets, and pens of livestock, framerates can drop into the low twenties on genuinely capable machines. Mods partially patch this but not fully.

And there's a flip side to the "indifferent" design philosophy: many players give it four hours, don't understand what they're supposed to do, feel adrift, and leave. That is a completely fair response. Kenshi is not trying to keep you. It has no hook. If you need the game to tell you what your next objective is, this is not where you should be.

The other honest note is that some of Kenshi's most compelling systems are undercooked in execution. Faction reputation is a single scalar per faction, when the world it describes clearly wants a more textured relationship model. Diplomatic options between factions you aren't personally part of are essentially absent — you can influence relations, but you can't broker peace or force alliances in the way strategy games permit. There is an obvious ceiling here, one Kenshi 2 is presumably meant to address if it ever ships.

For Whoever Wants to Be Left in the Desert

Kenshi has a small but ferociously loyal community. Not because they're hype-eaters. Because this is one of the few games where every player has a genuinely different story. Ask a Skyrim fan about Whiterun and you'll get roughly the same story every time. Ask a Kenshi fan about the first time they reached Mongrel and each one will describe a different fight, a different squadmate who died en route, a different cascading crisis that reshaped their small empire.

I think this is one of the strongest values in the entire Steam library. But only if you belong to a very specific kind of player: someone who prefers systems over narrative, who treats failure as content rather than punishment, and who does not need the game to ask permission before making things hard. If any of that sounds appealing, buy it. Kenshi 2 has been in development for years with no firm release date, so the first game remains the only place to experience something this rare.

One last practical note. Kenshi has an initial installation and setup phase that is worth doing carefully. There is an official mod called Reactive World that makes faction politics respond more meaningfully to your actions across the campaign, and it is widely considered essential — the game's built-in faction reactions are much shallower than they should be, and Reactive World fixes that. Beyond it, mods like Universal Wasteland Expansion add hundreds of hours of extra content, biomes, and factions. But start vanilla. Play at least twenty hours in the raw game. Feel what it is before you start bolting parts onto it. Kenshi rewards patience, and understanding the base state of the machine is part of the pleasure. It also gives you something to compare against when you eventually go modded — a reference point for what the developers built with their own hands, in a small studio, over many years, without a large budget and without asking permission from anyone. That context matters. Kenshi wasn't built by a committee optimizing retention curves. It was built by a very small team, over more than a decade, and the strangeness you feel when you first load in is not a bug of production. It is the whole point of the thing existing at all.