I like to try weird and novel games. Sometimes this is rewarded when I come across unexpected gems. Often this is not. Kenshi is a game that unfortunately falls into the latter category for me. Yet if I’d encountered it at a much earlier age, I can see myself falling in love with it. The game is advertised as a kind of RPG in which you can do almost anything and that’s largely true. But it’s also rather ugly, has a terrible interface, and is fully of janky, inconsistent mechanics. You can get all kinds of amazing stories going with your characters, but you’d also have to put up with a lot of grinding and boring moments in which nothing happens and I’m just too old for that now.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world that is largely empty as the people in it mostly hunker behind walls in their cities and towns. Humans are the most populous species but they share the world with the somewhat insect-like Hivers, the reptilian Shek and the humanoid robots known as Skeletons. Scattered around the world are the ruins and detritus of past civilizations suggestive of a much higher level of technological sophistication at some point. The inhabited parts of the current world are controlled by a number of polities such as the religiously zealous Holy Nation, the slave-owning United Cities and the many Hives of the Hivers. Out in the wilderness, many dangers roam from the weak Bonedogs, to the packs of Blood Spiders in the swamps, and mighty Leviathans on the edges of the map. Some zones are dry desert and in others acid rain that can eat away at flesh constantly fall.

The game offers multiple starting options, from staples like being a lone wander, a trader, an ordinary citizens of one of the major nations to more exotic ones like being a slave or being a criminal on the run in possession of a valuable sword. Regardless of what you pick, there’s no main quest or fixed set of objectives. Your immediate priority is survival of course. That might mean running from your enemies and will certainly involve securing a reliable way to get food. You’ll want to train up your characters and amass wealth and equipment. Beyond that, it’s up to the player what you want to achieve. You might want your party of adventurers to explore the map, plumbing it for its secrets and treasures. Or build a war band powerful enough to challenge one of the nations. Or settle down to build a base for your own faction.

It sounds great but it’ll many, many hours of gameplay to achieve such heights. Your characters start out so weak that you’ll lose fights to even the gangs of starving bandits. A single bonedog will lay out your entire squad. Here, your skills improve by using them. So you’ll likely raise your athletics skills very quickly simply by running away from enemies all the time. For fighting skills, you’ll need to get beaten up by enemies, recuperate and then wade back into it again and again. Hopefully you have enough money to pay for your food and the first aid kits you’ll need doing this. To build strength, you might set your characters to do mining and have them haul heavy sacks of ore around. If that sort of gameplay seems familiar to you, that’s exactly it. It’s grinding of the old-school variety. The game has time acceleration controls to speed things up, but you’ll still need plenty of patience to get anywhere in this game.

The graphics are, as you can see, not terribly impressive but serviceable. The world feels huge and each biome is markedly different. But it’s also mostly empty as there are very few things you can interact with. Combat is mostly automatic. Your characters will choose weapons, block and attack as they please. The only orders you can really give are to focus on a particular enemy or run away. Success or failure is determined by your stats and whether your skills are high or low, the fighting animations are the same. The simulation is actually kind of cool. Each body part has its own pool of health, limbs can be severed, wide swings can hit characters adjacent to the one that was targeted and so on. But it’s not an action game and you mostly just watch the fights play out. There’s no morale system or any kind of psychological modeling. Anyone you recruit are loyal for good and have no needs or desires of their own other than food. You can gather a huge number of people together and assign them to your settlement or to venture out in the world. The difficulty will be managing all of them and making sure they all have enough food.

There are many ways to make the initial grind easier but they feel very exploitative. For example, one of the easiest ways to earn early money and perhaps gain some combat experience is to pull enemies to the gates of cities where the guards will do most of the fighting for you and you can pick through the pieces afterwards. Many of the ruins contain valuable artefacts but are guarded by robotic spiders. Instead of fighting them, you can kite them away so that you can loot the site. If you don’t care about breaking the game, you can try stealing from shopkeepers. With low skills, the attempt usually fails and raises an alert. But if the game is paused, you get to try repeatedly until you succeed. There’s a lot of other weird things in the game. There’s even a skill that applies only to projectile weapons and helps prevent friendly fire. To raise it, you need to, wait for it, repeatedly shoot at your friends and allies.

I stuck with the game long enough to gather a solid team, explored around a bit to see different biomes and had them equipped decently enough to not be totally embarrassing in fights. But I didn’t really feel up to grinding on mobs to get their skills up to say nothing of building a settlement. At the same time, a younger version of myself will likely be addicted to the simple grind of seeing the skill numbers going up and eventually ending up with super characters capable of taking on entire hordes. You can even replace the severed limbs of biological characters with robotic ones eventually. It might also be fun to set up a base in order to craft the very best equipment possible, use turrets to defend yourself against raiders, and set yourself up as the ruler of this wasteland. It might take hundreds of hours of playing to get to that point but for a certain type of gamer, that’s a plus.

These days I no longer have enough patience for this type of gameplay. Not only does it take too long to even do the simplest tasks, such as getting from one town to another, it has poor productions values and has janky user interface issues. It does a lot of different things but each part is appreciably worse than what other games offer. If you want roving warbands, just play Mount & Blade instead. There are plenty of better open-world RPGs. Whatever settlement mechanics it offers is far more simplistic than the real settlement games. Of course nothing allows you to have all that in one game like this one so it’s understandable why it has a devoted fanbase and they’re all eagerly waiting for the next game which will be a prequel.