Kenshi
A free-roaming squad based RPG focusing on open-ended sandbox gameplay features rather than a linear story. Be a trader, a thief, a rebel, a warlord, an adventurer, a farmer, a slave, or just food for the cannibals. Research new equipment and craft new gear. Purchase and upgrade your own buildings to use as safe fortified havens when things go bad, or use them to start up a business. Aid or oppose the various factions in the world while striving for the strength and wealth necessary to simply survive in the harsh desert. Train your men up from puny victims to master warriors. Carry your wounded squad mates to safety and get them all home alive. Features Freeform gameplay in a seamless game world in the largest single-player RPG world since Daggerfall, stretching over 870 square kilometers. The game will never seek to limit you or restrict your personal play style. Custom design as many characters as you want and build up a whole squad to fight for you. Characters will grow and become stronger with experience, not just in their stats but their appearance too. Original take on the RTS-RPG hybrid genre. No "hero" characters with artificially stronger stats than everybody else- Every character and NPC you meet is potentially an equal, and has a name, a life. You are not the chosen one. You're not great and powerful. You don't have more 'hitpoints' than everyone else. You are not the center of the universe, and you are not special. Unless you work for it.
Steam User 1163
Criminally underrated and HIGHLY addictive. There is Slavery, Racism, Racism against Racists, Racism against people who MIGHT be racist, more slavery, robotic limbs, discrimination against the lower class, discrimination against the upper class, discrimination just in general, MORE slavery, fish people who will eat you alive on a pole, blue bug people who will eat you alive on a pole and worship the person eating you, bald doughy bastards who don't wear clothes who will also eat you, massive murder giraffe-dinosaur hybrids with beaks who will eat you, crab worshipers, beep, a deranged autistic robot surrounded by headless simps, and did I mention slavery? An absolute masterpiece, 100/10.
Steam User 202
My Story in Kenshi so far.
I made a female starter character. Started in the Hub and just went out into the desert.
Met my first Starving Bandits and got knocked out. They took my food.
Found a bar to restock my supplies and discovered some ore nearby. Mined for starter money, while narrowly avoiding more bandits.
Took my meagre earnings to built myself a base, but got a visit from a patrol of the Holy Nation. They reported me to their inquisition and returned with reinforcements to burn me for being a woman.
But I knew the area by now and baited Black Dragon Ninjas into their raid. The inqusition won, but suffered heavy losses and had to retreat, which left me in a field of wounded and dead. I took their equipment as loot while the crippled survivors got eaten by scavenging Bonedogs.
I vowed to take my revenge on the Holy Nation and destroy them without leveling up other troops, just with this one character.
So I started training, beat up Dust Bandits and explored more of the world. My travels yielded better loot and better tech, my outpost was growing, and then I found a rare crossbow.
In a dessicated world of unarmored targets, speed, range and a copious amounts of bleed inflicting bolts are king. I began to utterly destroy bandits with this crossbow. Improved my stats and hunted down bigger bountys to measure the strength of my character.
After some time, I found myself in the Ashlands, an even more desolate lategame area. In the ruins of a fallen civilisation, I stumbled upon a powerful "skeleton" (think mad max samurai terminator). Kiting him to hell and back, I somehow managed to knock him out... and took him back home with me.
Now I'm very much tempted to return his monstrous weapon to him and throw him in the capital of the Holy Nation, so he can nuke their cities.
So yeah… I am about to start a war.
10/10 This game is amazing.
Steam User 153
Grindy as all hell, a slog to play, everything kills you in a heartbeat and 2 swings. But there's that one character that manages to patch himself up just in time, run just a little faster and not get caught stealing from the shop that one time... That is when a legend is born! That's how a story is told, on the backs and corpses of ten thousand others that did not make it.
Steam User 130
I started as a thief, spiraled into becoming Pablo Escobar. Started kidnapping officials from around the world. And managed to ruin a world that was already ruined twice.
Excellent game.
Steam User 134
This is one of the games that has small but devoted fanbase. Its like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio, project zomboid and other indie games with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
So Kenshi....you create an ugly ass dude and are put in ugly ass world (the game uses ugly ass engine from early 2000s).
You get beaten by literally everyone and have no idea what to do and how to play.
Then you keep trying, dozens of hours pass and then you are the greatest force in the ugly ass world who can beat anyone, anywhere.
Its 10/10
Steam User 110
In just 22 hours, this has been my experience:
Started with 1000c at the Hub, a run-down criminal dump with only a working bar. I bought a little food and got to mining. I went through the "get beat down, toughen up, build skills, and acquire gear" grind with the character I forgot to rename before hitting confirm in the editor, "Feck."
Feck was a loner for a long time. Built a shack, a storm house, stone quarry, stone processing, and a few other production facilities by himself. After awhile I found an NPC who wanted to be free of his master and I paid his contract. Voth joined me and we built a walled camp worth being proud of. We faced countless bandits and wildlife along the way, but we did it.
No rest for the wicked, though. We set to making steel and crafting weapons, and probably managed 15 swords and had 8 in the chest to sell when 20 black dragon ninjas showed up to beat us bloody and toss us out of our camp. Feck and Voth recovered and launched a two-man counter attack after some rest, but were beaten again. We recruited mercs and the lot of us managed to whittle their numbers, but now there's "hungry bandits" trying to edge in and our heroes were ousted again.
I have spent the last several hours recruiting a handful of new characters to train and arm as elite warriors. Feck and Voth are hardened killers who outmatch any 2 black dragon ninjas. I don't care if we can recover our base, as long as we can make them regret taking what we worked for, I don't care if it burns.
So yeah, you could say I'm deeply invested.
Steam User 194
To this day kenshi really shows up modern development studios, and demonstrates that a game can be great if it isnt infected with the business investor CEO parasites demanding modern audience appeal and in game transactions