“It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that not only are video games art — that alone would have been manageable — but the classic roleplaying games specifically are our equivalent of high art, and the signs are everywhere… CRPGs are high art because people appreciate them from a distance — nobody plays them. These games are art because folks get emotional and irrational in their presence.”
-- Warlockracy1
I certainly get emotional and irrational in the presence of 2018’s Kenshi. It is high art in much the same way as Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista, the 1961 work consisting of ninety tin cans each ostensibly packed with the artist’s literal shit. A surface-level examination reveals nothing but farce. Efforts to discern its contents remotely are frustrated by the hard material. It has no readily apparent value of any kind, artistic or otherwise. And yet it has developed a remarkably dedicated fanbase whose perpetual refrain is the most confusing part of all: “Hey everybody, you’ve got to see this thing! Some European freak filled it with shit and I paid money to experience it!”
At the end of May, I — like many of you, it would seem — had the pleasure of reading a great review of this “brilliant, brutal, batshit” game by
, whose righteous frustration with the actual game aspect of this game really got me thinking. That review may be the most thorough critique of Kenshi’s ground-level game design yet published and, though I love the game, I found myself nodding in agreement over and over again. I like to fashion myself a connoisseur of core gameplay, and the majority of my favorite games are tightly designed around excellent primary gameplay loops. Kenshi, on the other hand, has essentially no primary gameplay whatsoever. It’s very much up to the player to learn its various systems and to find amusement and/or inspiration in their confluences. To get to that point, one either spends several hours bashing one’s head against the brutal difficulty curve, or else spends several hours paging through one of the absolute worst Wikis in the entire history of metagaming. Why do I like this game so much, again?The nuttiest part is that all the standard criticisms of Kenshi as a commercial video game are basically spot-on. Not one individual gameplay mechanic stands out as great — not one. The world and its rules are so byzantine and inconsistent as to seem totally arbitrary at first. And as if all that weren’t enough, not only must you as the player make your own fun, but the game will gleefully steer you toward frustration and disappointment if you try to rely on its limited guidance. We can get the easy part out of the way first: if you object to the thought of paying for a game and then having to figure out how to have fun with it on your own, then don’t buy Kenshi. There’s nothing for you here that you couldn’t more easily obtain from a good YouTube video.2
It’s often breathlessly insisted in comment sections and the like that Kenshi is not actually grindy or even particularly difficult once you adapt to its systems. This is true, but only inasmuch as becoming Heavyweight Champion of the World isn’t particularly difficult once you adapt to being the world’s greatest boxer — it rather underestimates the journey to get there in the first place. The fundamental truth of the matter is that Kenshi is not only tough as nails, but is so nightmarishly, absurdly unfair to newcomers that you’ll occasionally wonder whether the developer is straight-up trolling. Getting the most out of Kenshi requires one to develop a second-nature intuition for its systems and how they interact with one another, and doing so can take dozens of hours. If memory serves, I myself didn’t start having any fun until I’d logged around ten. Not unlike Shadow Empire, this game is targeted at the sort of gamer who will gladly endure hours of hardship and frustration just for the promise of a totally unique experience. There is absolutely no shame whatsoever in refusing to so treat yourself — let no fanboy tell you otherwise.
That said, one simply has not seen Kenshi at its best who has only ever experienced it second-hand. Its greatest moments come about when its systems conspire to tell emergent stories of a sort that simply can’t occur within the rigid boundaries of a traditionally quest-driven, core gameplay-focused RPG. There is truly no other game like it, and so there is no other way to experience what it has to offer than to feel it for yourself. But Kenshi is so rough around the edges and so hard to recommend overall that I just can’t bring myself to insist that you play it. So instead, I’ll try to bridge the gap by sharing the broad strokes of my latest campaign, which I began the very evening after I read Scanlines’ review. Along the way, we’ll talk about some of the reasons why the game is as bizarre as it is.
Only a certain type of gamer should consider buying Kenshi, but all lovers of game design and the artistry behind the medium owe it to themselves to experience it somehow. It’s a deeply engaging roleplaying experience and a generationally brilliant work of ludonarrative fiction even though it’s frankly quite shit as a game in-and-of-itself. In this review, I’ll do my best to deconstruct the cognitive dissonance that drips from that statement.
THE BASICS (SUCH AS THEY ARE)
In the absence of a traditional story hook or narrative thrust of any kind, a playthrough of Kenshi begins quite suddenly. You select a starting scenario, create a character (or a party of several), and are then unceremoniously dropped into a world that immediately forgets about your existence. For my most recent campaign, I chose the “Wanderer” scenario, which starts me with one character, some worn rags, and a pittance of cash. My starting guy, a human called Hex, begins in a largely ruined settlement of drifters and fugitives called The Hub. Kenshi doesn’t mechanically implement anything as complex as character backgrounds, so I decide by roleplayer’s fiat that Hex fled here after defecting from the theocratic dictatorship to the north. I am now free to go wherever I please and to do whatever I want, so I scan the horizon for a promising destination and set off toward some old ruins a few kilometers away. The ruins are blanketed with discarded weapons and valuable mechanical parts — we could’ve made some early cash from grinding away at a copper mine instead, but Hex has an adventurer’s spirit.
The first thing you’ve got to know about Kenshi is that it was all but wholly conceived by exactly one freakishly dedicated auteur. As regular readers know, I’m a shameless whore for games like that. It was built on the free-and-open-source Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE), which you may remember from… nothing. Wikipedia suggests that there exist a grand total of twenty OGRE applications ever commercially released, and I’ve heard of less than half of them. Popular opinion holds that the engine was more or less obsolete by the time of Kenshi’s full release in late 2018, which is rarely a bullish indicator for cutting-edge polish. If you have a low tolerance for jank in your video games, then playing Kenshi will probably feel like being continuously waterboarded. That’s the OGRE promise!
So, what’s the gameplay like, then? See, that’s where we hit a wall. We ordinarily use the term “gameplay” in reference to the general character of the player experience as intended by the game’s designers, but Kenshi is such a freewheeling and undirected experience that it barely even qualifies as a “game” in the way I understand the term. There are no victory conditions besides those you set for yourself, and no failure conditions save for losing every player character. There are no quests to accept, no story arcs to close, and the world is already too thoroughly ruined for you to have any chance of saving it. There’s trading, base-building, bounty-hunting, and monster-killing to be done, but no particular incentive to do any of it except your whim for adventure. Kenshi is a sandbox in the purest sense of the word, and I’m not just saying that because eighty percent of the game world is covered in sand. As with an actual sand-filled box made as a plaything, the responsibility for facilitating some kind of fun lies strictly with the end-user.
This is the biggest hurdle to overcome. Kenshi simply does not offer a traditional game-designed RPG experience. In fact, it deliberately and joyfully rejects standard conventions of game design and will deliver a confusing and aggravating constellation of bewilderment and ennui if approached like a typical CRPG. Annoyingly, the game softly encourages new players to approach it in that manner anyway. Most players’ first instinct will be to start as a lone wanderer and slowly grind up basic skills near the starting settlement. That’s a good way to get your ass thrashed and robbed by bandits when your attention inevitably lapses, which is exactly what the game has in mind for you. After spending an hour or more securing basic equipment and a supply of food, nothing in the world is more infuriating than getting spontaneously dicked on by thirty starving, rail-thin bandits who then proceed to strip you of every ounce of progress save for the Toughness XP you’ll be granted for surviving the encounter. If you survive.
But if you do survive and subsequently decide to keep playing instead of shutting the game down and getting a refund like a rational person, you might just start to enjoy Lo-Fi Studios’ steaming heap of charm. It’s to be found in the details, like when Hex returns to The Hub to sell his scavenge and there meets a novice swordsman called Jinsei. He spins Hex a yarn about how his wife left him for being a pathetic underachiever, so Hex offers to recruit him and lead him to glory. They begin right away: the pair begins heading south, with Jinsei leading by a couple hundred meters. Like clockwork, the various brigands we encounter beat Jinsei’s ass, find nothing of value on him, and walk off. Hex can then sneak up to his crumpled companion and splint his fractures so that the adventure may continue. They camp under the stars each night, and Jinsei’s wounds heal over into sturdy battle-scars. A week later, he’s survived half a dozen beatdowns and can go toe-to-toe with three or four bandits at once. Together, the pair can bring down a whole patrol.
MAKING OUR OWN GAMEPLAY
The survival mechanics in Kenshi are a strange breed. Organic characters have a Hunger meter whose mechanical purpose is largely to stop the player from wrecking the difficulty curve with a huge team of characters — food is actually relatively easy to come by, just not in vast quantities. It can’t be actively consumed, instead being automatically scarfed down as characters get peckish. There are no thirst mechanics whatsoever, so all the beverages you can find or craft function solely as trade goods. There are beds and sleeping bags, which dramatically raise injured characters’ rates of natural healing but which are otherwise superfluous. Uninjured characters may remain awake indefinitely and do not tire or slow down from exertion unless starving.
Even stranger is the combat. Characters engage one another in pairs or in gangs of a few simultaneous combatants, and damage is applied when their combat animations physically intersect with an opponent. You as the player have essentially no direct control over combat. Instead, the speed and finesse of the combat animations is determined by character stats, which improve as they are used. Since your characters generally begin the game with the minimum possible values across every stat, early-game combat is an exercise in managed displeasure. The game’s solitary mercy in this regard is that nobody ever dies outright unless they take a particularly mighty blow from a massively powerful enemy. If a character runs out of blood or takes too much damage to a critical body part, they just pass out and become unresponsive for a while. It’s impossible to finish off downed characters so, if you want somebody properly dead, your recourse is to knock them flat and make sure they don’t get up before they slip into critical condition and bleed out.
The mechanical purpose of all this is to make combat feel worthwhile from a character-development standpoint. The linchpin of the whole system is that, even if your whole party is convincingly defeated in a fight, everybody will walk away a better fighter. Furthermore, XP rewards scale with the difference between the participants’ combat skills, so occasionally picking an unwinnable fight can significantly increase the rate of skill gain. And most fights will be unwinnable at first — even the poorest, weakest bandit factions tend to roam in squads of fifteen to thirty. For at least the first couple hours of any unmodded playthrough, the combat experience largely boils down to watching your main character(s) get crushed while an ally hides behind a rock somewhere, ready to staunch their bleeding after the aggressors shove off. This is how I get Hex and Jinsei to a point where they feel like RPG protagonists instead of pathetic nobodies, and watching them get there is satisfying enough to make up for the slow early game.
This represents both Kenshi’s core appeal and its greatest flaw in microcosm. The early game is intentionally designed to piss you off in hopes that you’ll weaponize your anger and be drawn further into the world. From an RPG design perspective, this is genius. You feel your characters’ helpless frustration because it is your helpless frustration, and you can’t help but be pulled in (assuming you don’t rage-quit). Once you get used to it, you start to feel like a goddamn anime protagonist. You stop seeing the game as a gauntlet of unfair, player-antagonistic systems and start seeing it as the mechanical sandbox that it means to be. You’ll stop relying on cheesy exploits to progress and start bending the game to your will. It can become a devoted partner in storytelling if only you’ll let it.
But from a game design perspective, of course, the effect is to subject players to hours of misery and to sell the result as a recreational product. Eventually, any sufficiently motivated player will snowball their combat skills to the point where a single guy can mow down a whole squad of bandits. That’s when most RPG-brained players will want to try putting down roots and building a base somewhere, which is when Kenshi’s cruel streak once again rears its ugly head. Most Kenshi players have a story about spending hours on finding a good location, buying up building materials, constructing an early base, and then getting raided by forty goons who kick everyone out and take all the hard work for themselves. You could try settling in a civilized zone instead, but only if you’re ready to pay exorbitant taxes or get regularly inquisited for heresy.
That brings me to the faction system. The continent hosts nearly a hundred different factions, of which maybe five are remotely good-natured. Most will only ever be encountered in the form of wandering vagabonds, but there are also several factions that hold territory. Some vie for political control of the continent in order to entrench their ideologies, and each of those battle several factions that exist in opposition to those goals. The player also controls a faction of their own, which can ally with or antagonize others. The gameplay impact is relatively thin — enemy factions will attack on sight and occasionally send raiding parties to your outpost(s), while allied factions will sometimes come to the player’s defense. Other than that, there are a few major settlements that can change hands or simply fall into squalor if the player defeats the local liege-lord or effectuates other extreme world states. None of this has a significant impact on moment-to-moment gameplay. Engaging with the faction system for the sake of material rewards, as you’d do in a traditional RPG, is a recipe for disappointment. It exists instead as another tool in the player’s storytelling arsenal.
Hex and Jinsei, for example, soon become well practiced at rolling over the poorly equipped but numerous Dust Bandits. In fact, they’re skilled enough to start openly attacking Dust Bandit camps for their plunder. This makes us an enemy of the Dust Bandit faction, which begins sending raiding parties later in the game when I build an outpost. But this funnels lots of wanted fugitives into our swords, and we develop a friendly relationship with the martially inclined Shek Kingdom by regularly turning in our quarry to their police. They begin addressing us with friendly small-talk when we enter their establishments instead of hurling ethnic invective. I could leverage this into an alliance if I wanted, but I’d rather not owe these people anything.
This is all reflective of what passes for Kenshi’s core gameplay experience — something along the lines of “run around a gigantic map and create a narrative around what you find and do.” If the classic Interplay Fallout RPGs were like dynamic virtual storybooks, then Kenshi is like a virtual action-figure playset. The game is so lacking in story direction because it expects you to supply your own. It also expects you to recognize when you’re not having fun pulling a given thread and to deal with it yourself by trying something new. If that sounds interesting, then you might just adore this game and lose hundreds of hours to it. If not, you’ll fall into an MMO-like pit of meaningless grinding and boring pseudo-progression. One either meets Kenshi in the middle or else gets nothing out of it at all.
But why, though? Why would you tell players to make their own fun when you’ve already designed a vast, lore-rich world with competing factions ripe for traditional RPG quest design? Why structure the simulation around languid stat progression algorithms that encourage grinding when that experience is so self-evidently unfun? Why can’t this game just be normal?
These are fair questions, and I don’t have a simple answer for you. So let’s get one straight from the horse’s mouth! Consider this exchange from a 2019 ask-me-anything thread on Reddit about Kenshi’s development:3
Questioner (u/Saucy_Salmon): “What drove you to make the game so challenging?”
Hunt (u/Captain_Deathbeard): “Number 1 rule of storytelling. Character wants something, character faces obstacles and challenges preventing him from attaining it. The job of the storyteller is to torment and obstruct the character. More torment = more story. Solution: maximum torment”
Hunt’s view of adversity as a narrative instrument reflects a well-trodden approach to literary storycraft, of course, but what so fascinates me is how brazenly heterodox it comes across in the context of game design. Imagine pitching this as a guiding paradigm for one of today’s archetypal AAA open-world RPGs like Assassin’s Creed: Witless Subtitle or Far Cry: Yet Another One — you’d be laughed out of Ubisoft’s boardroom, because the non-gaming executives in charge of modern high-level game development conceive of their playerbases as wholly allergic to obstructive challenges. To play these games is to be condescended to and spoonfed narrative clichés that wouldn’t pass muster at Marvel Studios. Is it any wonder that modern AAA game-dev is so creatively hollow? Is it any wonder that so many of today’s most popular games are over ten years old? Is it any wonder that big-money game development looks primed for an existential catastrophe in the near-term?
Not every game should be like Kenshi, of course. My point is that Kenshi’s unusual design choices reflect not a failure to consider the RPG experience but a deliberate and thoughtful effort to translate the principles of effective storytelling into a player-driven ludonarrative package. It may or may not click for you personally, but one can’t deny that Kenshi represents genuine innovation in game design of a sort that does not (yet) exist elsewhere. Setting Assassin’s Creed in feudal Japan does not represent innovation in game design, no matter how much a non-gaming C-suite insists otherwise. Neither does hiring Giancarlo Esposito as the principal antagonist in a Far Cry game that plays almost exactly like the last five.
FICTION AND LUDONARRATIVE
Before we close out, I’ve got to talk about Kenshi’s writing and fiction, which might just be enough to pull a few skeptics over the edge.
First things first: Kenshi was famously developed all but solo by Chris Hunt until it achieved noteworthy success in pre-release (after which he hired a team), but it’s often glossed over that he wrote less than one percent of it. A vast majority of the game’s writing was done by Natalie Mikkelson, Hunt’s sister and business partner. In a recent interview with her and Hunt, she talks a bit about the tribulations of writing for so abstract a game within the constraints of its mechanics, and I think it’s severely underdiscussed just how towering an achievement Kenshi’s fiction and presentation ended up becoming in light of all this. Recall that the game straight-up abandons most of the genre’s standby means of narrativization: there are no quests, no cutscenes, and no storyline. Every part of Kenshi’s fiction is brought across through dialogue, scavenged documents, and environmental details. That might not sound like much, but it’s been more than enough to inspire a cottage industry of lore analysis within the community. How many YouTubers can you name who built a reputation from analyzing Far Cry 6?
I could probably write a hundred pages on the world of Kenshi if I wanted to, but I want to be at least marginally respectful of your time. I’ll settle for telling you about one of my favorite parts of the fiction. I’m classifying the rest of this section as “minor risk of light spoilers,” but I wouldn’t worry about it unless you absolutely need to experience Kenshi 100% blind (I promise that you needn’t).
AGI AS DOWNTRODDEN LOSER
Kenshi takes place several hundred years after the apocalyptic collapse of a great multi-racial empire led by robots, who are called “Skeletons” in-universe for their scaffold-like construction. I use the word “who” because the Skeletons are driven by unthinkably advanced AI cores that render them fully sentient beings with humanlike psychologies. As robots, they have no need for food or medicine, can quickly repair damage instead of healing, and are functionally immortal unless violently destroyed. Crucially, their ability to experience humanlike emotion lets them interface naturally with the continent’s organic inhabitants. It’s a double-edged sword, though. Skeletons can no longer be manufactured in the post-apocalypse — the necessary technology is irrecoverably lost. Moreover, it’s become apparent over the centuries that the ravages of time do not spare the Skeletons’ minds. Their entire race is doomed, and every last individual is painfully aware of this. Learning how different Skeletons choose to cope with it is, to my mind, one of the game’s strongest adventure hooks.
Skeletons are also consigned to the ravages of RPG mechanics despite their being robots. Without an Internet to data-mine, Skeletons are forced to learn through experience and adapt to circumstance just like their meatbag counterparts. Accordingly, while some Skeletons rise above it all and become heroes, most are easily oppressed even by fleshy humans. And as in our flesh society, there is significant disagreement about what should be done about this: many Skeletons choose to separate themselves from organic society altogether; others seek to rebuild their power and dominate the organics anew; some try to assimilate by partnering with humans, while others try to assimilate by physically becoming human in a particularly gruesome fashion.
In one of my most memorable playthroughs, I played as a lone Skeleton whose sole motivation was to become strong enough to subjugate any living human. I decided on this because I wanted to experience the game’s most famously brutal Skeleton faction and, when I did, I was overcome by actual disgust. I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to join the Skin Bandits other than what I remembered from the Wiki, which turns out to catalogue only a tiny minority of the faction’s grisly atrocities and horrifying mystique. This is one aspect of the fiction that I just can’t bring myself to spoil, but suffice it to say that Kenshi became the only game other than Spec Ops: The Line that made me feel actual, real-life guilt in response to actions I took in a video game. I talked last week about how I’ve played some games for hundreds of hours without creating any significant long-term memories, but I remember just about every single playthrough of Kenshi. It’s just that damn good at player-driven storycraft.
THE VERDICT: GUILTY AS CHARGED
It doesn’t feel right to recommend Kenshi in its capacity as a game, because it really isn’t much of a game at all. It’s undirected, unfair, and uncompromising in its every design choice, and it has practically no interest in mechanically satisfying gameplay for its own sake. Instead, I want to recommend Kenshi as a tool for inspiration. Science-fiction nerds will eagerly lap up Natalie Mikkelson’s engaging lore, RPG nerds will latch onto the interlocking simulations, and game design nerds will find a nearly bottomless well of intrigue if they have the patience to gaze into the abyss for long enough. I’ve made no secret of my preference for games that inspire emotion and creativity over those that seek primarily to numb, and Kenshi is a platform for exactly that to the exclusion of almost everything else. It offers you all the tools you need to tell a story about creating something of value in a doomed world, and nothing more. It gives you no quests because it wants you to create your own adventure out of whole cloth. It trusts you to approach it as such and to lose yourself in the shoreless seas of imagination.
At this juncture of history, I see more utility than ever in the reengagement of our imaginations. Big-money game design is now creatively stagnant, having grown fat at the hand of an intellectually stagnant technocracy. It’s the same story already told and re-told by the excoriation of creativity from mainstream cinema and elite literature. But in Kenshi, I see a silver lining.
Social conformity and hard work no longer seem like guarantors of prosperity or even of survival, and us folks on the lower rungs now have to reimagine how to make good lives for ourselves and our loved ones. Some fifteen years ago, Chris Hunt decided that a career as a part-time security guard was no way for him to live and so began development on a goofy idea he had for a unique open-world RPG. It was an audacious risk that would be chased from any industry pitch meeting, but it has now sold well over two million copies and inspired an enormous fanbase of dedicated players. Kenshi is a powerful example of the greatness that can be achieved by a small team of passionate nerds, and if it represents the future of innovation in a rapidly deprofessionalizing games industry, then I reckon we’ll be just fine in the end.
See ya next time <3
From Fallout 1: Real Theory Hours, approx. 36:08–36:22
I recommend Warlockracy’s review and this video essay by Old Man Gamer, both of which consider the game from a starting point of RPG design theory. See also SsethTzeentach’s infamous review, which is crude and sarcastic but nevertheless remarkably faithful to the core experience.
An irrelevant part of the question is elided. Hunt’s answer is reproduced exactly.
I always come away from games like Kenshi with the sense that they're kind of 'failed MMOs.' Not at all in the sense that they were MMOs or were ever going to be MMOs but more in the sense that a gas giant or a brown dwarf is a 'failed star.' They're attempts to create the same kind of virtual worlds that are designed for thousands of interacting players, with interlocking systems and sprawling footprints, but with no hope or desire to fund servers or attract the player base required for such a thing to actually become a functioning space, they fill it with AIs that sort of act the way people playing MMOs might - like selfish, marauding assholes. The reason they feel like sandboxes despite having tons of RPG elements is because the aim of an MMO is not usually any 'end' goal, but in becoming part of a community, and in a 'failed MMO' you have to kind of pretend that you're joining one made up of NPCs. It's a bit like how you CAN play D&D or any tabletop game by yourself, but it ends up feeling a bit lonely and hollow, because the whole structure of the games are designed to encourage interplay between multiple people, and that's tough to appreciate when you're the only mind at work.
Really enjoyed this review from start to finish and I'm glad mine encouraged you to also cover this very atypical video game.
It's funny, a bit removed now from my own last visit to Kenshi and I only remember liking it, even if my review was not a positive one and I was convinced at the time I probably wouldn't touch it again.
Everyone should play it once and a few people might just find a new favourite game.
A comment on your section about Triple-A design now: I wholeheartedly agree that the aversion to having players face any kind of obstacle is a massive issue and I would also add that modern Triple-A games feel designed around a market niche, not a gameplay loop or narrative. I don't see a game like Star Wars Outlaws and think "This was designed to tell a Star Wars story." Or "The game was built around this gameplay gimmick or loop." I just see "They realised there wasn't an open-world offering for Star Wars geeks."