Open world survival RPG Kenshi can be cruel, especially in the early hours. As our reviewer put it back in 2018, “basic survival plans can be easily derailed by a city guard who plants drugs on you then demands money you don’t have, or by finding yourself deep in a region inhabited by vicious alien giraffes.”
The tough, uncaring world is part of what makes Kenshi so great, however: you’re not playing some fabled hero following a big quest arrow to fame and glory, you’re just another average person trying to scrape by in a complex world. It’s not supposed to be easy.
“A writer’s job is to torment their protagonist,” according to the designer of Kenshi, Chris Hunt of Lo-Fi Games, in a video released today. “That’s what a lot of writers will tell you. And so I just adapted that.”
Kenshi is a tough game to wrap your arms around: even Hunt suggests players try something else first. “You need a gateway game,” he says. “Otherwise, you’d just be thrown into something too complicated. I think you need to play a few other games first, as training.”
It’s not just Kenshi’s complexity that makes it daunting, but its nature to not hold your hand or point you in the right direction. You will fail, often, and need to pick yourself up and try again, something Hunt wishes more games would embrace.
“Too many games let the player succeed. You go ‘oh it’s a power fantasy’ and you just run along mowing down enemies and succeeding. And that’s it, that’s the whole game. And that’s mind-numbingly boring to me,” Hunt says.
“You need to encounter problems. You need problems thrown at you from left field,” he says. “That’s what a good story has, right?”
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As for games where you play as a prophesied hero of legend, following their destiny to greatness? That’s not Hunt’s favorite theme, either.
“I hate being ‘the chosen one.’ How relatable is that, being the chosen one?” Hunt says. “Stories are supposed to be relatable, right? They can be power fantasies and stuff, but I know being the chosen one is just stupid. I also don’t want to be a king or a noble or a superhero. I want to see a story about a regular person who struggles.”
Hunt didn’t reveal much about Kenshi 2 in the video, though he says it is set in the same world but takes place “1,000 years before Kenshi 1.” He also says the map is roughly 50% bigger than it is in Kenshi, which was already staggeringly huge at 870 square kilometers. Writer Natalie Hunt (they are siblings) says Kenshi 2 will also feature “a lot of completely new factions” that are “completely unique to the world of Kenshi.”
There is currently no release date or release window for Kenshi 2, but it’s a great time to buy the original: Kenshi is currently 70% off on Steam.
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