I had nothing, so only a wireframe of my shack would ever be built. You can plant foundations anywhere deemed far enough from the nearest town but you need a generic resource called "building materials" as well as other resources – vegetables for a small veg patch, a sleeping roll for a camp bed, and so on. The building options are a tad confusing, however. A perfect place to set up my first shack. A little counter in one part of the nebulous UI told me that I was “committing a crime” and needed to stay out of sight for 20 more seconds. I didn’t expect to be running away from my first town so soon, but a thief’s life is a hard one, especially when common farmers have such zeal for property law, on top of an impressive knowledge about who owns which drinking receptacle. That must be the local guardsmen, I thought, although I won’t be waiting around to find out. He at once recognised the mug that I was trying to hawk to him as belonging to his own people. But Kenshi again did not fit neatly with my expectations. This was good news, since it meant that I could sell back the very same things I had just stolen. But for my purposes, he was willing to trade. I went inside the house next door to see what it held. And I’ll be damned if Gary will be satisfied with only burglarising one building this afternoon. I stole that too.īut there was a second house in this settlement. I also spotted a book called “the Holy Flame” sitting on the shelf, which I assume is this world’s Bible. I took flour, fabrics, fuel and a hacksaw, amid other pieces of bric-a-brac. I came out of the house, pockets bulging. A sneak toggle makes sure you try your best not to be seen. Hungry and penniless, I resorted to sneaking into the nearby villagers’ sleeping quarters and stealing everything on the shelves. The crafting and building requirements here are totally different, something I would only learn later. I thought I should get some resources, so I clicked on some trees, to no avail. Any assumptions you bring to Kenshi from foreign quarters will be rewarded with confsuion. My hunger meter was going up and I was worried about my future in a land where I understood nothing. If you don’t count the bonedog (I don’t).Īs Gary Gurpson, I tried to make friends with the farmers of the settlement he appeared at, but nobody wanted to talk to us (only certain characters have a speech bubble). You’re weak and useless at the start of your adventure and, in my case, alone. It’s also not easy to dive straight into these elements of the game. But there’s no deeper system of dialogue and roguishness. You're also expected to form a large squad, eventually roaming the land with a small army. There’s a faction system too, with meters that show how much certain groups dislike you. You can travel between towns on the map and fight as a bounty hunter for local authorities, for example. Indeed, there is a vague Mount and Blade feeling to it. You can also zoom in and out to the point where you might confuse this with a strategy game. The tutorial does its best to explain the basics but it feels like only patience and death will deliver a deeper understanding of the many systems and commands here. It’s a mix of buttons, acronyms, menus and submenus that is ferociously ugly and a pain to use. Gary would start with a pet bonedog, who would prove useful in exactly zero ways. There are others, but I opted for the ‘Man and a dog’ scenario. Or a group of “nobodies” who have strength in numbers but are poverty-stricken in all other respects. You can be a wandering trader, low on money but stocked up on goods. You’re offered a choice of stories when starting a new game, which determine what goods or equipment you have at the outset. This time I made somebody normal-looking – Gary Gurpson. Faced with a character creation screen, I normally like to put all the sliders to max (or min) and play as whatever monstrosity is born of a dedication to extremity. How would I fare in this hostile landscape? Let me tell you the saga of the Gurpson clan. My favourite line in the trailer is: “nobody will help you when the fog-men are eating your legs”. It’s set in a single-player fantasy Japanese world of skeletal robots and bony animals of burden and it’s got a reputation for toughness. I mention Wurm Online only because this feels like the closest comparison. Or you could call it a chaotic jumble of good ideas stitched together via a user interface that would make a Wurm player eat their keyboard in a blind rage. You could call Kenshi an RPG, you could call it a survival game. This time, the hot mess of genre that is survival-strategy-city-builder-RPG Kenshi Every week we cast Brendan into the early access badlands in nothing but rags.
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