Kenshi is a role-playing game with nearly 80,000 positive reviews on Steam, where players rave about getting severely beaten up.
What game is it? Kenshi is a role-playing sandbox with a massive open world and a particular focus on player freedom. Players do not take on the role of a hero who is magically stronger and better than all others.
Instead, you start as a simple wanderer who must fight for survival in a ruthless world. It is up to you whether you want to be an adventurer, a warlord, or a rebel – but if you’re not careful, you’ll all end up as a slave or cannibal food.
Kenshi was released in 2018 for PC and has been attracting thousands of players monthly on Steam, where it enjoys a dream score of 95% positive reviews with almost 80,000 ratings.
Absolute Freedom and Ruthless Hardship
What makes it so special? Critics and players praise Kenshi primarily for the absolute freedom and depth that the role-playing game offers. The world of Kenshi spans over 870 square kilometers – more than 10 times the size of the 81 km² of GTA 5.
However, it is not an empty wasteland, but a dynamic game world filled with countless peoples, factions, and groups, all pursuing different interests, and whose experiences are no less exciting or complex than your own.
On Steam, the developers write that Kenshi is the largest single-player role-playing game since Daggerfall. Its world, at 487,000 km², is absurdly vast – and perhaps that’s why it has been searching for its equal for nearly 30 years, as reported recently by our colleagues at GamePro.
No matter where you are, there’s a high probability that there’s something to experience or discover. And there’s plenty to experience, as players report in reviews on Steam – and for some reason, these stories always revolve around getting beaten up or enslaved.
Here comes another uniqueness of Kenshi into play, as even these setbacks can be overcome – though this does not mean there are no consequences. Injuries affect how a character moves and fights.
Severe injuries can even lead to an amputation. But that’s not a problem, as your character might just be a robot prosthetic away from becoming a cyborg god that can conquer entire nations single-handedly – or perhaps the blood attracts a predator that abruptly ends your playthrough.
This is all the more impressive knowing that Kenshi was created by a relatively small team – starting with a single developer. Chris Hunt worked alone on Kenshi for several years while earning a living as a security guard on the side.
Between these difficult beginnings and the final release in 2018, 12 years passed. We have already reported extensively on the development story on MeinMMO. You can read the entire article here: One of the best open-world games on Steam was developed by one man.
