If you play Kenshi like Skyrim, you will walk right into its traps

As you explore the dunes and canyons of Kenshi, you should be on the lookout for traps. No matter how many fights you’ve won or how many followers you’ve recruited or how sharp your katana’s blade is, if you become comfortable and treat this open-world RPG like popular staples of the genre like Skyrim or Dragon Age, you will walk right into its creator’s snares. 

“I like to manipulate the player whenever I can,” Kenshi creator Chris Hunt says, adding after a pause, “for the purposes of fun.” 

One of Hunt’s favorite traps is hidden in a tower in the middle of a sparse desert. “You know, the kind of building you’d usually find a lot of good treasure in,” he says. If you enter the tower, you discover a horde of murderous robots. In a traditional RPG, this is where you would fight them to the death. But then, Kenshi isn’t traditional.

Rather than attack you, the machines act as your bodyguards, following you wherever you go and killing anyone who gets near. “You think you’ve struck it lucky,” Hunt says. You can walk into any enemy base, and your machine cohort will cut them down before they reach you. 

The trap only truly springs when you enter a friendly settlement. “They just attack everyone and slaughter whoever you encounter,” Hunt explains. “It becomes a curse you’ve got to try and get rid of.” It’s like a proto version of Dragonsplague, the contagious sickness in the recently released Dragon’s Dogma 2, which will kill any nearby NPCs. Except Hunt’s team at Lo-Fi Games did it long before Capcom, as Kenshi has been playable since 2008.

Cutting loose

Hunt first began work on Kenshi out of frustration with the limitations he encountered in other games. “[It’s] a result of a lifetime of playing games and thinking ‘I wish they would do this’ or ‘I wish they wouldn’t do this’ all the time,” Hunt says. He was fed up with games that had fixed stories to tell and offered little freedom to define yourself, particularly in genres like RPGs where you were supposed to inhabit a role and not just follow the script of a prewritten character.

Set in a world of high-tech machines and low-tech swords, Kenshi’s deserts are dotted with small settlements, towns, and cities, which are all connected by roads populated with vagrants, trading caravans, and bandits. Underneath that desert, out of sight, are interlinked systems and mechanics that simulate all the action in the world.

Besides their initial placement, nothing in the game is scripted; all of the NPCs act and respond based on simulated behavior. You may stumble across an abandoned caravan on a dusty road not because it’s the start of a quest, but because the AI trader had the bad luck of running into AI bandits, and they had a simulated battle out of sight from you. This is because in Kenshi, there are no quests, and the world doesn’t revolve around you.

“In every movie, it’s like the main character’s ‘The Chosen One’ or a prince or royalty,” Hunt says. “I want to see stories about a conscript soldier, a beggar, or someone who’s struggling to survive.”

When you start Kenshi, you are one of the weakest people in its world. You have almost no money to your name, and if you start a fight with a nearby villager or even a goat, you will find yourself knocked out. But if you persist and make money from mining, trading, taking on bounties, and recruiting NPCs to help you, then “you can achieve godlike powers,” Hunt says. 

Late-game Kenshi players can raise armies, create networks of trade caravans, and build whole cities, but it takes time and hard work. “That’s what gives you the feeling of achievement, a goal and something rewarding, not just something that was handed to you because you followed the steps of a predefined quest,” Hunt explains.

Your progression, like so much in Kenshi, isn’t dictated by the game. As a sandbox word, there are several actions you can perform—such as mining, fighting, and trading—but you choose how to use them. For instance, say you wanted to build a settlement of your own. You can lay down the blueprints to construct a house and palisade walls and deposit the resources to complete the task. However, how you get those resources is up to you: You could find them in the world, or mine ore and sell it to a local shop to raise money to buy what you need, or you could hire local muscle and raid caravans. There’s not a set path; you work out your own aims and your own solutions to reach them. 

Stories out of systems

While Kenshi doesn’t have quests, that’s not to say it lacks a plot. It’s just that the stories you encounter emerge from the systems that interlock and interact beneath the surface of its world. Take its medical system, for example; many games handle health with a simple HP bar, but in Kenshi, attacks can strike individual limbs, a character’s chest, stomach, or head, and the attacks can cause bleeding or stun damage depending on the weapon used. The complicated calculations all happen off-screen, but it can lead to unexpected events in-game.

“You have all these little adventures that just form organically out of having different injuries in different situations,” Hunt says, recalling a story where a bandit attacked a player and knocked them out in the fight. The AI robber then looted the player’s body but, as they were walking away, passed out from their own blood loss. When the player regained consciousness, they stole all their stuff back and took what was on the bandit’s body.

As a player in this world of sandbox systems, you must both make plans and adapt them as you go. You could set yourself the mission of clearing the plains of cannibals, for example, preparing yourself by seeking out the best equipment for the job. But when one of your legs is severed in battle and stolen away by a wild dog, you must react and go in search of a prosthetic replacement.

If Kenshi sounds intriguing (or perhaps even a little overwhelming) Hunt does have advice for new players. “You need to look at the game a bit differently from a traditional RPG,” he says. “Rather than worrying [that] no one is telling you what to do, where to go, [and that] you don't know what to do, you've got to think of it as 'What would I do in this world in real life?' That's the key to Kenshi."