Kenshi is an RPG about how losing fights to wild animals will make you strong enough to topple nations. Kenshi is a town builder about cooking hash in the desert. Kenshi is a game about struggle; a game where you can expect to be beaten, eaten, thrown in jail, and enslaved just for trying to make your way in the world. Kenshi is an adventure game about a desolate land haunted by the works of millennia-ago empires, where understanding the world means learning to survive day by day as much as it means delving into ancient derelicts and long-forgotten mysteries.

Kenshi is a difficult game to box into a genre. You could play a lone wanderer travelling its vast world or recruit up to 30 characters. You could ally with a nation, burn them all down, or mind your business and spend all your time exploring ruins. You could build a town or simply drift from place to place. There are no quests. There is no defined end. The character you start with could even die and the game will continue so long as you have other characters left alive.

Released in 2018 by UK-based indie studio Lo-Fi Games, Kenshi is the culmination of a 12-year-long passion project that began with creator Chris Hunt working solo for years, finally expanding Lo-Fi Games from just himself into an actual team following Kenshi's successful Steam Early Access launch in 2013.

I came by the game in 2021, avidly reading a friend's playthrough as she posted a let's play of it in our Discord server. I finally got around to playing it myself this year, in 2025, and fell in love with it immediately. It was like nothing I'd ever played before (though another friend tells me it belongs in a genre with Mount & Blade, however one might wish to define that genre).

Kenshi has many charm points I hope to share with you in the following chapters, but I found myself particularly enraptured by a couple aspects of it: First, your characters become tougher by losing fights, which completely changes the calculus of what's a good or bad idea to do in-game. It means losing a fight doesn't become a frustration, a feeling of time wasted, or a temptation to reload a save—it becomes an important step on your journey, a character-building moment. Second, I think the game does a great job building a world in which very little is certain, from actions to knowledge. As with any game of its ilk, Kenshi has bits of lore to uncover throughout the game world, but it's presented as opinion or conjecture rather than objective fact and it really tickles the sociologist in me—I think it does a fantastic job of showing why the world is the way it is by tugging at characters' and factions' motivations and biases, really making Kenshi feel like an actual place with actual people despite how stark and lonesome the world generally is.

With regard to the playthrough, I would like to begin with a couple notes on style. My goal is to show the game off, to explain how it works and to convey how it feels to play, but also to tell a story. Kenshi is a game with little dialogue and as such encourages filling in between the lines: An exercise I enjoy and in which I will indulge throughout the playthrough. If I write something like “Jam ponders the texture of gristle flaps” or “Jam and Riddly discuss how they'll assault the slavers”, that's me adding a bit of flavour to help the story's flow or attributing my own thought process to the characters. I will not invent dialogue, though. If you see any dialogue in quotation marks, that is actual game dialogue.

I will also be taking a particular approach to gameplay. My intention is to reload saves as rarely as possible, rolling with the consequences of my actions unless I encounter a major bug or unless things go so catastrophically wrong it would bring the let's play to a grinding halt. I tried doing a self-imposed iron man run (a playthrough where you're never allowed to reload a save) once and while I was impacted by enough game bugs that I didn't really feel good about the experience, I want to hew as closely to that as is reasonable. I will not be making insanely risky moves and then reloading when things go wrong. That said, it wouldn't be very fun for you or me if I was completely risk-averse. If it seems like it'll fit the story or show off an interesting part of the game, or like it'll be fun to do, we might get a little silly. There can't be any highs without lows, right? Making bad choices is part of life and it's definitely part of Kenshi.

Finally, I do use a few mods. None of these add content to the game and they shouldn't be very obtrusive. Your experience as a reader should be pretty much the same as if I was playing unmodded. I do, however, want to list the mods, both in the interest of full disclosure and to give credit to the mod authors. All mods found on Nexus Mods and author names taken from there.

• Less Foliage Mod that doesn't block your doors by SCARaw
• Compressed Textures Project by jbndis
• Adequate Recruitment Limit by MaybeManor
• More Names by jnbradi, modified further by me

The Less Foliage and Compressed Textures mods are merely performance mods. Kenshi is an extremely ambitious game for a tiny indie company and it's frankly impressive that it runs as well as it does, but the game can kinda chug if you have lots of characters in various areas of the world or in foliage heavy areas (The swamp. The swamp is the main culprit) so I find myself using these.

The Adequate Recruitment Limit mod raises my maximum number of characters from 30 to 75, which probably won't be as big a deal as it sounds. I don't actually like having many more than 30 characters anyway, but in my first playthrough, I didn't realize there was a recruitment limit and hit it fairly early, missing out on lots of chances to recruit or even just talk to interesting unique characters. It's there just in case and so that I don't have to miss things or fire people if I happen to hit 30.

The More Names mod vastly expands the list the game draws from when it's selecting random names to give to recruitable characters, drifters, shopkeeps and the like. The unmodded list is pretty short and results in a lot of repeated names, so expanding the list felt like a good idea to keep characters feeling more unique. As it turned out, my name preferences differed from those of the mod author somewhat so I replaced about 40% of their names. The rest of their names remain on the list, as do all the default names.

With all that said, we are ready to begin. Pull up a seat by the fire, grab some chewsticks, and please attend my bloody tale.

—scaryoak