Kenshi Gives Us Freedom After The World Ends

It’s the end of the world as we know it, Samurai, hope you’ve got some friends to spend it with….

Kenshi is an upcoming post apocalyptic, survival sandbox indie game from Lofi games where you try to survive and prosper in a world where the only law exists on the edge of a blade, and the only prosperity exists in the bodies you leave behind.

 The game’s creator, Chris Hunt, describes Kenshi as, “an open-world, squad-based RPG where players have complete freedom to be good or bad, build a town, start a faction, fight cannibals & bandits, craft items or simply survive in the challenging, vast world.” The game is currently in Alpha, and available on Steam as an early access title.

Your first few hours in Kenshi are mostly spent learning the complex mechanics that make up the game’s freedom; the learning curve is steep but rewarding, as challenging objectives become simple survival. The first few battles are white knuckled, high risk, and a bit stressful as you try to figure out the mechanics of the game’s combat system.

What makes this combat even more enticing to watch are some of the visuals the game can achieve through the blood red twilight of a setting sun, casting long shadows to lend a sense of brevity and overture to the life and death format of combat. One of the best feelings in this game is seeing the shadows cast by the small outpost that you have built yourself, with the sun setting after a long and hard day’s work.

What does Kenshi have in store for us in the future? Chris Hunt says they’re working on a  “huge, new and diverse world map, 4x the size of the current one. Much later on it will have water, rivers and wildlife too,” he continued. “The gameplay will get much more complex, with environmental challenges added in – hunger, thirst and weather conditions. There will be a lot more combat details, for example, crawling when injured, robotics limbs to replace severed ones, unarmed fighting and ranged combat skills.”

It’s interesting to think what will be in store for the world of Kenshi as the game gets closer to it’s so far unannounced launch date. With a little more content and polish, it will easily be worth it’s $20 price tag; make sure to keep an eye on this one.