**Recommended**
I almost refunded Kenshi.
For my first 50 hours I thought it was broken, empty, and unfair.
450 hours later...
I sat down at 10 AM intending to play for an hour.
I looked at the clock and it was 7 AM the next day.
It started with Prince, a one armed man stranded in the desert.
Prince almost didn't make it to his first meal. Literally collapsing twenty times before he reached the gates of Sho-Battai with nothing but a dead mans chainmail shirt to pay for food.
Eventually he met Dirt.
Then Mel.
Then everything went completely off the rails.
Dirt got enslaved.
Instead of immediately rescuing her, she stayed because slavery turned out to be the best lockpicking and stealth school in the United Cities.
Then she stole a meatwrap.
That single stolen meatwrap somehow escalated into a camp-wide war.
Prince walked into the active battlefield disguised as an ordinary visitor, patched Dirt up, rented her a bed **inside the slave camp**, then casually walked back out the front gate.
Dirt decided she still wasn't finished training.
The camp became so overcrowded they literally ran out of cages.
I watched a guard use his shoulder as a prison cell.
I recruited a prisoner who decided I'd make a better boss than his captors.
Prince was later captured by Sand Ninjas...
...only to become friends with one in prison.
The same Sand Ninja later broke Prince out after I got caught trying to free him.
Mel, meanwhile, completely ignored the chaos, bought the squad a house, and started researching beds like the only functioning adult in the group.
Dirt eventually escaped...
...put on a disguise in front of the guards...
...picked her shackles...
...walked out the main gate...
...then decided she wasn't actually done yet.
She rented a bed **inside the slave bar**, slept next to an off-duty guard, woke up, walked past the guards again, and got told to "get back to work."
She wasn't sneaking.
She wasn't running.
She was basically roleplaying being a slave whenever it was convenient.
None of this was a quest.
No dialogue.
No cutscenes.
No scripted prison break.
Just hundreds of systems colliding until I ended up with a story no writer would've dared pitch because nobody would believe a video game could generate it.
People always ask, "What's the point of Kenshi?"
This is the point.
I thought Kenshi was empty.
Kenshi is a decade-old program that somehow achieved sentience... but it's trying very hard to convince you it's just a video game.
PRO TIP: Play on 1x speed. Never save scum.
10/10.
