Kenshi - Preview @ Indie Game Mag

Indie Game Mag has a new preview of Kenshi. I mentioned the game last month, but it seems development is still going slow. So read on if your interested.

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.”