It is a daunting task to write a review for this game, and not for the reasons that you may think. Before we proceed with anything else, allow me to lay bare some important points - the game is not perfect. The unpolished dull edges come to light when you wash away the dust with both tears and sweat. The engine is as ancient as the world you dwell within this game, as the deserts that you roam from dusk till dawn. However, perfection only comes as an abstract ideal, a comparison to a theoretical maximum, which exists only in the mind. There is no perfection, in any form, nor in art, nor in life.

But you do not take upon Kenshi because of such a pursuit, of course. This game succeeds in one task which it may not even have intended to do - it is a catalyst for change, and you can only begin to understand it once you sacrifice a few dozen hours.

As a playable character, you are a nobody. You are the same cheap flesh or steel as everything else in creation. There are no gods that will guide your path, no men who will shed blood in your stead, no community that you belong to, nor will take you without gain. No rulers that you can look up to, for none have the heart or wisdom. You are but a pale child, a sacrificial lamb that will be given as tribute to the only existing force that reigns undisturbedly on its throne - death.

As bleak as it is, such a world sustains something that an orderly one lacks - freedom. You wake each day with a single primary goal: to survive. But along the path you walk, you stumble upon ruined memories carved in cement and steel, towers that once reached out to the heavens, and steel disks that whispered through radio static across the stars. You ponder what once lay yonder, in a time long before you. What was the world that once was, and does the current one have to be as it is? You look down upon your hands, clenching them, thinking: what can you do? Nothing. At least for now. But what about the day that comes tomorrow? So you walk your path, struggling to see a new dawning, again and again. And through your adversities with no meaning, you become stronger than you were. As you rapidly shift through endless sands faster, you start to grow indifferent to the circumstances that condition you. You start to thirst for something more.

Kenshi teaches the player an important life lesson - struggles are unavoidable, painful, deadly. But with the toll paid in sweat and blood, one grows in both flesh and spirit—washed in that metamorphosis, birthed anew. Henceforth, becoming something more. Someone. You will always be conditioned by the world, never vice versa, but there is a dim hope that you could change at least a fragment of it, for a whimpering moment. And this image, this reality, reflects upon the one we actually live in.

"He who has a why can bear any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche

War...... War neber chages

I HATE this game! I played for 25 minutes and was confused! Until.. One day I just decided to give it another go, HAVEN'T PLAYED ANYTHING BUT Kenshi. Fantastic game.