Kenshi

The last few days, I've been playing Kenshi, a squad-based sandbox (almost literally) RPG that's still in development.

Actually, I've been playing a lot of games lately that are still in development (typically available in Early Access on Steam). Unfortunately, I haven't been blogging about any of them. Well, I haven't been blogging about much of anything, except for posting YouTube videos.

So that's what I'm going to do here, too. Maybe someday I'll get back to computer game posts. I certainly have no shortage of games to talk about, or of things to say about them. But I'm not as enthused about blogging as I was. So for now, this will give you an idea of the game, if you're at all interested.

There are lots of game videos on YouTube, including many of Kenshi. That's how I discovered this game, in fact. This isn't the first one I watched, but it might work as an introduction.

As a bonus, I'm going to post a few screenshots of my current game. First, here's my all-woman harem army:

Note that you can have a lot bigger armies than that - the maximum is more than 200 people, I think, though it's hard to find that many to recruit. (Certainly, it's hard to find that many women.)

Note that you can modify the appearance of your initial character - your faction's leader - and of every person you recruit, too. I'm no artist, but I've been trying to design women of a variety of types and sizes.

Here they are without clothes on, to give you an idea of how different I've made them, so far. (Note that they do have pants on when you first hire them, and sometimes the lighting in the bar is so dark it's hard to see exactly how they're going to turn out.)

Yes, you recruit people in the bars. Apparently, they have to be drunk before they'll agree to join my faction.

I played around with my faction leader, too - the only man in the group. Admittedly, this isn't really how he looks in the game. I saved the game first, then played around with his image, trying to make him look as absurd as possible. (There are 'plastic surgeons' in every bar, so it's cheap and easy to change the appearance of any of your people.)

Still, he looks just like me, doesn't he? No wonder he's having a hard time recruiting women! :)

Finally, here's a picture of my squad running across the desert, just because I happened to take the screenshot. You spend a lot of time running across the barren wastes in this game!

For such a detailed combat and construction sim, the developer has certainly put a lot of effort into the graphics, hasn't he? And that's particularly unusual because you frequently end up playing the game zoomed way out. (While running across the desert, I can barely even see my characters, they're so small. But that's necessary so I can keep an eye out for bandits.)

It's a fun game, but it's been in development for years already, and it's still only in alpha. Then again, I play other games that have been in development a lot longer than that. And as I say, this is fun.