


It’s a mix of buttons, acronyms, menus and submenus that is ferociously ugly and a pain to use. Gary would start with a pet bonedog, who would prove useful in exactly zero ways. There are others, but I opted for the ‘Man and a dog’ scenario. Or a group of “nobodies” who have strength in numbers but are poverty-stricken in all other respects. You can be a wandering trader, low on money but stocked up on goods. You’re offered a choice of stories when starting a new game, which determine what goods or equipment you have at the outset. This time I made somebody normal-looking – Gary Gurpson. Faced with a character creation screen, I normally like to put all the sliders to max (or min) and play as whatever monstrosity is born of a dedication to extremity. How would I fare in this hostile landscape? Let me tell you the saga of the Gurpson clan. My favourite line in the trailer is: “nobody will help you when the fog-men are eating your legs”.

It’s set in a single-player fantasy Japanese world of skeletal robots and bony animals of burden and it’s got a reputation for toughness. I mention Wurm Online only because this feels like the closest comparison. Or you could call it a chaotic jumble of good ideas stitched together via a user interface that would make a Wurm player eat their keyboard in a blind rage. You could call Kenshi an RPG, you could call it a survival game. This time, the hot mess of genre that is survival-strategy-city-builder-RPG Kenshi Every week we cast Brendan into the early access badlands in nothing but rags.
