[Beef Supreme]

This is the top rated steam review by someone named Carry Mulligan.

Kenshi is ugly, opaque, confusing, buggy, and unwelcoming. It demands patience and persistence with no immediate rewards. It makes no allowances for the inexperienced, the inept, or the videogame-illiterate. It actively defies you to give up and uninstall within the first 10 minutes of play. It also happens to be a little bit brilliant.

Having vaguely followed Kenshi's development for years, and having bounced hard off the free demo released a few years ago, I finally picked it up on sale, confident that I would probably Steam refund it after my second try. One week later and I've hardly played anything else.

It's quite likely you're suffering a little cognitive dissonance as your eyes drift from the rather unpromising screenshots and trailers - packed with outdated graphics, an ugly UI, and vague, overambitious-sounding statements - to the Steam reviews, which are currently 87% positive. You may be worried that Kenshi is one of those games that is really enjoyable for hardcore, min-maxing basement dwellers but totally inaccessible to anyone else - and that's a legitimate concern. Kenshi does ask you to invest time and patience to get the most out of it; I want to convince you that the investment is worthwhile.

As the trailers suggest, you start off as a nobody in a harsh, post-apocalyptic world filled with people (and monsters) that comprehensively outnumber, outgun, and outclass you. And that's it. There's not a main quest that doles out steadily-improving powers and gear, there's not a friendly NPC who gives you some cash and directions to an easy fight with decent loot. You exist in a hostile world that can and will kill you moments after leaving the starter town - it's how you bounce back and start making that world your own that makes Kenshi stand out.

There's a moment of existential dread that sets in when you look out over the scorched wasteland, with nothing more than some rags, a rusty iron stick, and half a day's food in your pack, wondering what the hell to do next and if it's even worth it. Fight through that dread. That feeling of aimlessness and hopelessness is just mainstream-videogames leaving your system; you get so used to a smooth tutorial and a clear path ahead that all the freedom in front of you is straight-up daunting. What should you do? Just start walking.

The world of Kenshi is huge, and contains rather more colour and diversity than the trailers make out. There are roaming bands of marauders, mutants, cannibals and religious zealots, there are fortified cities, hardscrabble farmsteads, and infested ruins, there are foetid swamps, blasted deserts, and weird, fungal valleys just as peculiar and intriguing as anything out of Morrowind. When you start out, this world is going to reject you: there's nothing you can face in a straight fight and nowhere safe to lay down roots. To get anywhere, you'll have to sneak, steal, starve, and - yes - get the ♥♥♥♥ kicked out of you every now and then.

Life at the bottom of the food chain is tough, and it can feel like you're not making progress, but in reality everything you do is making you tougher. Getting walloped makes your character hardier, losing fights improves your combat skills, and the scraps you pick from the aftermath of procedural battles between NPCs can provide some much-needed gear. In my first few days, I scrounged up enough money for the materials to put up a small shack. I built it away from civilisation, tucked into the crevices of a mountain by the swamp, hoping maybe to scratch out a living by farming before venturing out and doing some walloping of my own.

Bandits came and beat me up. Raptors ate my first crop, then my second crop - then every harvest after that for a week. Desperate, I wandered deeper into the swamp, looting the remains of swamp bandits who had been eaten by blood spiders (blood spiders?!) as I went. I found a settlement, pawned my paltry pickings, and signed on a couple of outcasts willing to join me for free. Back to the shack we went, where once again the raptors ate our crops and the bandits doled out humiliating beatings. The next time they came back there was a wall, and a big gate. They just knocked down the gate. The time after that, there were crossbows mounted on the walls and a few more drifters on our side. They got through the gate, but no farther. We do the walloping now.

Kenshi erects some fairly high barriers around itself, and a lot of the best fights and features are locked behind those barriers. This starts out feeling like a problem, but you come to realise that overcoming those barriers make every success, no matter how minor, seem immensely important. The struggle to survive never stops being real, and no threats ever become so trivial that they can be safely dismissed. This means you are invested in your characters and in the world in a way you rarely feel in other games; by the time you get a handle on things, you've come so far and have so much to lose that the drama of the game world is always gripping. How many times in other games have you been warned by some Cortana knockoff "Oh no, a wave of dangerous and battle-hardened foes is approaching, try not to poop your pants!" only to be faced by more of the same goons you've been absent-mindedly mowing down for hours? This never happens in Kenshi. Kenshi never has to artificially inflate the stakes, because the stakes are always real. Kenshi never has to script its drama, because its drama is generated automatically by your interactions with the world.

Once you've got past the rocky start, the dodgy presentation, the occasional wonkiness of the AI, and the overall hostility of the world, the freedom the developers promise really is there. You choose your own adventures and your own goals; there are fights to be had, rivals to be made, bounties to be collected, factions to befriend or destroy, and a surprisingly deep city-building element you can pick up or ignore completely as you see fit. Kenshi will reward all the time, imagination, and obsession you pour into it - just give it a chance!