By Lo-Fi Games released a video (spotted by PC Gamer) discussing open-world survival RPG Kenshi’s extreme difficulty, which the developer absolutely stands by.
In the video, the game’s lead developer, Chris Hunt, spoke about the thought process behind Kenshi’s challenges.
“It’s not like Dark Souls, where you die, you start again, you die, you start again,” he said, adding, “the idea is that you keep going, because that’s what stories are about.”
Hunt calls something going wrong “the basis of storytelling” and says that a writer’s job is to torment their protagonist, but he adapted it with the mindset that the player is the protagonist.
When you think of brutal games, there are always a few names that come up. Obviously there’s Dark Souls – which is now shorthand for “hard game” – and a litany of NES-era games that were complete nightmares. But one of the harshest games of the last decade has to be Kenshi, in which you can lose a limb in a fight and just have to deal with it.
But despite the nightmare scenarios you’ll find yourself in, Kenshi is pretty beloved, with the game selling 2.3 million copies as of last year.
“Too many games let the player succeed,” Hunt said. “You go, ‘oh its a power fantasy,’ and you just run along mowing down enemies and succeeding… that’s mind-numbingly boring to me.”
Hunt says, “any of those TV shows you’ve been bingeing because you’re addicted is because wild shit keeps happening to the character.”
He also goes on to say that he hates the “chosen one” trope in games: “Being the chosen one is just stupid. Also, I don’t want to be a king or a noble or a superhero. I want to see a story about a regular person who struggles,” which definitely explains why Kenshi is the way it is.