Aug 6 2023

Minecraft

There's not much to say about Minecraft that hasn't already been said, but I'll try anyway. It's a classic that I've been playing since beta 1.8, when I was 11. It's timeless, though a bit of a flawed masterpiece.

As a game I've been playing for so long, I have a lot of thoughts about it. Click the grass block to the left [NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!] (or the grass block on the navbar if you're reading this in the future) to navigate to the Minecraft page. I'll also post some screenshots of one of my worlds there.

Aug 6 2023

Kenshi

Kenshi is a really interesting game, though a little difficult to place genre-wise. It's a kind of RPG, kind of RTS sandbox game set in a vast post-apocalyptic swordpunk desert wasteland.

Kenshi's genre kind of changes depending on how you play it. It can be a base building RTS farming simulator with tower defense, where a group of people set out to build their own utopia, or an RPG detailing the epic journey of a singular swordsman as they master the blade.

The game was mostly made by one person, Chris Hunt (though the art, music, and much of the dialogue were created by other people), and has been in development since 2006, only recently being completed, moreso due to the limitations imposed by such an old engine than because Chris Hunt was satisfied. As such, Kenshi 2, a prequel set roughly 1,000 years in the setting's past, is in its early phases of development.

Kenshi is set on a desert continent on an alien moon, the sands of which obscure a deep history, featuring interstellar empies, starships, orbital lasers, tyrants, and kings, which you slowly uncover as you explore the game's desert world and interact with many of its NPCs.

Kenshi features a reactive world system, where your interactions with the game's factions and faction leaders have consequences on the world around you. If you kill or kidnap the noble commanding a city, it may fall to ruin, or the peasants within it might rise up and begin to govern themselves.

The game does have its flaws, however. Kenshi is rather unstable and may break completely at times. This appears to be mostly due to the limitations of such an old engine.

Regardless, Kenshi is a unique, fun and interesting experience that is well worth the game's $30 pricetag. I've personally gotten 80 hours out of it so far, with much of the map left to explore and a number of playstyles I have yet to touch.

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