izigame.me

TLDR: Souls like games are good because they're built with the assumption that the player will lose a lot, especially early on, and are balanced in a way that makes repeated attempts rewarding and not overly penalizing. Kenshi is great because it's built with the assumption that you will lose a lot, but rather than minimizing consequences it makes those consequences the sort of thing that you can work through and grow from, even making those loses rewarding enough that experienced players aren't even attempted to load a previous save. Rather than forcing the player to constantly save and reload, kenshi stews the player in each loss while allowing every defeat to be an experience worth having.

Full review:
A short tale about the glorious pain of playing kenshi:
Your character was ambushed by bandits, you've lost all your equipment and now you're starving to death. Both legs are crippled so you can't walk, crawling to the nearest city is the only chance you have left to squeeze out a tight save before you bleed out.
But then slavers find you, beat you a few inches closer to death, and carry you to a work camp in shackles. you made a save file, so time to restart right?
Wrong
The slavers shave your head and bandage your wounds. With a little time, you heal up and even unarmed you can find your way out of the slave camp. Will you fail? Probably. Shackles slowed you down the first time, the guards beat you down before you reached the gate. But they heal you again, put you back to work, and next time you pick the lock on the shackles first and tear them off before fleeing.
A few more cycles of this and finally you break out. Maybe you free the other prisoners first, loot weapons and fight your way out together. Maybe you sneak out in the middle of the night, knocking out a couple guards on your way. Or maybe you just picked a good time and booked it out of there. Now you're running into the sunset, making your way for more distant lands where you aren't marked as a fugitive, at least until you can grow your hair back out and lose the attention of local slavers.
And all those beatings, the running around and the hard labor, it made you stronger. You're starving, but after you get some food in you your character is a bigger, better, faster version of the one that was carried off into a slave camp. Hell, maybe you lost an arm, but you can replace with with a new, shiny prosthetic that can punch a bandit's skull in with one hit. One day you'll come back even stronger, with a squad of real heavy hitters, and you'll burn that camp to the ground before moving on to tearing down the entire country.
Welcome to kenshi.
In any other game you would have save scummed, because if losing has any consequences at all they're something you want to avoid. But kenshi doesn't play like that: losing hurts, and it has consequences that completely change the path of the game, but there's almost always a way forward so loading a save usually isn't necessary, in fact you'll probably come out better if you let the scenario play out.
Dark souls is hard: there's a high skill ceiling that kicks your ass at first but builds you up in a way that will have you starting a new file and dancing around enemies until you're beating the final boss with no armor and a starting weapon without taking a hit, because it's a game you're meant to be able to master.
Kenshi is PAINFUL: you will never escape that pain, it's in the fabric of the game itself, a feature that builds the core experience. You can manage it, get much better at dealing with it, but the pain will always be there even after you "master" it.
Like a souls game, losing is not a deal breaker that forces you to load up a save, but rather than removing the consequences kenshi renegotiates the consequences to be ones you can move on and grow from.
This game was a religious experience. Games like this are 1 in a thousand, it should be taught in university it's so unbelievably good. Kenshi 2 is in development, which is good because you never move on from a game like this.