Kenshi

Kenshi is a 2018 role-playing and strategy game from Lo-Fi Games, designed by Chris Hunt and developed largely by him over twelve years. It is set in a huge, ruined world after an ancient catastrophe, where factions, slavers, robots, religious zealots and cannibals compete. You start as one person with nothing.

There is no story. You recruit others, build a squad and perhaps a town, and choose what to become: a trader, a bandit, a liberator of slaves. The game runs in real time and can be paused at any moment to give orders to every member of the squad. Characters lose limbs, are enslaved, and improve their skills by using them, often by being beaten.

It is one of the most remarkable games of its decade: a world that does not care whether you live, where every story is your own. Its squad of misfits, built up from failure, is what players remember.

It is rough, ugly and slow to start, and its early hours are humiliating by design.

Kenshi shares Fallout Tactics' wasteland, its squad, and its pausable real time. It takes the squad out of a military campaign and into an open world, where the squad is all you have. It is one of the best examples of real time with pause in a squad game of any kind.