Lo-Fi Games

Lo-Fi Games is a British independent video game developer and publisher based in the UK, founded by Chris Hunt. The studio is responsible for Kenshi, a sandbox RPG that Hunt developed largely alone over twelve years before reaching version 1.0 in December 2018. Kenshi is one of the most distinctive games in the survival RPG genre, built around player freedom, emergent systems, and a deliberately harsh post-apocalyptic world with no handholding and no scripted story to follow. Kenshi 2 is in development.

Chris Hunt and the Development of Kenshi

Chris Hunt began developing Kenshi in 2004 as a solo project and released it into Steam Early Access in 2013. Over the following five years he continued updating the game based on community feedback, adding base building, squad management, faction systems, and AI behavior that allowed hundreds of NPCs to live, fight, and die independently across the world. The game reached version 1.0 in December 2018, making it one of the longest Early Access development periods in Steam history. Hunt operated Lo-Fi Games as a small team throughout, bringing on additional staff as the studio’s success allowed but keeping it deliberately lean to maintain creative control.

Kenshi

Kenshi is set in a vast, arid world with no protagonist, no quest markers, and no guaranteed path to success. Players start as a single character with nothing and must survive, recruit followers, build bases, trade, fight, or do whatever combination of activities lets them carve out a place in a world that does not care about them. The game’s AI-driven faction systems mean that wars, raids, and alliances play out without player involvement, creating a living world that changes regardless of what the player does. It became a word-of-mouth success with a dedicated modding community that has produced thousands of mods extending the game’s content and systems significantly beyond the base release. Kenshi has sold over one million copies across its lifetime.

Kenshi 2

Lo-Fi Games announced Kenshi 2 in 2021, a sequel set in the same world’s past that will use a modern engine to support larger populations, improved AI, and more detailed environments than the original engine could handle. Development details have been limited, with Hunt keeping updates infrequent in the studio’s typical style. No release window has been announced.