Tried Kenshi
Man, I don't know. I've owned this game for years and bounced off it twice before. My husband showed me a video of a guy breathlessly recommending Kenshi, so I decided to try it out again.
I finally got more than an hour into the game, but I don't think I was playing it in a way that made me happy? I was just trying to survive. And this time I did a really, really good job of surviving.
I have a guy named Set now with like, level 72 Laboring skill. He is very good at mining copper and operating a rock crusher. He can draw water from a well so fast. He regularly makes enough money to buy food at the bar in the small city on the top of the hill.
He has been KOed by bandits 2 or 3 times. His little base has been completely overrun and claimed by those bandits several times as well. Each time he had to go in and fight and kill them. He has like level 14 or 15 katana skill which makes him way stronger than any of these bandits... they are all hungry and sad and dying, and they limp around in his base dying of hunger while he slowly sneaks around killing them.
He has a buddy named Logan who is a sniper. Logan has very few skills besides sniping. We can't even afford a good weapon for him to snipe with, so he isn't particularly useful. I'm trying to make Logan better at laboring so that he can crush rocks and draw water as effectively as his boss does.
I took the videos I watched at face value - Kenshi is a kind of Fallout-esque RPG, but also a life sim where you can take on the role of a farmer or a trader or a laborer who mines copper and crushes rocks. I dug right into that immediately because mining copper seemed like the most effective way of getting rich without dying. I stayed up late working on something one evening, so I had Kenshi going on one monitor and my work on the other. Every few minutes I would make my guy stop mining copper and I'd go send him to sell some of it in the town. He got pretty rich that way, but I was spending all that money, too, so by the end of it the only new true wealth he had was the knowledge of how to build certain indoor furniture and crafting tables, and certain large swords.
I haven't left the first map yet.
I don't think I'm playing this game in a way that will result in me having fun. But I am maximizing various numbers, and I did finally get enough money to recruit Logan, my employee/best buddy, so I am.... making progress, I guess. My guy is alive. That's never happened to me in this game before!
I am fascinated by this genre of life sim RPGs - which includes Elin, I think - where the real-life virtues of personal commitment and dedication to practice are systematized as grind. Yes, it is true: in real life, you have to do a lot of a thing before you get good at it. And yes, it is fun to make number go up. But I'm not sure that I have fun in games like these... I'm not sure that I'm capable of playing them in ways that will cause me to have fun.
I love this mechanic in, say, Oblivion and Skyrim, where you can really mess with and exploit it. I have a friend who once trained his Athletics by using a rubber band to make himself swim into a wall in Oblivion until he was maxed out at it. I used to max out a character's alchemy only, and do dumb shit that way. It's stupid fun.
Put it in a game with a top-down camera and mechanics that simulate drudgery, however, and you're not gonna get the same kind of behavior outta me. If I can increase my numbers via drudgery rather than swimming and jumping and making potions, I'm actually going to, like, do the drudgery, even if I realize I'm losing my mind a little.
I'm not going to give up Kenshi yet. I really want to unlock the ability to build a training dummy so that I can actually train my characters' combat skills to the point where I feel safer doing the RPG content. But to do that I'm probably going to have to mine a lot more copper.