It's not, like, mechanically addicting, like Civ or Factorio. The joy in Kenshi is exploring the weird and wonderful world, and beefing up to kick the shit out of all the enemies who kicked the shit out of you and stole your dust sandwiches in the past. Also in teaching robots to do kung-fu. And also smuggling hashish.

I put 300 hours in to it the first time I played, so that is a legit concern. You will become incredibly attached to your little people and their efforts to survive and become Shonen anime protagonists. I started out cheesing bandits with cross bow emplacements and ended up at war with, and defeating, an entire country of religious slaver fanatics. and there were large parts of the map I never even visited or explored.

There's actually a mechanic where you can be enslaved if you get beat up and knocked out, and you have to stage your own escape unless you want to work in a field for the rest of the game.

One thing to note going in; You get tougher and stronger by getting beaten up without actually dying. This is one of the core mechanics of the game. You have to lose a whole lot of fights and get your crap stolen, and spend a whole lot of nights huddled around a fire starving and hoping the Beak Things don't get you, before you start making progress on your way to becoming an unstoppable kung fu badass who could single-handedly defeat an army of 10,000 men. It's a big complicated RPG/Tactics sim set in a truly, piteously cruel world. You're going to lose a lot before you figure out how things work and start winning.