Good evening. I apologize in advance for my first question on these forums being so out of touch and plain stupid, but should I buy:

Kenshi
OR
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Two totally different productions, with no common points besides their similar prices.
Thank you for being patient enough to answer!

Kenshi has no plot, no missions no stat points (those are earned by "doing" - get beaten up? you get tougher and so on) and is essentially a rather unusual sandbox survival game. If thats a no-no for you, do not pass go.

What Sach said, plus if your machine is on the lower quality side, Kenshi will not run well. Kenshi alo has a quirk. Everything revolves around the player character in a reality bubble. Everything outside of that freezes until the player goes near again. So this creates a massive logic problem for factions, crops, anything that you expect to have change once you return to a location.

If thats not bad enough. Everything giving chase has "Flock of birds syndrome". Where by, anything chasing something else will instantly change course to what they pursue. You can watch lets play videos and see this often.

Who?

....Sachys. 2inch keyboard+fat fingers...typos happen.

Since the previous replies were about Kenshi, I'll chime in on the other side and say there aren't many games that would even make me pause to think if asked whether to play them or Bloodlines...
The one problem with Bloodlines here is that ever since Bloodlines 2 was announced, they doubled its discounted price, used to be discounted to $5 at first...

Y'know, Sach-o! The Sach Man! TyrannoSachys Fex!

As the non-bot replies said, Kenshi is player-centric. I don't remember if it was a one guy team, but it was a slow-going effort before catching some attention. The versioning before 1.0 was about 0.7, so it was pretty much a "stuff seems to work, mods are live, you guys keep fixing and changing as you like. We're done." type of release.
I plan on buying if it ever reaches 75-80% discount as a nostalgic memento. But i'm too much a of a cheapskate to buy it even at its current price.

Bloodlines is a buggy mess without the community fixes. Might not even work on modern systems without some tinkering, but it has a type of charm. A pair of twins actually.
Yet I'm not buying it either because it used to have a higher discount and so i'm not feeling the xmas spirit...

The games are completely different as OP said, but they are both worth a try. If one can safely do so for free before deciding, then that would be even better.

Not true. Bugfix (and occasionally other) updates are ongoing and have been since release.

Started out as one guy but ended up with a small team.