Tales of Kenzera: Zau (2024, Windows) Review

GOOD MOURNING

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a pretty, metroidvanian platformer about grief. Quality-wise, it's a two-headed beast. The story needs a pat on the head and someone to tell it everything's gonna be alright. Meanwhile, the gameplay is confident, challenging and overall pretty great. I had a good time playing, but the wordy narration and slow voice acting kept interrupting my fun.

It's never pleasant to critique the way someone deals with the loss of a parent. Abubakar Salim founded Surgent Studios to tell this story after his father's passing. Salim is a fine actor with droves of movies, TV-shows and games under his belt. He voiced Bayek in Assassin's Creed: Origins with great emotional range and played the part of Father in the show Raised by Wolves with great restraint.

Here he's equally convincing as Zuberi, a young man mourning the passing of his father. His mama presents him with a book that the old man had written. As the kid starts reading, he realizes it's a message passed on from father to son.

The game takes place in this story-within-a-story. It presents a vibrant fantasy world, inspired by Bantu myths from southern and central Africa. You control Zau (also voiced by Salim), a young shaman who seeks to bring his father back to life. He summons the god of the afterlife and makes a deal. To fulfil his request, the god asks for three souls in exchange.

When you put it like that, the quest sounds similar to Wander's in Shadow of the Colossus. You guide Zau through the world in search of these boss souls. They reside within mythological animal beasts. You feel like a selfish asshole for hunting them down. If you learn to perceive them as metaphors for psychological issues, you might find it easier.

Like Ori and the Blind Forest, it has a neat metroidvanian world structure of obstacle courses. It feels quite linear. Offshoots lead to optional challenges, upgrades and secret lore stashes. In the grand scheme of things, these feel insignificant. Of greater import is that Zau controls great. You run, jump and dash through the air with fine precision and speed. On Windows, the game supports the Dualshock 4, which helps.

Zau comes equipped with two masks. One represents the sun; a fiery, powerful stance you equip to maximize your melee damage. The other one calls upon the moon, allowing you to freeze or shoot enemies at a distance. Salim took inspiration from his own experience of putting on masks (figuratively) to deal with the world around him while he was mourning.

It's an interesting metaphor. You need to alter swiftly between them to clear obstacles or create paths. Walls and platforms appear or disappear depending on your current choice of mask. Some sections require you to switch back and forth mid-air, building or wrecking platforms above a stretch of deadly ground. These sections are the ones most flagrantly inspired by Ori, but I liked this game more. The difference lies in the controls; its fine-tuned movement allowed me to feel accomplished rather than frustrated.

Not only is the world fun to traverse, its African fantasy setting is also uplifting. Presented in a 2,5D sideways perspective, its visual language is both detailed and clear. It never screws the player over. The color coding makes hazards obvious and the surroundings never interfere with your perception. Aesthetically, the game is unpretentious. The backgrounds of savannahs, waterfalls and crystal caves offer nothing new. Much like the music, they create a frictionless atmosphere that fits Zau's smooth acrobatics.

I'm not too keen on the combat. When enemies appear in the open world, it's not a problem. But the game takes too much delight in locking you up inside combat arenas. It doesn't let you off the hook until you've defeated a few waves of spawning enemies. It seemingly wants to emulate a round of Super Smash Bros (a series I'm no fan of), with a similar setup of platforms and hazards. Your enemy-juggling, stunlocking attack chains makes it eerily similar to the Nintendo brawler.

Naturally, some enemies are impervious to one of your masks, forcing you to change to the other. No problem. But I quickly found an attack that circumvented that limitation for some reason. I could spam that devastating ground strike and use it to defeat every enemy, except the flying ones. After that, combat became a chore. There's too much of it, and there's not much to it.

While I don't dislike the story, I'm not keen on the sheer amount of storytelling. It overexplains. Every time you unlock a new mechanic or feature, the god of death appears and tells you the lore behind it. Let's say you pick up the purple life force from a defeated enemy for the first time. It's called Ulogi, which is just another word for "experience points".

Well, did you know that "Ulogi is the spiritual property that resides in everyone and everything. Through your resonance as a Shaman, it can accentuate your inner power. When the time is right, use this energy. Adapt it to your will. Through Ulogi [...] you can become stronger and faster than ever." Then a tutorial screen pops up, explaining it in even more detail. You can level up! Gain new skills! Make your masks stronger!

I love lore-specific terminology, but you can be brief about it. The wordiness becomes even more of a grind when certain characters make their entrance. Some voice actors like to dramatize, and think that speaking slowly - is - the - best - way - to - do - that. Meanwhile, their lines appear instantly as subtitles. You read through them much faster than they're spoken. Sure, you can speed-click, but skipping the performances also removes a crucial aspect of the storytelling. It's like reading the subtitles to a movie without watching or hearing the actors.

You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. The story has some really strong moments, particularly involving some of the boss souls, but the tedious narration removes a lot of the emotional impact. That being said, that ending was effective, and pretty clever.

It's a shame this game sold poorly, because it deserved better. With a lack of clear exploration motivators, I'd recommend this to Ori-fans rather than those looking for the next Metroid. Surgent Studios nailed the parts that are hard to get right. They could easily polish the combat and narration to perfection in their next game. Sadly, with the entire studio on hiatus, their future looks bleak. But if we ever get another Kenzeran tale, I'd be happy to support them.