Tested on: Xbox Series
Also available on: PS5/Switch/PC
The very young Surgent Studios delivers its debut with Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. The game does not avoid taboos and tackles a difficult subject: dealing with the loss of a loved one. But does such a profound theme also result in a successful 2D Metroidvania? You can read that below.
Learning to let go
In Tales of Kenzera you take control of Zau, a young shaman who goes on a spiritual adventure to bring his Baba (read: father) back to life. He is accompanied by Kalunga, god of Death, who promises to save his father if he can guide three lost Spirits to the afterlife.
Tales of Kenzera embraces the personal experiences of creator Abubakar Salim (who also provided the voice for Bayek from Assassin’s Creed Origins) following the death of his father. With Kalunga as a mentor, Zau discovers how to deal with loss during a gripping adventure. He looks back on memorable moments with his father, but also learns some important life wisdom.
The dialogues between Zau and Kalunga are often striking imagery and poignant views on life, which take you as a player through Zau’s grieving process. Yet Tales of Kenzera is not always a sad game, because the contrast between the naive Zau and the wise Kalunga produces funny interactions more than once.
Despite the powerful message, the story is missing something. The dialogues sometimes make you think, but there are few elements that really stick. Furthermore, the player’s personal experiences will always determine how strong Zau’s story resonates.
Sparkling simplicity
Tales of Kenzera does its best to create a memorable experience. Not least because of the colorful levels, inspired by the mythology and culture of the Bantu people. Zau crosses dense jungles, impressive canyons, vast fields and dark caves, all of which have their own atmosphere and appearance. The 3D backgrounds have a great sense of depth, making the environments seem much larger than they are.
Despite the graphical frills, the actual level design is quite simple for a Metroidvania. The path through the levels is almost always linear with little room for exploration. The exception are a handful of optional challenges, although it is often not worth investing time in them due to meager rewards. Back-tracking is also rarely necessary, because you can often spot all the hidden goodies during an initial exploration.
The platform puzzles, on the other hand, are nicely conceived, but never challenging. After all, the game autosaves so often that you only have to repeat part of each platform section after a restart. It does become frustrating when Tales of Kenzera is not consistent collision detection. A collision with sharp rocks guarantees an insta-death, but sometimes Zau flies over them and the game still registers it as a collision. Other times it hits the killer spikes blatantly, but the game continues as normal.
The dance of Sun and Moon
In between the exploration, Tales of Kenzera serves up a lot of confrontations. Fortunately, Zau has two cool weapons, each with its own skill tree. If he activates the Sun Mask, Zau can quarter the monsters with fiery daggers. The Moon Mask allows him to fire icy projectiles to attack enemies from a distance. And while Zau has a handy dash to dodge attacks, we miss a parry & counter system in the later chapters.
Confrontations are quite dynamic where you zoom through arenas and switch between both masks depending on your enemies. It’s a shame that the arena environments often have the same layout, making confrontations almost always feel similar. And the limited variety in enemies doesn’t help either. In later environments, the same monsters even have a double health bar, which makes the repetition even more important.
The boss battles are better developed and leave a stronger impression. Each Lost Spirit has a design that matches the environment it rules. In addition, each boss has a dynamic and evolving moveset, so you have to be a little more attentive to stay standing. The Ghosts are not very challenging, but they are a nice extension of the rest of the formula.
Carelessness
Despite the beautiful presentation, Tales of Kenzera: ZAU suffers from buggy controls. And that’s bad for a Metroidvania. It seems as if Zau sometimes completely blocks out the environment. This can happen after a series of jumps, but also during it glide. An extra jump or moving the thumbstick to neutral positive fixes the problem, but during combat this of course leads to an early death. And that is extremely annoying.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a good first effort from Surgent Studios. The game serves up a quite catchy story with a nice graphic design, but takes too few risks in terms of gameplay. In any case, there is potential there, so perhaps better for the next project?
