Now a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this, and in some way it’s recency bias speaking. Well actually no, I played this game two years and it was the first entry in a gigantic franchise I beat so I have a soft spot for it. Assassin’s Creed: Origins is genuinely a really good game and one of the better entries in the Assassin's Creed series. The shift to an RPG format was a weird turn for Assassin’s Creed and we all knew it wasn’t going to reach the heights of some of the older games like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Black Flag. However, it was a confident game doing the most it can to make the elements at play work and tell a nifty story. Pretty beautiful narrative the more I think about it. A man who is out for revenge for the murder of his son, but really he can’t process the grief and guilt left since then. Learning how to cope and eventually let go. I do really like the narrative Assassin’s Creed: Origins tried to tell, and while the other two entries in the RPG trilogy went grander in scope I think they also forgot the personal narrative of the main protagonist. The struggle they’re personally going through and how they’re dealing with them. It has been the heart of Assassin’s Creed for a long time, but that’s not why we’re here to discuss today.
The reason why I open the review up like this is to connect to the main topic, which is the game directed by the man who played Bayek. The main protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Origins. The man’s name was Abubakar Salim and he wanted to make a game expressing how he felt after his father lost a battle with cancer ten years prior. The grief that he felt and mentally processing the various thoughts going through his head. So he formed his own indie studio, got Electronic Arts to help publish the game, and with time made a game that explored his experience with grief. I, like many other reviewers who analyzed the game I am about to discuss shortly, really want to emphasize the focus on grief rather than loss. The two words are correlated, but what they are and how they work are severely different. Loss is more of an at the moment sort of description. The death of a loved one happened recently and you would use the word ‘loss’. Following that is grief, the emotional response to loss. Having to emotionally process the death of a loved one and move forward knowing they will no longer be around. Two words that are interconnected, but different when carefully glanced at.
Over the course of five years, Salim and his independently formed team Surgent Studios would develop Tales of Kenzera: Zau. The game that would explore the process of grief and show much like a majority of games out there that the medium can be art. Well I know video games were art for a very long time, but I was still hopeful that Surgent Studios’ debut title would be good. That big name voices putting money into smaller scale projects than pumping millions of dollars into a project we received tons of before. That people like Salim, videogamedunkey, and more could serve as good examples of celebrities helping fund and support indie projects. I like it when folks do this and thankfully I was right. For the most part, because when Tales of Kenzera was released it received backlash. Not from critics though a lot of reviewers really liked this game. No, what happened instead was some of the most worst and vile sh*t the internet could conjure and do to a person. I don’t want to explain any further because there’s already a response video by Salim that does a better job addressing and explaining the backlash. What I will say is that art and art, and art with a vision is better than art that was to suck in as much cash as possible.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a pretty great game albeit flawed. I had a fun time with it, the story was able to convey what it wanted to say, the ending was sad, and it didn’t overstay its welcome. This is something I can recommend to a lot of people even if the gameplay is flawed. When I first saw the trailers for this game I could tell it was going to be a metroidvania. As you all know it’s my favorite video game genre. Haven’t played a metroidvania yet that I’ve personally hated. It was going for the 2.5D look of Metroid Dread and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and I was quite excited as again those two are examples of why pumping money into smaller scaled titles isn’t a bad idea. Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a pretty good game to play, but compared to contemporaries it has a few rough edges. Combat and level design are not a highlight for Tales of Kenzera, but just like most games Tales of Kenzera is more than the sum of its parts. Tales of Kenzera isn’t going to amaze people who’ve played any other metroidvania before, but it will still impress with how its narrative is told, where it goes, and how it’ll leave you by the end. Let's talk about Tales of Kenzera: Zau and why it deserves your attention.
Story
The game opens up in what I believe is the modern day. A man is grieving over the recent death of his father and is unable to enter the room for which his father now rests. He tells his mother that the burden is too much and he feels more could’ve been done when his father was still with them. The mother tells the son to enter his father’s study room. There he’ll find relics of the past and a book explaining what the father did when he faced the exact same circumstances that the son is dealing with now. The book is opened, turned to the first page, and there the real story can begin. We follow the father when he was the exact same age as his son as of reading. When he was a young man his father died of old age too, and had to conduct a ritual so that his father may move onto the afterlife. Unable to grieve with his own father’s loss, Zau turns to another method. Instead conducting a ritual to summon the god of death, Kalunga. He tells the god he wants his father’s soul back and he’ll do anything it takes to retrieve it. Kalunga accepts the boy’s plea and sends him on a quest to retrieve the souls of three angered spirits. All of whom have manifested into monstrous beings who are ravaging certain sections of the land. Thankfully Zau came a bit prepared as he has two masks granting him elemental powers to fight the raging spirits. He’ll make strange allies, learn to cope with his father’s death, and potentially reclaim his soul.
Gameplay
I’m going to assume a majority of you readers have played a metroidvania before or at the very least a 2D adventure with platforming elements. In Tales of Kenzera you navigate a vast world filled with shortcuts and different paths, fight enemies, obtain new skills, get stronger, and try to get to where you need to be. Metroidvanias tend to have either an exploration or combat focus, and in the case of Tales of Kenzera it’s a combat focus. Enemies come in a variety of flavors so they can get up and juggle you about. Basic enemies who melee you up close, flying enemies, sentries who throw stuff at you from afar, beefy boys, and much more. You’ll have to vary your approach when fighting them and this is where your two masks come into play. You can switch between them easily much like switching between worlds in Guacamelee, and both masks have their own unique skills and elemental affinities. The fire mask is melee focused in that you run up to enemies and slash them. Longer combos do more damage, your heavy attack can launch medium sized enemies into the air, and your ultimate skill summons a pillar of flames that can continuously damage enemies caught in it. The water mask is range focused and basically lets you play the game like Metroid. You fire rapidly from afar, your heavy attacks knock enemies back, and your ultimate is a giant laser. Over time you unlock new powers to traverse new parts like the flame spear to activate contraptions, ice projectile to freeze water, grappling hook, and much more. Certain enemies have elemental defenses so you want to switch up.
The world is big, but getting to where you need to be is a linear path. The game will test your skills with a variety of platforming challenges and if you die during them most likely you’ll get kicked to the start of the platforming section. Optional collectibles include echoes, trinkets to go equipment, and optional challenge gauntlets all of which reward you with experience points to unlock skill perks and upgrades. There’s a total of three regions to explore and each of them have their own gimmicks and hazards you have to work around. At the end of each region there is a boss and they’ll test what you learned during the level as well as any new characters abilities you may have unlocked during your travels. Beat them and you get to progress the story. Outside of that Tales of Kenzera is a pretty simplistic game to play. I was expecting this review to be not all that long, and that’s okay because not every review needs to hack away at everything. Let’s just hope you can calm the spirits, fulfill the ritual, and retrieve your father’s soul.
Thoughts
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a very confident game that does what it needs to do to convey its main theme. Confident is truly the best word I can use to describe Tales of Kenzera, because while I did have a lot of fun with it overall there are certain aspects that could be better. What it here is stuff that works, and if we were to check the principles of what makes a good game Kenzera can check off all the marks. Coming from a metroidvania enthusiast, Tales of Kenzera can easily be outmatched by a lot of its rivals. The combat is good and knows how to ramp up in time without feeling too needlessly hard. The first act is a tad bit easy, but once the game starts applying the elemental shields to foes as well as arenas with more hazards that’s when it gets interesting. You have to constantly switch between masks to break elemental barriers, move around instead of staying in the same place, alternate between combos, and know who to prioritize. Bosses while not always being great are fun and it feels rewarding when you finally take them down. Combat is a main design focus of Tales of Kenzera, but the more I played it the more I wished it was not such a focal point. Again, it’s fun, but something feels off with it. Later on enemies begin to stun you easily and it’s difficult to get back up and keep going when there’s so much happening on screen. Bosses are cool and serve as visual spectacles, but the second and third boss specifically don’t feel particularly designed well with one in particular covering too much of the screen. It’s not hard to read what they are doing, but knowing where you are during the fight.
Movement is good despite your traversal options not being the most varied. I like platforming in this game, but it seems most platforming challenges in Tales of Kenzera mainly consist of large gaps or distances. Meaning you’ll be double jumping for the most part, and it’s not until later segments where you have to range between moves. However, this is a design choice I’m willing to overcome because as a metroidvania it’s supposed to become more complex as the player goes and unlock new skills. It follows the good metroidvania guidelines of new skills should be new powers you can use either in traversal or combat. Not just a key you use to get forward one or two times during the story. Optional collectibles like trinkets, trinket slots, and experience points are fun to get but outside the experience points I don’t see a reason why to get trinkets. They can give you perks similar to that of Hollow Knight and Blasphemous 2, but they don’t do much to really assist the player or change their playstyle. Combat and world design aren’t the greatest, but what I can appreciate is what the game does to offer variety. Throwing in the occasional puzzle or chase sequence to make you feel epic.
A lot of people will pass on this game due to the gameplay, which I think is a bit unfair. I really liked Fallout 3, but I’m not afraid to admit that its story wasn’t the best a Fallout game could tell and it wasn’t until New Vegas that its RPG aspects were truly put to the test. What I’m saying is that a game is more than the sum of its parts, and Tales of Kenzera does a bit to keep you around for the six to seven hours it goes on for. Visually the game looks very nice. Having some very nice art direction and backdrops to gaze at. It’s on par to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, but it does let the game stand out compared to a lot of modern releases with fancy graphics that can depict every pore on a person’s face and are too focused on making the grass look realistic. The music is also very good, trying to mimic that of African music. I’m not the biggest expert when it comes to culture, but I like the many nods they give to African culture and religion. I like the character portraits that pop up during cutscenes. They remind me a lot of the beautiful work seen in Hades or at least one of the Supergiant games. The game may be linear, but I like how focused and condensed it is. The game isn’t long and I appreciate that, because while my favorite titles in the metroidvania genre are often vast I don’t mind when a metroidvania cuts out the slack and just delivers a well paced adventure. Getting you from goal to goal without dilly dallying.
How’s the story though, because it’s going to be the main draw for a lot of people looking into playing this game. It’s very good. As I said, Tales of Kenzera conveys what it wanted to do well. It’s a story about grief and the process of how a human being deals with it. Throughout the whole game you encounter characters going through the same process as you. A child who has to bear what was left behind from their mother. An old man who cannot accept what happened to his son just like how you can’t accept your father’s passing. A friend who's on the brink of passing and you are trying your best not to let them go just yet. There’s a plot twist near the end that is a tad bit predictable, but I still think it’s handled really well. The denial one is faced after loss and then coming to terms with it. Learning to finally deal with loss and eventually the period of grief is able to come to an end. Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a pretty enjoyable enough game with a beautiful world, fun although flawed combat, fantastic moments, and a story that’ll leave you sad yet kind of hopeful by the end. It’s a bit weak for a metroidvania, but it’s an outstanding debut title for Surgent Studios and if they plan to make any future games I hope they can roughen out the edges their first game had. In the end I am going to give Tales of Kenzera: Zau an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
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