Tales of Kenzera: Zau is one of those games that has a deeply personal origin story.
Abubakar Salim, an actor who starred in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, decided to make the game as a way to honor his departed father, who died a decade ago.
He founded Surgent Studios and assembled a team of 30 people who made the game, which will be published by EA Originals on April 23 on the consoles and the PC. It’s a unique game, set in Africa, and in some ways Salim was surprised it was approved. He pitched this emotional game to EA Originals with little more than a simple prototype and a written story.
“It was enough because the Originals team saw the heart in it,” he said.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a heartfelt single-player action adventure platformer about the love between a father and a son and the transformative power of loss — and love. The 2.5D game was based on a question that Salim asked himself almost every day after his father passed.
“What would I sacrifice to bring my father back, to hear him again, to touch him,” he said.
Salim wanted to make a game that honored his father and others we have lost.
It a Metroidvania is about a young Shaman, Zau, who makes a deal with the God of Death to bring his father back. Some asked him why he made a game rather than a film, as he is an actor who played Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. He felt the more you stay in the Metroidvania world, and grief, the more you stay in it, the more comfortable you get in it.
And he said that the truth was that before he became an actor he loved playing games. The game is laced with Bantu myths and legends, “many my father told me as a kid,” he said. “It was my father that introduced me to these games.”
The game is a coming of age story that is an evolution of this boy, Zau, to a young man. The characters he meets. He learns of this new version of himself where he presses on after his father’s death. The journey of grief is full of surprises, ups and downs.
“We want people to connect with this world and get lost in it,” he said.
Grief in art
As you can see from the trailer, the game has a lot of action and fast motion through the colorful environments.
It takes place in Kenzera in 2089 in Amani, a bustling coastal city that is the cultural center of Kenzera, the home of Zuberi. It’s a city of tech, innovation and progress. The world is a land of myth with diverse geography, and it is occupied by lingering spirits trapped in the world of the living, yearning for peace. He is gifted a book by his father.
There is even grief in the art style. Ackeem Durrant is art lead and character artist. In a briefing, he explained why a game about grief is so colorful. He said Bantu funerals have a lot of colors paired together, noting how they’re mourning someone but also celebrating a life. Bantu is a huge region in the south of Africa.
It has colors like purple that represent spirituality and peace, and others for fear and loss (woodlands), anxiety and responsibility (highlands) and anger and acceptance. (the deadlands). The latter is about overwhelming emotion that must be channeled into something.
Zi Peters, lead game designer of the game, said in a briefing that while Zau is on a personal journey, the team still wanted to make the world of Kenzera into a place that was fun to explore. The environments are colorful and they reflect on Zau’s internal thoughts. The Spirit Rituals can spit out enemies that Zau has to deal with in order to get through to the awards.
Peters said the gameplay was inspired by Castlevania, Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest and more. There is also some inspiration from Devil May Cry and God of War.
“We cast a wide net in terms of the inspirations and also wanted to keep the emotional inspirations as well” into the gameplay, Peters said.
The combat is like a dance, Salim said. He said he told the team he wanted the feeling of movement, agency and freedom in the way you could play the game. Peters said the team went for a movement-based combat system, on the ground or in the air. Zau is often outnumbered, and it encourages movement to deal with the threats. There are different masks that enable either melee or shooter fighting. There’s an element of strategy in how to deal with combat foes.
As for the diversity of games that show Black people as main characters, Salim said, “Yeah, it’s important. It’s part and parcel of seeing yourself or someone who looks like you in a journey. I will never forget the feeling of seeing Black Panther in the cinema for the first time. It’s incredibly important to have all these different stories. It inspires other people to tell their stories.”
Nainita Desai, the music composer, had to ask herself, “What’s the sound of grief?” It’s sad and it has a gravitas to it. She brought musical traditions from different parts of Africa into the game. She wanted to embed cultural authenticity into the game with music.
“Some days you are completely happy and there are other days when you do not want to get out of bed,” she said in a briefing. “My musical challenge was to encapsulate this highly emotional coming of age story. The game is certainly not gloomy or dark. It’s wrapped in a rich colorful world of Bantu mythology.”
The soundtrack will come out shortly after launch. In a Q&A with press, Salim said he would love to expand the world of the game to other media, which already includes a comic book.