Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review 

This is how the game is described on their webpage: “Wield the dance of the shaman. Reclaim your father’s spirit. Brave the beautiful and treacherous land of Kenzera with the God of Death in Tales of Kenzera™: ZAU, a metroidvania-style adventure crafted by Surgent Studios. Wield the dance of the shaman. Reclaim your father’s spirit. A grieving boy begins to read a Bantu tale written by his late father. Adventure into the beautiful and treacherous lands of Kenzera as Zau, a young shaman who bargains with the God of death to bring his Baba back from darkness. With your cosmic powers and untried courage, you advance into unknown mythological lands. Once bursting with life, Kenzera is now rife with lost ancestral spirits. As Zau advances toward his goal, 3 mighty beings lie in wait, fearsome in their strength yet somehow strangely familiar. Will you embrace the dance of the shaman?”

I’m a little late to the party reviewing this game. If I’m being honest a part of it was because there was so many games that I was playing at the time of its release and also I knew that I was going to have a hard time being objective when it came to reviewing Tales of Kenzera: Zau. The reason being is because I naturally want to see this game succeed. I generally want most games to succeed but this one more so than usual because it is a game that is highlighting people who look like me. I’m a chocolate man and we don’t get games like this often. With that said I tried to center my emotions like a Jedi and go into this Tales of Kenzera review as objective as possible. So is this a good game, did it live up to my expectations, who is this game for? 

Let’s dive into it. 

Narrative: 

you play as Zuberi in a futuristic, Wakanda-adjacent African society. Grieving over the death of his father, Zuberi begins reading the tale of Zau, an ancient shaman hero who strikes a deal with Death to save his father’s soul. That fable represents the vast majority of the playtime. Zuberi’s story is a framing device to help establish the game’s themes of accepting duality: life and death, happiness and sadness, past and future, fact and fiction. We’ve all been through grief before so the story about a kid coming into his own, while trying to grieve his father and accept his father’s passing is a tale that’s easy to relate to. It’s something unfortunately we all go through. This is a personal tale for The game’s creator, voice actor Abubakar Salim (best known for his portrayal of Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins), has been particularly open about the personal inspiration behind the game: his own experience of grief following the death of his father.

Gameplay: 

Similar to Prince of Persia the Lost crown, this game is a adventure action platformer Metroidvania. Metroidvania games task you with revisiting locations until you’re powerful enough to break into new areas, so they’re only as interesting as their worlds. Tales of Kenzera: Zau doesn’t disappoint in this department. The Biomes include the typical jungle, cave, swamp, and desert, but I was impressed with how the team mixed in the African spice into it, that made the environments feel more unique and distinctive.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s duality extends to its combat, too. Like Ikaruga, Zau must frequently switch between two colors to vanquish foes. The orange Sun mask favors close-quarters-brawling by offering powerful strikes. The blue Moon mask gives you projectiles for long-range encounters, with ammo that refills on a cooldown. You can prefer one style more than another, but both are needed to survive certain attack patterns. Some enemies have shields that can only be damaged by one color. Zau begins the game with basic abilities already learned, like a dash and double jump, indicating his base capabilities as a hero. The feel of the game is superb as he swiftly leaps, wall jumps and bounds through each beautiful, African-inspired environment, and later abilities, like a grappling hook and powerful smash, complement the skillset. Zau’s a capable fighter, then, with attacks building up spirit energy that’s used to either heal or unleash powerful blasts of anime-style energy. These are later boosted by unlocks in a simple upgrade tree. Again, it all flows well and feels satisfying at first, but combat is ultimately let down by a lack of enemy types that leads to repeated visual design and strategy, with higher difficulty achieved by simply throwing in more enemies at once. Bosses, though, punctuate story and gameplay with welcome challenge and there are some thrilling chase and escape sequences.
each mask has a limited number of uses before it runs low on energy forcing you to switch to the opposite mask as that energy is refilled. So your ranged mask might only have 12 uses before it runs out and then you’ll need to wait it out before you can use it again.

Both of these masks can be upgraded to unlock passive and active abilities to bolster combat, but it’s the flow of the combat and the way the AI fights back, as well as the actual mechanics of the battles that just didn’t work for me. For example, some enemies have a shield to chip away before you can directly attack their health, or you might need to use ranged attacks to lower a shield before you can let loose with melee. The first few times I encountered these were interesting, but after some time, they became a frustration as they broke up the flow of battle.

Additional Pros: 

The soundtrack is rich and fits the themes of adventure, grief and combating right and wrong.

I love the artstyle as well. Each locale feels distinct from the others, both in color scheme and challenges. The sickly green swamps and massive trees of the forest to the west test Zau’s acrobatic abilities, for instance, while the volcanic heat and dry oranges and reds of the desert to the north features plenty of endurance-focused challenges that force Zau to withstand large groups of enemies or solve multi-step environmental puzzles. The structure of these areas interweave with the story, enriching the narrative in rewarding ways. The desert sees Zau come to understand that grief isn’t something that can be simply overcome–it continues to wash over you in waves, much like the waves of enemies he has to contend with

Flaws/Cons: 

One aspect of this game that I did not enjoy is the fact that it doesn’t tell you where to go next. Even while using the map it’ll give you a indication of where you been but not necessarily a icon that’ll tell you this is the destination that you need to make your way to. So it’s easy to get lost in this game. This is a staple of metroidvanias as a whole so I can’t just isolate it to this one particular game. I have played a couple of Metroidvanias recently that will give you a hint if you ask for it and I feel like that should be a new staple for the genre. This game doesn’t have that and quite frankly it is irksome. No Marker System: While the game has few places that require markers, as a Metroidvania that requires some backtracking, markers are a must.

Unfortunately, I have to challenge the idea that this game can be played on the deck. I have all the settings at low and the resolution set to 720p and the first boss just doesn’t play at high enough frames to be reasonably beaten on the Deck. Notably, it took me more than the return window to get to this point. If you’re on a low-end machine or mobile device, this discovery can be pretty disappointing. There is definitely an optimization issue at play here because this game tears through the Steam Deck battery, whereas I’m able to play games like Spiderman, Starfield, and  for much longer at more stable frame rates. I played some of the game on the steam deck, but most of it on the xbox Series S/X. It ran fantastic on both.

I also did not enjoy the sudden difficulty spikes in combat (I’m looking at you elevator in Act 1) and the lack of a difficulty slider led to me banging my head against a wall more often than not. I was not tutorialised on enemies having a shielded health bar on top of their normal one that I needed to destroy by only using the Sun or Moon mask. The enemies are tiresome and repetitive with only a few grunts that show up for the longest time. The only changes come with the inclusion of minibosses but even those begin to appear all too often and make each combat scenario a bit of a bore.

Should you Play: Tales of Kenzera: Zau

While the game isn’t perfect, I enjoyed my time with the game. The artstyle fits the story well and the story hits hard esp if you’ve experienced grief in your life. While the highs may not hit as hard as some other Metroidvanias this is a serviceable and worthwhile game. As a person of color I loved playing a game with a character that looks like me and experiencing something that resembles African culture. We don’t get that often in games and I’m thankful to this one for providing with an experience that I won’t forget anytime soon.