Since playing it, Tales of Kenzera: Zau has never left me. Grief is life’s inevitable tragedy, and until this game, I’ve never felt it adequately explored in the medium. It’s odd because death is everywhere in video games. It’s an incentive or an insignificant punishment without consequence: numbered hearts, a health bar, a kill streak, or a Dark Soul’s “You’re Dead” sign. For all of death’s ubiquity in gaming, grief is almost absent if it isn’t a motivation for more killing.
It’s no mystery why video games struggle to adapt an experience as thick and prickly as grief. Video games seldom allow the spaciousness for mediation that more prosaic art forms offer to explore one of life’s amorphous heartaches. There’s an imperative that games must be ceaselessly entertaining; a coherent narrative might fall to the wayside, but who cares if you’re having fun?
After losing his father a few years ago, voice and screen actor Abubakar Salim (known for his roles in House of the Dragon and Assassin’s Creed: Origin) sought a video game as the vessel for his grief. He founded the media company Surgent Studios and developed Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a masterwork in game design and narrative, that strikes the elusive balance in gaming’s tug of war to deliver thoughtful ruminations on human experiences while delivering a fun time.
Tales of Kenzera is a story within a story. The game opens on Zuberi, a young man who has recently lost his father. To help his son process his grief, Zuberi’s father leaves behind a book chronicling the story of Zau, a young shaman who makes a deal with the God of Death, Kalunga, to bring Zau’s father back to life.
The main quest sees you liberating three lost great spirits of the lands of Kenzera so that Kalunga may bring your father back to life.
Inspired by a tapestry of Bantu folk stories, Tales of Kenzera is rich with mythology that many Africans know as our heritage. As much as Kenzera is a Wakanda-inspired hodge-podge of too many cultures to draw any clear influence, I found myself amused at the reference to Tokoloshe, or the noticeable Ndebele patterns in the game’s world design
The world of Kenzera is abundant with characters, unique costume designs, hairstyles and locations. Each locale boasts a creative aesthetic and mood, coupled with special platforming puzzles based on your progression in the game. Regardless of where you are in the game, Tales of Kenzera doesn’t shy away from gorgeous design. The levels are filled with tricky yet springy platforming segments and combat encounters. You’re equipped with a sun mask for up-close melee fights and an ice mask for ranged battles.
For all its visual variety and splendor, Tales of Kenzera is a mechanically difficult game. I found myself constantly struggling with precise platforming puzzles and complex enemy encounters and died more times than I’m too proud to mention.
Through exploration, the game progressively equips you with skills to assist you in combat and traversal, and if it does get easier, it doesn’t mean you won’t hit a roadblock soon after. Tales of Kenzera takes its influence from the Metroidvania genre, which generically emphasizes exploration, challenge, repetition, and an evolving mastery of the world it’s based in. So, yes, it’s slow, frustrating, and forces you to adapt because Tales of Kenzera isn’t simply a game about grief, the game is itself a manifestation of it.
The boss battles are the most exciting parts of the story. They’re varied and complex, and through them, we get the game’s most compelling story beats. As Zau liberates the great spirits of Kenzera, each of them leaves him a unique lesson to process the loss of his father.
I chose to experience the game in KiSwahili, which makes the finer notes of the story and the land’s mythology come alive. Not only do we seldom have video games set in Africa, but even fewer where characters speak in African languages. Zau’s heady rushed delivery, in contrast with Kalunga’s chocolatey baritone, creates some of the more humorous and heartfelt moments throughout the game.
Unfortunately, what should’ve been a welcome breath of fresh air for the gaming world has been mired in controversy from a right-wing faction of gamers:
Under the “Go Woke or Go Broke” banner, tens of thousands of gamers have actively boycotted Tales of Kenzera: Zau due to Abubakar Salim’s association with Sweet Baby Inc., a consulting agency in the gaming industry ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion standards are met in video games.
There’s little available data, but signs show that the boycott has resulted in Tales of Kenzera’s poor sales despite the game’s strong ratings from critics and players. On July 2, it was reported that some of the talented employees at Surgent Studios were laid off. Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a mirror to what large portions of the gaming community look like and has revealed a new culture war in gaming where the most vulnerable people, the workers, are the most severely affected by it. While other games may be too big to fail, it’s smaller independent studios like Surgent Studios and their workers who suffer when caught in the crossfire of a needless culture war.
For African gamers, Tales of Kenzera feels like a godsend, a glimpse of what a more diverse video game industry can look like. Africans and those in its diaspora deserve a place in gaming and for video games to cater to them. If a small, inexpensive passion project can cause this much militancy from reactionary gamers, it shows that they don’t sincerely care about the development of the medium. Modern gaming isn’t harmed by appealing to wider audiences; instead, it’s harmed by gamers.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is one of the most moving games I’ve played this year, and it might remain one of my favorite experiences in gaming for a very long time. Not just because it beautifully represents cultures almost completely excluded from gaming, but because it touchingly realizes one of life’s most tender and vulnerable experiences. It’s a fun game, for all ages and experience levels to enjoy.
