Tales Of Kenzera: ZAU review – shaped by grief and love-Nick Gillett-Entertainment – Metro

Tales Of Kenzera: ZAU – masks of the shaman (Picture: EA)

EA presents a new indie Metroidvania with a very personal theme and setting, as it explores issues of loss in a fantastical African setting.

Although there’s usually only one reason why big budget video games are made there’s often a more interesting story behind indie titles. Developer Surgent Studios’ founder, Abubakar Salim (who voiced Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins), saw making this game as a way of dealing with the loss of his father, and so Tales Of Kenzera: ZAU focuses on a shaman who has also just been bereaved.

The shaman’s reaction to his loss is to make a deal with Kalunga, the god of death, who quickly hands over the two masks that form that basis of the game’s combat. A 2.5D Metroidvania steeped in African folklore, Tales Of Kenzera is at once both familiar and interestingly unique in its presentation and setting.

The Mask of the Moon offers ranged and ice attacks, while The Mask of the Sun is melee and fire orientated. Both come with heavy, light, and special attacks, which you’ll be needing often given the frequency of enemy encounters. The rest of the time you’ll spend in traversal, which starts with the usual double jump and dash, before adding a grappling hook, glide, block-smashing charges, and more.

As in every Metroidvania, your exploration is not always left to right, and involves plenty of winding paths and a little backtracking to use new skills and equipment to access previously unreachable chunks of the map. You’ll also find secrets tucked away all over the place, ranging from Echoes, which add a bit of lore, to experience point bonuses.

With experience points you can augment your mask skills, adding new ways of attacking and strengthening existing abilities. You’ll also pick up trinkets, which confer perks and can be equipped or removed at workbenches you stumble across. These enable you to configure your skill set for particularly challenging encounters or the game’s infrequent boss fights, although we never found them very necessary.

There are also challenges, each of which takes place in its own discrete level, where you dash around a fast-moving course that sends you right back to the beginning every time you make a mistake. In the first couple of acts they’re very straightforward, but as the game wears on they get far more difficult, which would be fine if they were purely optional.

Unfortunately, the concept gets used in sections that make up some of the game’s critical path, which quickly becomes frustrating. In the later acts that can mean repeating the same minutes-long level over and over again, attempting to get its near-pixel perfect multi-jumps, glides, and block smashes exactly right just to progress.

In those levels, the lack of checkpoints and rote-learning gameplay hark back to a simpler time in video games when people had fewer entertainment choices. The reason they’ve largely fallen out of fashion is that they’re not all that much fun, and after the fifteenth attempt to complete a perfect set of moves, only to have to start from the beginning yet again, you may find yourself experiencing controller-destroying levels of frustration.

It’s a shame because there’s so much else that the game does right. The art style might be something of an acquired taste, but the acting is wonderful, the mellifluous African voices sounding joyous throughout. It even has a decent map, which despite looking a little simplistic is consistently useful.

That’s partly because despite its Metroidvania leanings, for most of its run time Tales Of Kenzera is rigidly linear. There are fast travel bonfires, but for the majority of the game you’ll have no reason to use them, with levels generally leading you directly towards your next objective, which is both clearly marked and usually nearby.

Tales Of Kenzera: ZAU – a very pretty Metroidvania (Picture: EA)

Movement and combat are fast and fluid, and while this has nowhere near the depth or elegance of Dead Cells, your shaman feels good to control, while fights are punchy and lightly tactical, with mask-switching constantly needed.

It’s also not just bug free but polished to a high shine. Action sequences go off as intended, landscapes are interesting to look at, and different enough in character to keep you wanting to see more. The characters are also a delight to listen to, as they chat, argue, and reconcile.

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In the last couple of acts, battles do start to get a bit samey, with multiple waves of familiar but increasingly tough beasts hurled at you. Traversal also gets a little too comfortable for its own good – there’s an awful lot of Tales of Kenzera, but you sometimes wish there was maybe slightly less, with a touch more invention.

The biggest issue, though, is those repetitious challenge-style levels, where a single error sends you back to the start. The second boss battle, and too many other completely unavoidable parts of the story, become as slog as a result and it’s a real shame. It would be a stronger and less infuriating game without them but given its bargain price, and otherwise admirable level of refinement, it’s far from a total bust.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Price: £16.19
Publisher: EA
Developer: Surgent Studios
Release Date: 23rd April 2024
Age Rating: 7

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