There have been many video games over the years to cover the subject of grief, each in different ways. Brothers: A tale of two Sons, Rime, What Remains of Edith Finch, Rime, and even the 2018 God of War, all look at grief through different lenses. But they all touch on the same shared hurts, the same stages of processing the devastating hole left behind when someone you care for passes on. The newest of these is Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a game envisioned by the actor Abubakar Salim, who lost his father. He has said he wanted to make this game specifically as a way to share and process the journey and feelings that he was going through and to honour a love of the medium he shared with his father. It was released at the end of April 2024 as part of the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue, and I thought I would give it a try as I love games that attempt to evoke emotions, and I love metroidvanias. So let’s look at my journey to get the Platinum Trophy, in Tales of Kenzera: Zau.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau, opens with a young man named Zaberi, grieving. His father has passed and he isn’t ready to say goodbye to him. To help him, his mother gives Zaberi a book his father had been writing before he passed, to help his son with the feelings he would be struggling with.
The book tells the story of Zau, a shaman who has also just lost his father. Zau, unable to accept the loss of his father, makes a bargain with the god of death, Kalunga, if Zau can capture the Three Great Spirits that had denied Kalunga, then the God of Death would return Zau’s father to him. Perhaps intrigued by Zau’s spirit and determination, Kalunga decides to journey with Zau as he goes about his task.
As the story progresses, and the two talk, Zau will often share stories of his father, of the lessons he taught his son, or the experiences they shared together, and the way this happens is one of the things I liked the most about this game. It is so open about what it is trying to say, not showing grieving as a metaphor or through imagery, or even by progressing through levels named after the stages of grief, it’s just showing the thoughts and feelings of one man dealing with the loss of his father.
As you explore Kenzera’s locales, you can find large trees that Zau can meditate under. Mechanically these increase your health, but narratively they are so much more. They are named reflections, and they are places for Zau to do just that. At the first one you visit, Zau shares a story of his Father taking him to meditate under these trees, and as you find more, you see and hear more about his life. These moments are used to show the player, and Zaberi who is reading this story, to see where Zau is emotionally and mentally. There’s one where Zau sits down to meditate, and quickly says “I can’t do this” and gets back up. It’s such an honest depiction of what losing someone feels like that it took me by surprise, and there’s never any judgement for what he feels, with Kalunga offering only comfort and sage wisdom.
The game is full of moments like this, each of the bosses representing different forms of grief and how those emotions can take form, and that in the end, the only thing we can do is accept that the people who died are gone, and try our best to move forward without them.
If it’s not obvious, I really liked the story being told here, and even though there was so much more exposition than you would normally find in a Metroidvania style game, I think it worked really well. There was also a lot of lore and worldbuilding outside of the main narrative that I really enjoyed too. There are echoes you can find that tell short stories about the characters and creatures in the world, and each enemy and power up comes with a codex entry that gives some background information about the Shaman who wielded the power first, that Zau is learning from, all inspired by Bantu mythology and folklore.
This inspiration also permeates the artistic style and locales of the game. From the afro-futurist city that Zaberi lives in to the African-inspired locales, Zau explores. It is such a unique and interesting setting, that I don’t see enough of in games and I wish there had been more of it to actually explore, rather than just walk through.
In my opinion, there are two important components that make a good Metroidvania. The first of these is exploration, the process of filling in the map, discovering new areas and seeing how they fold in on each other and link up to make an interconnected world. Symphony of the Night is one of my favourite games and I love filling in that map, and then doing it all again in the inverted castle. Not knowing where the exit you choose will lead, and running into barriers that you aren’t equipped to overcome quite yet but knowing you will come back later to do it. The satisfaction of finding hidden upgrades, or weapons in an out-of-the-way corridor you remembered had an exit you couldn’t quite jump to yet is my favourite part of the genre.
The second of these is movement. Movement has to feel smooth and fast as you rush around the map, backtracking to and fro between routes. Dashing, double jumping, dashing again, before sliding under a small crack between the floor and ceiling. This is something the Metroid series is great for, controlling Samus is fun, and running through rooms you’ve already been through is rarely boring because the act of just getting through rooms by sprinting jumping and screw attacking your away across them feels so exciting that it becomes half a game in itself to see how fast you can get to your destination.
Tales of Kenzera, despite its great backdrops and setting, falls short in its attempt to hit these goals. Movement is fluid and fast most of the time and you unlock new traversal abilities as you go, as you do in most Metroidvanias. But these abilities never felt as exciting or as fun as the abilities you can get in other games. Part of this is because you start with quite a lot unlocked to begin with. Zau starts with the ability to double jump, dash, and wall jump straight away, and because of this the abilities you get rarely make it more exciting to move than it is at the beginning. You unlock abilities to fling yourself from points in the air, like in Ori, or glide slowly, but all of the abilities you get are there to help you get through obstacles, and even these obstacles are few and far between most of the time. It rarely felt like all of the abilities were coming together to be used in any real manner, with the exception of some really well-designed chase sequences that push you to use all of the abilities you have, often in quick succession.
Outside of these exceptions though you never feel the sense of increasing momentum I felt with games like Metroid Dread or the Guacamelee games. In fact, this is my biggest issue with the game itself, even with all of the power-ups and abilities, Kenzera rarely gives you a reason to want to use them.
When you enter a new part of Kenzera, the map reveals itself to you almost instantly, and you get a sense very quickly of where the game has hidden its collectables or challenges. You can spot instantly the looping section of the map where you know a traversal challenge will be, or the little outcropping off to one side where an echo will be waiting for you. This took so much fun out of the actual exploration of the map, the joy of discovery that makes up the best parts of the genre.
The game always is nudging you forward, so much so that it rarely even puts up blocks that you will need to return for. I think each area has at most two blockades that you can’t immediately get through when you find them. And with one exception, they are overcome by the ability you find, in the same area. Only one time did I have to go back to an area to use a power-up I had received in a different area. I found myself being able to get 100% completion of a zone in most cases before I had beaten the boss for that zone. Maybe it was part of the story the game was trying to tell, that you need to move forward through your grief, but I’m not sure it was, I just found it disappointing, considering how well it started with Zau having such great movement abilities to begin with.
Combat feels the same too, starting off feeling fluid, smooth and fun. Zau has two masks that he can switch between at the press of a button. The Sun Mask which focuses on melee attacks and quick combos, and the Moon Mask has ranged abilities. You dance between these two masks depending on the enemy types you face and the distance you are from them but it never really changes from there. You can earn experience as you defeat enemies that you can use to buy combat upgrades, but none of these made combat feel meaningfully different or interesting and there were not many enemies in the game to mix things up either. The combat gets more difficult as you progress for sure, but this is done by throwing more enemies at you, and giving them shields that regenerate if you don’t do enough damage in time. It was rarely frustratingly difficult but did venture towards repetitive, especially in the combat challenges where you fight waves of monsters.
These gripes I have would be more of a problem if the game wasn’t actually pretty short. It took me a single playthrough over around 12 hours. The game is pretty easy, with only a few of the traversal challenges taking me more than a single attempt. There are no missable trophies in the game, and although there are quite a few collectables to get, as I mentioned before, none of them are really hard to find or out of the way. Like most metroidvanias though, you will need to explore 100% of the map to earn the Platinum Trophy “Whole Again”.
Firstly you will need to find all of the reflections that I talked about earlier, the trees where Zau increases his max health for the trophy “Know Thyself”. You will also have to find and complete all of the challenges around the map. Some of these are traversal challenges, challenging you to use your abilities to get through an environmental puzzle. These reward trinkets that you can equip to give Zau small boosts, and finding all of these trinkets gets you “The Art of Trinketry” trophy. The other challenges are combat trials, of which there are three each with three levels of difficulty. These involve fighting waves of enemies and completing each difficulty gives you a different reward. The easiest ones give you additional trinket slots, and earning all of these gets you “Perk Up”. The intermediate difficulty gets you an extra bar for your spirit gauge, which you will need to earn them all for “Soulful” and the hardest difficulty gives you experience, which you need to level up all of the skills Zau can learn. Once you have mastered all the skills you will earn “Shaman of all Trades” and once you have beat all the Combat Trials you will earn “A Warrior’s Way”
Lastly for collectables you need to find the 32 echoes that are not particularly well hidden around Kenzaru’s map. This will earn you “Listen and Learn”.
There are a couple of miscellaneous trophies that are worth remembering just to make things a bit easier for yourself as you play. Firstly you need to kill 4 enemies with the special super moves Zau can do by spending two bars of his spirit gauge. In the Sun mask, you will need to wait for enemies to get close to you, and then activate it as it has a short range. This will earn you “I Am the Sun”. For its opposite trophy “I am the Moon” its actually much easier to get, just switch the moon mask and activate the attack, make sure you catch 4 enemies in it and the trophy is yours. The last trophy to look out for is “Quick Draw”. This requires you to buy the skill upgrade from the moon tree that lets you do a quick reload of your ranged attacks. You do this by pressing the quick attack button in the highlighted part of the bar that appears when you are recharging your shots. This will reload your ranged attacks much quicker and if you do this 10 times you will get the trophy. The remaining trophies are all unmissable story related ones that you should be able to get without difficulty.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a better than average metroidvania game, and as disappointed as I am in that fact, it is elevated by its story, worldbuilding and characters. Its exploration of grief and the journey it takes to get through the pain of loss to acceptance is so much more interesting and in depth than the exploration of its map, but sometimes that is ok. I still enjoyed my time with the game, and it was a touching story that I think anyone who has been through loss will resonate with. I just hope the studio improve this next time and make a map worth exploring every inch of.
Leave a Reply