Tales of Kenzera™: ZAU

I went in expecting a competent genre exercise and came out thinking about a dead father for two days. That's the short version of what Tales of Kenzera: ZAU does to you. It is a 2.5D metroidvania built from recognizable parts, but the architecture behind those parts belongs entirely to Surgent Studios and to creative lead Abubakar Salim, who drew directly from his own experience of losing his father when shaping the story. The result is one of the more thematically cohesive games I have played in this genre: health upgrades come from moments of meditation, combat skills represent the protagonist Zau learning to inhabit his father's legacy, and every biome you cross is quietly mirroring a stage of grief. The dual-mask combat system is the mechanical spine. The sun mask is melee-forward, fast, aggressive, built around light combos and a powerful charged ranged attack you unlock later. The moon mask flips the script: ranged by default, with a useful early stun ability that becomes essential against grouped enemies. Swapping between them mid-fight is where the rhythm lives, and when you string together a clean sun-to-moon rotation the game starts to feel almost choreographic. Alongside the masks, Zau's movement kit, double jump, wall jump, air dash, and eventually a grappling hook, opens up as you progress. Notably, core traversal abilities arrive early rather than gating you behind long hunts, which means the world stays fun to cross throughout. Souls collected from enemies, called Ulogi, fund new skills on two separate upgrade trees, one per mask, giving you some build expression within a compact framework. The biomes themselves are genuinely distinct and worth moving through: sickly green swamps that test acrobatic patience, volcanic desert stretches loaded with multi-step environmental puzzles, and quieter forest corridors that let the soundtrack breathe. Composer Nainita Desai layers synth and electric textures over African traditional instrumentation in a way that feels earned rather than cosmetic. It is one of those scores you notice without meaning to. The visual style is expressive and colorful, and the full Swahili voice performances give the world a cultural grounding you rarely get in this price bracket. Where other games borrow an aesthetic, this one is building something from the inside out. The criticisms land, though, and they deserve honest mention. The map design is the weakest link: entire zones reveal themselves on entry, but there is no way to mark visited rooms or track where you have and have not explored. Backtracking for secrets becomes guesswork, and most secrets only reward a small experience bump rather than anything that alters your relationship to the build. Some reviewers noted that gauntlet-style kill rooms cluster together in places, stalling momentum at exactly the wrong time. There are occasional difficulty spikes that feel less designed and more accidental. For players who come to the genre from Hollow Knight or Ori, the overall depth will feel modest. This is a first metroidvania from a debut studio, and it plays a little safe by those standards. What it does have, and what I would argue the mid-tier Metacritic score undersells, is a rare emotional clarity. Every encounter, every upgrade, every NPC who deals with loss in their own way, feeds back into one coherent human question. Zau's roughly eight-hour journey knows when it is done. It does not pad itself. For anyone who has ever used fiction to hold grief at arm's length, this game is doing something specific and honest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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