Here’s probably your feel-good story for the weekend: The makers of mega-hit Palworld are using some of their Palbucks to set up a up-to-date publishing arm, and their first project as publisher is an untitled horror film from Surgent Studios, the struggling creators of Tales Of Kenzera: ZAU.
Interestingly, this doesn’t look like the “Project Uso” Surgent revealed last October, which founder Abubakar Salim described as both a reflection on the experience of fatherhood and “a cross between an RPG and a power fantasy fighting game.” According to Salim, the game is set in the same world as the studio’s debut Afrofuturistic platformer. Their up-to-date game for Pocketpair is not like that. Instead, it is intriguingly positioned as a game “about” the entertainment industry.
“Both Surgent and Pocketpair are well versed in taking risks,” Salim comments in the shared statements GamesIndustry.biz. “We noticed a pattern in the entertainment industry, and Pocketpair gave us the opportunity to create a horror movie about it.”
However, this does not mean that there will not be another match against Kenzera. “We are still in serious discussions about further projects set in the Tales of Kenzera universe, but this will be a standalone piece: a mile marker between where we came from and where we are going,” Salim added.
This is certainly a timely turn of events for Surgent. Although Tales Of Kenzera has had quite good reviews, it seems to have sold much worse than expected. Surgent fired a dozen employees last July, just three months after the layoffs, and then suspended its entire gaming division.
It’s also a timely turn of events for Pocketpair, which is currently being sued by Nintendo for patent infringement. If you’ve been living under a rock since last winter, the studio’s reputation for “poaching” has a lot in common with the Pokémon franchise, although Pocketpair seems at least sheltered from a separate charge of copyright theft.
Salim’s canned statements about Pocketpair’s “risk taking” ring true here, although I’m not sure they accurately describe the game’s design. Palworld isn’t as bad as monster-collecting base builders tend to be, but it won’t win any awards for imagination.
All of this makes me curious about the above “entertainment industry benchmark” that Surgent intends to target. Salim has been outspoken about racism in the gaming industry and community, so perhaps that’s where we’ll focus. Or maybe a game published by Pal will pit chubby, mustached lawyers accompanied by adorable electric pissing monsters that look nothing like Pikachu.
