Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau, I thought people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but the Afrofuturistic story within a story, framing a mythological platformer about robust ways to deal with grief, certainly taught me not to underestimate human creativity. I really enjoyed a lot of things about Tales Of Kenzera, and I also found a lot of things that annoyed me – and the divide seems to be such that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which is probably not ideal for a platformer. But I still think it’s worth persevering.
You play as the titular Zau, a youthful shaman struggling with the recent death of his father, so his solution is to lend a hand Death, personified by an older man named Kalunga, defeat three powerful spirits who refuse to move on. If he succeeds, Kalunga will owe him a blessing, which he intends to operate to resurrect his father. What we have here is a very understandable video game story, with the three spirits acting as groundbreaking boss fights, like a giant thunder eagle or a wooden owl made of fear. These are striking designs.
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But Zau’s story was written for Zuberi and is read by him, his father, who has also just died. As you play, Zau learns about the natural rhythms of life and death, seeing the land suffer as spirits refuse to move on, and encounters other characters, such as a father pining for his son and a youthful girl whose mother is avoiding death. In this way, Zau and Zuberi gradually learn to accept their grief. It’s like Gris, but less jarring for me. In fact, framing the story as a mythological fable really enhances it, because it’s exactly the kind of practical moral you’d find in a story passed down from your ancestors.
Zau learned shamanic abilities from his father, the most vital of which are the Sun and Moon masks, which you can switch between with the touch of a button (a controller is recommended, here) and which give you separate animations – a detail I loved – as well as separate abilities. Moon’s powers are more ranged and allow for crowd control in combat, while Sun gives you dual spears and melee combos, and both have huge special attacks that deal a lot of damage when needed. As you progress, you get more stacked abilities to lend a hand with movement. You get jumps and double jumps, and of course a dash, but later on your Moon form lets you freeze water, so you can jump down waterfalls or run up ramps, and your Sun gets a long-range lance that activates switches. Add to the list a more powerful dash, a type of lasso jump, the ability to glide, and the ability to rebuild or destroy certain structures.
You can level up your Zau to gain additional abilities (like solar attack combos that set enemies on fire, which is a good ability), but you can also complete Shaman Trials – extremely complex platforming stages – to earn Tokens, which grant passive buffs, or Shrines and other sources of extra power to level up faster. Image Source: Rock Paper/EA Shotgun
That’s a lot, and if you put this game down for more than, to be generous, 72 hours, you’ll probably forget all the controls (and the game doesn’t have a diagram of them in the menus, so good luck figuring them out again). But there are moments when you get caught up in handsome flow patterns as you traverse, where you’re jumping and sliding over warm air, dodging crystal spikes at the womb of a mosquito, leaping over multiple collapsing platforms, and dashing to safety without breaking a sweat. At the same time, there are sections that rely on timing your jump into a lava explosion you can’t see, or where entering a jump at a slightly wrong angle will cause you to run into an environmental hazard. Respawning is fairly instantaneous, but the unskippable chase sequence that you finish by memorizing from repeated failures isn’t nearly as fun when your next failure comes just as quickly.
The world you explore is more of a pure delight. The world map is deceptively immense, with a few quick travel points – although I found them too sporadic to be useful, and despite the hidden collectibles and challenges, Tales Of Kenzera doesn’t really function as a Metroidvania – and it has strikingly different areas. You travel through deep mines, barren plains and lush jungles, each housing the remains of a village. They’re all handsome, with loads of detail and depth, despite Tales Of Kenzera being a side-scrolling game, and it feels lived-in and also slightly magical, although you do end up doing a bit of back-and-forth tracking on your way to and from quest markers.
But while the world is full of beauty, it’s also full of monsters. Your main enemies are the souls of former warriors who aren’t fans of Zau roaming around bringing death to their doorsteps. There are ranged ghosts, melee ones, mini-boss tanks, mischievous little tricksters who explode when defeated, and others that look like insects and drain your health. They’re aided by floating snakes that spit acid and petite flying lizards that bombard you. Sometimes the bastards will appear shielded from Moon or Sun damage, to encourage you to change your attack style. It’s an impressive amount of variety.
But I think there’s a bit too much variety in practice to be entirely fun. The rhythm becomes obvious: you’ll have a complex platforming section, then some running, then you’ll enter an area with a perceptible amount of platforms for no apparent reason – at which point the walls blocking the entrance and exit will snap into place. Then you have to fight several increasingly complex waves of enemies in an enclosed space, like opening a can of sardines and discovering that all the fish bastards are out to get you. Instead of being a fun, hectic exercise in using all your acquired skills, it becomes a chore where you end up doing the same routine no matter which enemy you’re facing.
It doesn’t lend a hand that there are a few compact but annoying bugs to contend with as well. While I was playing, Zau would sometimes get stuck in a crouching position, and other times he would constantly jump, which is no good for anyone. His ranged Moon attack also wouldn’t automatically shoot straight up instead of towards the enemy. They don’t break the game, but they are frustrating in combat – especially in the middle of a fight, and Very especially in the boss fight where there are three huge ghosts at stake – one of them is just a giant platforming level.
Tales Of Kenzera shows great precision in character and world design, in writing, in voice acting, even in individual animations. But there is a lack of precision in some areas of combat, especially in platforming, which is probably what matters most in a platformer. I’m not sure that’s the case! Despite my frustrations – I have evidence in the form of furious messages to a friend about how many times I tried one sequence where you have to sprint down waterfalls to a timed gate, and another where a jump appears-drop in time to land on a platform floating on a fountain of lava – I’d like to see what other stories could be told in Kenzer.
This review was prepared based on the version of the game provided by the developers.
