The premise of Tales of Kenzera Zau is simple at its core, but wrapped in a more complicated story: Zuberi is a young man who has just lost his father to illness, reading the last story his father ever wrote.
In said story, a young shaman named Zau has ALSO just lost his father, and has dived into the underworld to bargain his father’s life back from Kalunga, the god of death. To have his wish fulfilled, you’re challenged to track down three Great Spirits who have cheated death, and help them to pass on.
In gameplay terms, this essentially means three major bosses to track down and defeat. The game’s 2.5D world very much feels like a classic Metroidvania journey; exploring, hitting barriers and then looping back when you get the cool new move or item that unlocks the way forward. Fans of the genre will likely recognise a lot in common with January’s Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, right down to the shattered-crystal effect in the game’s map screen.
The comparison to Lost Crown was one I found myself making more and more in my time with Tales of Kenzera, much as I didn’t want to hold them against each other. Both employ a protagonist of colour, always welcome in a medium still awash with white bros. They also share a predominant colour scheme, genre and release window to boot, which makes comparison inevitable.
Thanks to the larger studio and history of games, Ubisoft’s The Lost Crown does come out of the match-up a lot better, boasting a level of polish and refinement in gameplay that a new studio would find hard to match on their first outing.
Where Tales of Kenzera sets itself apart however, is its approach to combat. Zau has access to two powerful masks, both inherited from his father – the masks of the Moon and the Sun. The Mask of the Moon acts like a ranged weapon, allowing you to fire projectiles in any direction, while the Mask of the Sun is a powerful melee weapon that lets Zau take enemies head-on. As the game progresses, some enemies will become weak to one particular mask or resistant to the other, encouraging you to constantly flip between them in the heat of battle.
It’s a mechanic reminiscent of classics like Ikaruga, which similarly added colour-matched enemies to create even more challenge in an already-packed fight. Even with this great mechanic, it felt as though it was dropped in unprompted to create a “learn by doing” moment – whether this was intentional or just due to a gap in tutorialising is unclear.
As much as I’m invested in the game’s narrative and emotion-filled voice acting, I did find myself a little disappointed on the gameplay side. Movement in Tales of Kenzera just feels slightly sluggish across the board; for me, the absence of a dash move was sorely felt, especially given how spaced-out the world’s fast travel points were.
Your dash move jarringly loses all momentum when used in the air, and often made me misjudge jumps based on my natural assumption for how an air dash should work. The jump itself also felt a little sluggish or heavy, with the double-jump offering almost no height whatsoever to boot.
While these may seem very specific and technical complaints, it’s essentially just giving reason to the feeling of “movement feels weird”. Add this to a world absolutely OBSESSED with one-hit KO spikes from the jump, and you have a game that can be frustrating to play.
Combat itself can also be savage, with enemies taking you out without a second thought if you’re not putting in your best effort. Thankfully the checkpointing system is FAIRLY generous, but I did still have a few moments of painful backtracking in my time playing.
In addition, I did encounter some bugs with Kenzera – at more than one point where a checkpoint save put me midway through a combat segment, the game loaded in without any of the interface. When the game is so willing to decimate you at any moment in a fight, having no clue how you’re doing was certainly not helpful… and had me stuck in that one fight for a bit too long, just hoping I could win blind.
Another odd effect would happen any time I came back from the pause/map screens, with half the inputs not responding unless I released every button on my PS5 controller first – so there’s certainly no continuing mid-jump in this game.
While I did enjoy my time with Tales of Kenzera Zau, it does truly feel like the game was a victim of timing. Had Prince of Persia The Lost Crown not released a few months ago (or the games had released in the opposite order) things would definitely be different. There are a few missteps here that by comparison put this title at a disadvantage, and you hate to see it.
A pre-launch patch did drop just as this review was being written, so hopefully at least some of this will be addressed by the time players go hands-on. For now though, Tales of Kenzera Zau is a game you should definitely play for the story it tells, even if the gameplay doesn’t quite meet the same standard.
Tales of Kenzera Zau heads to Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, and Switch today, 23 April.
Tales of Kenzera Zau was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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Tales of Kenzera Zau23 April 2024PC PS4 PS5 Switch Xbox One Xbox Series S & X
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