HomeReviewsTales of Kenzera: ZAU
Tales Of Kenzera: Zau review: a beautifully designed yet imprecise platforming adventureIt’s not time to make a change
It’s not time to make a change
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
You play as the titular Zau, a young shaman struggling with the recent death of his father, so his solution is to help death, personified as an older man called Kalunga, with defeating three powerful spirits who refuse to move on. If he can do this, Kalunga will owe him a boon, which he intends to use to resurrect his father. Here we have a very comprehensible video game story, where the three spirits in question function as landmark boss battles against, e.g., a big lightning eagle or a wood owl made of fear. They’re striking designs.
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Extra curricularYou can level up Zau to have extra abilities (like Sun combo attacks setting enemies on fire, which is a good one), but you can also complete shaman trials - extra hard bits of platforming - for tokens that give you passive buffs, or shrines or other sources of extra power to level up quicker.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
The world you explore is more of an unalloyed delight. The world map is deceptively large, with a few fast travel points - although I found these to be too rare to be useful, and despite hidden collectibles and challenges, Tales Of Kenzera doesn’t really function as aMetroidvaniaanyway - and has strikingly different areas. You travel through deep mines, arid plains, and lush jungles, each housing the remains of a village. They’re all beautiful, with tons of detail and depth even though Tales Of Kenzera is a side-scrolling game, and it feels lived in as well as slightly magical, though you end up tracking back and forth a bit on the journey to and from your quest markers.
But while the world is full of beauty, it’s also full of monsters. Your main enemies are the lingering spirits of former warriors, who aren’t fans of Zau wandering around bringing death to their front door. There are ranged attack spirits, melee, mini-boss tanks, mischievous little tricksters who explode on defeat, and others who look like insects and syphon your health. Backing them up are floating snakes that spit acid and tiny flying lizards that divebomb you. Sometimes the bastards will show up shielded to Moon or Sun damage, the better to encourage you to switch up your attack style. It’s an impressive amount of variety.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
But it is, I think, a bit too much variety in practise to be entirely fun. The rhythm becomes apparent: you’ll have a tough plaforming section, then a bit of a run, and then you’ll enter an area with a conspicuous amount of platforms for no apparent reason - at which point walls covering the entrance and exit slam into place. You then have to fight several increasingly difficult waves of enemies in an enclosed space, like opening a tin of sardines and finding out all the fishy bastards want to kneecap you. Rather than becoming a fun, frantic exercise in using all the skills you’ve learned, it becomes a chore where you end up doing the same rote things no matter which enemy you’re facing anyway.
Tales Of Kenzera shows great precision in its character and world design, in the writing, in the voice acting, even down to individual animations. But it lacks precision in some areas of the combat, in particular the platforming, which arguably is the bit that matters more in a platformer. For me, I’m not sure it does! Despite my frustrations - I have evidence in the form of furious texts to a friend about how many times I attempted one sequence where you have to sprint up waterfalls to a timed gate, and another that features a jump-dashin time to land on a platform floating on a lava fountain - I’d like to see what other tales can be told in Kenzera.
