One of the highlights of last year’s The Game Awards was the unveiling of Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a new game from actor Abubakar Salim’s Surgent Studios. The game is a collaboration between Salim and his team at Surgent along with a long list of partners, including Electronic Arts under its EA Originals label and the members of the popular Critical Role series of online RPG streaming shows and The Legend of Vox Machina.
Salim, a British actor of Kenyan descent, played Bayek in 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins and really came onto my radar as the android, Father, in the excellent sci-fi show Raised By Wolves on HBO. He founded Surgent Studios in 2019 with Tales of Kenzera: Zau its debut release. The video game comes out this April after several years in development, though Salim tells me the idea has been germinating for closer to a decade.
When his father died, Salim says, “I remember going through this moment of—like a typical artist—how the hell am I going to process this? And how do I communicate this in a way that feels true to me and true to him?”
In fact, it was while playing Ori and the Blind Forest on his Nintendo Switch while working on (the tragically cancelled) Raised By Wolves in South Africa that Salim had his revelation. “It was that moment where I was like ‘This is how I want to tell this experience.”
Ori and the Blind Forest, Salim tells me, is a game about “feeling lost and trying to find your way back, right? And to a degree, I think that just really sort of inspired me and made me realize ‘Ah, okay, I want to build this really cool world, and I want to tell this story, but I want to tell it in a way that kind of resonates both the kind of games that me and my dad used to play and kind of tell the stories that he used to tell me and also kind of add my own flavor to it.”
Even the music in Tales Of Kenzera: Zau reflects this cross-cultural and cross-generational approach to the game’s design. “My kind of music tastes are going to be very different to my dad’s tastes,” he says, “And I remember in the car listening to all these kind of traditional sort of Kenyan music all the time on repeat.” Salim’s own tastes are more modern. Composer Nainita Desai’s score reflects this, blending—and even clashing—more traditional African beats and melodies with digital and more modern flavors. Salim likens it to Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse’s soundtrack. The music in that film was so good, he says, “Because it captures this essence of being a superhero, but still a kid of where he’s from. And that kind of marriage, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it just clicks.”
There is a great deal of contrast when it comes to Tales Of Kenzera: Zau. Or if not exactly contrast, then at least duality. It’s a story grappling with grief and loss, but as a game it’s also meant to be fun and entertaining. The game is a Metroidvania similar to Ori and the Blind Forest, a mixture of platforming, exploration and frenetic combat. Even the combat itself is filled with this yin-yang approach, as Zau makes use of two powerful masks—the Sun and Moon masks—each with its own special suite of powers.
The masks themselves are important from a storytelling standpoint. “When you’re suffering, when you’re going on this journey of grief, or as you along in your day, you feel like you’re wearing a mask, right?” Salim tells me. “You’re trying to just get by. You’re not going to go to the supermarket, buy a banana, and tell someone your life story. I mean, some people do, but there’s always a mask there.”
The mask is also an important part of a lot of African cultures where it’s used “to transport you and almost become like a conduit of a God.” The sun and the moon, meanwhile, “both represent in a lot of African cultures, life and death” and the balance between the two. In the game the sun mask is used for fiery, powerful melee attacks, while the moon mask is colder and used for ranged combat.
The mask of the sun, Salim says, is “that life of vibrancy. It’s kind of chaotic. An attack on the senses; this chaotic ballet in a way. But then when you look at the mask of the moon, it’s kind of logical. It’s crowd control. It’s very precise, almost a bit surgical, like death is kind of the end, you know what I mean?”
Much of the game’s inspiration can be traced back to Salim’s grappling with loss and grief, and much of what gave him and his team inspiration is also pulled from his father’s stories and from other African folklore. But Salim’s experience filming Raised by Wolves in South Africa also helped give shape to the game.
“We were filming in the Cape Town Film Studios and just across from us the townships and just the disparity is nuts,” he tells me. “And I just remember this raw feeling being out there. There was something with that in mind that sort of influenced the production of the show.” This was especially true when talking with locals, where Salim met traditional healers and shamans—Sangomas—and listened to their stories, many of which also influenced the direction of Tales of Kenzera’s development.
“Death was so common out there,” he says. “You know, I think we had quite a few people die, not on set, but while we were filming. Crew members we knew. The Sangoma that I actually spoke to, trying to learn more of the history and culture of the Zulu shamanism, he passed away. And it’s almost surrounding you, but it was seen differently, right? And even though we were all still grieving and going on this journey, it was just a different perspective. And this all influenced and kind of helped build this world. It made me look at my relationship with my father’s death in a very different light.”
While Tales Of Kenzera: Zau lands on April 25th, Salim hopes to expand the world of Kenzera beyond this game—and perhaps beyond games entirely. This is just a leaping off point. “The aim for me,” he says, “taking inspiration from what Ridley [Scott] does and how he builds these universes and spaces. And also stuff that I love like Lord of the Rings or Discworld. I really wanted to build a world or a universe that we can really explore in different ways and shapes and forms and also across different mediums, be it through games, film, comics, TV.”
Zao, he jokes, “is our entry point, our Iron Man.”
Another possible contrast to add to our list: A Metroidvania game steeped in African folklore dealing with themes of grief and the online roleplaying game streams of Critical Role from Matt Mercer, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Sam Riegel and the rest of that talented bunch (Salim had a guest part in the second season of The Legend Of Vox Machina, which Critical Role produced).
“I’ve kind of watched how they’ve built this sort of incredible sort of story universe and company, but simply driven by the enjoyment of just wanting to have good fun with friends and that’s been inspiring,” Salim says. “That’s like—you’re winning. You’re creating these really cool worlds that people really love and enjoy but you’re all just friends and just doing it right and getting paid for it.”
Salim says the Critical Role team mostly served as mentors, taking Salim and his fledgling studio of around thirty talented developers under their wing, helping build the foundations of the company and its interaction with the community it hopes to grow around Tales Of Kenzera: Zau.
“It’s the beginning of something really, really cool,” Salim says.
After playing the demo on Steam, I feel pretty certain that he’s right. You can play the demo, too, and add Tales Of Kenzera to your wishlist, right here. The full game comes out on April 25th on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
P.S. I interviewed Critical Role about Season 2 of The Legend Of Vox Machina and you can read (and watch) that interview here. My hope is to get Abubakar Salim back for a second interview about Raised By Wolves and the movement to get that phenomenal (and very weird) show picked up by another streamer. You can follow me on Twitter @erikkain and Abubakar Salim @Abzybabzy.