Tales of Kenzera: Zau review – good grief

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a great-looking metroidvania / Electronic Arts

Going into Tales of Kenzera: Zau, I was a bit concerned that the topic of grief would be a bit of a bummer. Nobody likes to lose a loved one, and being reminded of the inevitability of death – both your own and that of others – for 10 hours while playing through an admittedly fantastic metroidvania seemed like it would stir up some untoward feelings. Good news, though: that didn’t happen! In fact, I think it helped me be a little bit more comfortable with the concept of death as a whole. 

So yeah, let’s start with talking about grief. Tales of Kenzera: Zau is about those left behind when somebody dies. It’s a heavy topic, addressed through a combination of thick metaphor and straightforward storytelling. Zau is suffering through the loss of his baba – his dad – and makes a deal with the god of death to bring him back. Reclaim three souls who got away, and the god of death will bring back baba. 

It’s not just his dearly departed dad that Zau is grieving for. He’s a shaman in a mystical world that’s dying. Perhaps it’s already dead. But as a shaman his job is to heal, and there’s little left to heal except himself. Being abandoned by his father was a lot to deal with already, but healing a whole world? That’s a lot of pressure to put on somebody in grief. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau / EA

But like many in grief, Zau throws himself into this one task, hyperfocused on fixing everything in the hopes of fixing himself. Not everybody gets the chance to bring back a dead loved one, but Zau does, and he’s doing everything he can to do it, consequences be damned. It’s the first stage of grief, denial, mixed with a little bit of anger and bargaining, and it’s genuinely harrowing to see unfold. It may be a mystical world filled with monsters and spirits, but at its core we’re seeing a personal, human story take place, and it’s hard not to feel Zau’s pain in every spoken line. 

Throughout Tales of Kenzera, we see Zau help a young girl accept the death of her mother, blissfully unaware that he’s refusing to do the same. We see him focus on saving a childhood friend from a terminal illness, unable to accept that his inability to help with his dad’s own sickness wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t have fixed it even if he tried. He makes every single mistake, as you do when you’re grieving, trying to avoid the inevitable. I won’t spoil how that goes, but anyone who’s lost a loved one knows where this path leads. 

With the amount of emotion on display here, and the amount of storytelling packed into such a short game, you’d think that the actual gameplay would take a backseat, but that’s not the case. Tales of Kenzera starts with a handful of great mechanics, and builds upon them almost effortlessly. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau / EA

You start with a dash – both on the ground and the air – a double jump, a wall jump, and two different combat styles: ranged attacks through the Mask of the Moon, and close-range melee with the Mask of the Sun. Most other games in the genre would have you build up these skills piece-by-piece, over the course of the game, but Kenzera drops them all in your lap and tells you to explore. 

The result is that growth in combat and movement doesn’t necessarily come from the unlocking of new abilities, but by familiarity with the tools available to you. That’s not to say there aren’t upgrades, because there definitely are plenty of them, but they’re added layers to an already robust set of skills. 

As a result, the combat feels deeply punishing at first. I found myself getting overwhelmed frequently, I thought that the game was being unfair. It wasn’t, though, I just needed to learn the limitations of the tools available to me, and how best to effectively use them. I needed to learn how to balance ranged and close-up attacks, when to switch between the two masks, when to dodge, when to go all out. It’s about personal growth, and it’s executed almost flawlessly. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau / EA

When those upgrades and abilities were unlocked later, I learned to fold them into how I was already playing. One of the earliest abilities unlocked is an icy stone that you can toss at enemies to make them freeze in place. It’s good for a breather, but it also plays perfectly into the Moon’s abilities: ranged attacks are limited, and you only have a certain amount of shots before they need to reload for a couple of seconds, but once you have that icy stone, you can fire off a volley, freeze your enemy, and then wait for your shots to reload. Or you can freeze your enemy, dash in, switch to the Sun, and beat them up at close range. 

That flow of combat, the dance between fire and ice, night and day, Sun and Moon, it’s kind of beautiful. There’s a rhythm to combat, and learning that rhythm is both deeply satisfying and extraordinarily fun. Unlocking new abilities is never about changing things up, it’s about adding more steps into that dance, and when most of your combat abilities find their way into environmental puzzling too, it’s genuinely exciting to find new ways to enhance your skills. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau / EA

As with any good metroidvania, the world of Kenzera is packed with nooks and crannies to explore, but honestly, I found that exploration as a whole wasn’t really the key draw. Objective markers are clearly displayed on the map, and you can figure out how to get to them relatively easily with a bit of planning and frequent map-checking. If you want to earn yourself some perks here and there, you can do a little exploring and complete a few optional challenges, but otherwise, you’re going from point A to point B, and that’s honestly fine. Not every metroidvania needs to focus on every aspect of the genre, some are fine just honing in on one or two. 

There were times, though, when I felt like combat was getting a little bit repetitive, especially in the latter half of the game. There are plenty of enemy types, and the game tries its hardest to mix things up with different environmental hazards and enemy combinations, but once you’ve settled into a groove with combat, a lot of encounters just have you going through the motions. It’s still satisfying, but after a certain point, combat became a barrier to the story, rather than a selling point. If the game had been drawn out for much longer, I’d probably have given up, so its relatively short length is certainly a blessing in disguise. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau / EA

Even when things start to get repetitive, though, there’s no denying the beauty of the world of Kenzera. It’s a gorgeous game overflowing with color and character, with each distinct area feeling like a whole new world to explore while still all feeling cohesive and connected. Every one of the aforementioned nooks and crannies is lush and beautiful, and if there was anything that made me want to spend more time with the game, it was the art design. Backed up with a lovely – but largely unobtrusive – score, some top-tier voice acting, and some janky but charming animations, Tales of Kenzera is an experience that is delightful to look at. 

Tales of Kenzera: Zau breaks a lot of conventions of the metroidvania genre, focusing more on story than exploration and outfitting you with most of your abilities from the get-go. It’s a short experience that tries, both subtly and more obtusely, to weave a tale of loss, grief, and acceptance. In both regards, the result is a resounding success, with only a few small nitpicks to be found throughout. In a crowded metroidvania landscape, Tales of Kenzera: Zau stands out as one of the best in recent years. 

Score: 9/10 

Version tested: PS5