Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review – Bladedancing
Grief is a messy, convoluted emotion to navigate. There’s rarely a straightforward path to get through it; oftentimes it can feel like you’re walking in circles around what you’re looking for, or banging your head against the same mental roadblock again and again. In many ways, the experience of playing through a metroidvania mimics the feeling of working through grief–the genre is built on a similar path of progression, where the necessary tools to move forward are earned step-by-step, and a protagonist’s evolving moveset makes it easier to overcome its challenges and navigate a seemingly inescapable world. Tales of Kenzera: Zau leans into that parallel, creating a powerful and moving message within the context of a stellar action-adventure game.
Tales of Kenzera sees you play as Zau, the fictional hero of a story that a father wrote for his son just prior to the father’s death. Zau, similarly, is working through the grief of a lost father. Unable to get past the pain, he calls upon the god of death, Kalunga, and offers him a deal: If Zau successfully brings the three great spirits that have resisted Kalunga to the land of the dead, then Kalunga will bring Zau’s father back to life. The god agrees and the duo set out, Zau relying on the shaman masks and training he inherited from his father to overcome the dangers of nearby lands. As a metroidvania, the game features moments where Zau must backtrack and use newly unlocked abilities (freezing water, for example, or a grappling hook used to swing over large pits), which Kalunga helps Zau master to navigate the distinct biomes of the map.
Inspired by Bantu mythology, Tales of Kenzera’s map is a beautiful maze that pulls from African culture to characterize and flavor the interconnected areas. The myths of the Bantu color the undertones to the story, equating Zau’s battle against larger-than-life monsters with a spiritual journey–you don’t question how or why Zau’s efforts to beat up a mother helps convince her to come to terms with leaving her daughter behind. Within Tales of Kenzera’s lore, these actions make sense, reframing the physical space of the world into something more akin to a mental palace. That reframing contributes to the explosive battles, too, with the sound design and orchestral score of the soundtrack transforming each fight into a frenetic dance of emotion and spiritual energy where flame-infused shockwaves are stand-ins for violent outbursts and well-timed dodges equate to a carefully considered counterargument.
Each locale feels distinct from the others, both in color scheme and challenges. The sickly green swamps and massive trees of the forest to the west test Zau’s acrobatic abilities, for instance, while the volcanic heat and dry oranges and reds of the desert to the north features plenty of endurance-focused challenges that force Zau to withstand large groups of enemies or solve multi-step environmental puzzles. The structure of these areas interweave with the story, enriching the narrative in rewarding ways. The aforementioned desert sees Zau come to understand that grief isn’t something that can be simply overcome–it continues to wash over you in waves, much like the waves of enemies he has to contend with. And sometimes grief can waylay you by showing up in a recognizable but slightly different form, much in the same way the numerous environmental puzzles in the desert region are larger, more convoluted versions of what Zau had to solve in previous areas. We as the player overcome these obstacles alongside Zau working through his pain–he grows as we do, strengthening our connection to his journey.
The mentor/mentee relationship between Kalunga and Zau is front and center throughout, with Kalunga regularly appearing to Zau to provide insight and guidance to the lands’ history and culture, as well as to help Zau process his bubbling emotions. Actors Abubakar Salim and Tristan D. Lalla lend incredible gravitas to their respective performances–Salim seamlessly dips back and forth between hot-headed arrogance and barely contained sorrow in voicing the grieving Zau, while Lalla lends a power and authority to Kalunga’s fatherly tone. The two characters’ growth over the course of the game is surprisingly wholesome despite the dour plotline, making it easy to invest into Zau’s development as a shaman.
The other characters in Tales of Kenzera aren’t as fleshed out, only appearing a handful of times and always being relegated to narrative devices that tell Zau what macguffin he has to chase after next. The voice acting for these characters is still superb, but the supporting cast–both the humans and the great spirits–is let down by its minimal presence in the story.
The framing device for Zau’s story–that this is a story left behind for a grieving boy in the real world–also feels disruptive. Near the end of Zau’s adventure, you’re abruptly yanked back into the real-world to be reminded of this framing device, which felt incredibly jarring. Zau’s story of working through loss was working as a healing experience for me and the game felt the need to stop to explain its own premise, as if it were directly telling me that media can help people overcome grief. And, yes, I know. I was experiencing that sensation. The game broke its own illusion to specifically remind me that it was an illusion, and that lessened the impact of the final moments of Zau’s journey. It didn’t ruin the ending, but it certainly disrupted the narrative flow leading into Tales of Kenzera’s conclusion.
Tales of Kenzera’s combat mechanics, however, are fantastic all the way through. Zau can instantly swap between wearing the mask of the sun and the mask of the moon, each granting him different mechanics. The sun mask focuses on melee while the moon mask prioritizes long-range attacks, but the cadence of each bleeds into the other, rewarding you for chaining together the movements of both masks with devastating pirouettes. One of my favorite combos is slamming down into a foe with the summoned spears of the sun mask, switching to the moon mask to blast them away, dashing toward them, and switching back to the sun to hit them with a four-hit melee combo that launches them skyward, giving me a chance to switch back to the moon and juggle them in the air with ranged attacks.
Zau is powerful, but his enemies are numerous, transforming combat into a puzzle where situational awareness trumps power. As such, the game encourages you to dance between targets, overcoming overwhelming odds by being nimble. The movements of both Zau and enemies are sharp and the game makes good use of color–blue and orange for Zau and green and purple for enemies–to keep the fast-paced fights readable. Rarely does it feel like a loss is due to poor luck–the visual clutter of particle effects can become a problem if you’re ever standing still long enough for enemies to surround you, but that feels more like a consequence of a mistake on the player’s part rather than a detriment of the game itself.
You don’t get many upgrades to Zau’s combat throughout the adventure. There is a skill tree, but unlocks are geared toward improving existing mechanics–charging the projectiles of the moon mask to unleash a more substantial attack, for instance, or increasing the sun mask’s combo chain from three to four strikes. Instead, most of the combat’s evolution is based on the enemies that Zau has to fight. You initially only face warriors armed with simple melee attacks or slow-moving projectiles, but you quickly have to take on enemies who shield themselves or fast ball-like foes who willingly explode to take you down with them. And none of them compare to the dastardly fireflies who sap your health to heal other enemies.
Tales of Kenzera’s easy opening belies its surprising challenge, especially its tough latter half. There is a difficulty slider that allows you to adjust how much Zau can endure before dying and how much damage he has to deal in order for an enemy to perish, so there is some control in how tough combat is (you can adjust the slider at any time as well, so you won’t be punished for accidentally picking a setting too tough or easy at the start). Instant-kill hazards are not affected by difficulty, so there’s no way to make traversal challenges easier, but the game is generous with the checkpoints (save for a few exceptions, which we’ll get into in a bit), preventing any seemingly insurmountable walls from becoming frustratingly so.
Zau’s efforts to pull the great spirits into the realm of the dead culminate in boss battles, and the combat is at its best during these. Most of them see Zau clash with monstrously large beings who are grieving in their own right. Their emotional state informs not only how they fight but what Zau must do in order to get through to them and defeat them. A great spirit overcome with rage angrily lashes out at everything around him, for example, creating huge walls that push out at Zau and threaten to force him off the ledge of the arena unless you use his recently acquired ability to blast through obstacles. This also causes the spirit’s own attack to explode and briefly stun him–his anger literally blowing up in his face makes it harder for him to fight you.
The drama and tension of these encounters are amplified by powerful musical scores. I had to step away from Tales of Kenzera and compose myself after battling the great spirit who is overcome with fear, as the escalating rhythm of the score and tension of the string instruments playing through the boss fight made an already stressful fight a more unnerving experience than I expected. The true strength of these fights is how they are emotionally resonant as well as mechanically satisfying–they’re the moments when the game is firing on all cylinders, using combat and traversal mechanics, enemy and sound design, and music to emulate one of the more pivotal steps in one boy’s struggle with grief. They’re all powerful spectacles that I’m still marveling over.
On the other hand, Tales of Kenzera has a few chase sequences that veer toward irritating. These cinematic platforming sections are a common inclusion in the metroidvania genre, a staple that goes back to the original Metroid and Samus’ scramble to escape Zebes after killing Mother Brain. In most cases, however, these sequences either afford you a chance to recover from your mistakes (like Metroid) or incorporate numerous autosave checkpoints throughout the section (like Ori and the Will of the Wisps or Hollow Knight). Tales of Kenzera does neither, meaning a mistake usually results in a death that sends you back to the beginning of the sequence, forcing you to redo it over and over. There’s a particularly tough sequence near the end of the game where Zau is being chased by something that will kill him instantly, which requires hopping between narrow platforms and over lava that will also kill him instantly to escape. Maybe I’m just getting old, but it took me nearly a dozen attempts to get through that part of the game and by try number seven, I was really frustrated that I had to start over each time.
Thematically, you could say that these sequences emulate working through the fear and anger parts of grief, as both sections deal with the great spirits that embody those emotions, as well as the idea that false starts are an inevitable part of the healing process. And in the same way that there are no save points in working through fear or anger, there are no checkpoints to these platforming sections. That comparison loses value when the rest of the game is hypervigilant about autosaving your progress, however. It’s in these moments that there is a conflict between the fun you expect from a metroidvania and the potential desire to convey an emotional state. Tales of Kenzera cleverly blends the two through most of its elements (especially its world and boss design), but falters when it comes to these traversal challenges–the sheer frustration of these platforming do-overs results more in a lack of fun than it summons a sensation of anger or fear. Thankfully, these moments are few and far between, meaning they’re only a small irritating blip to what’s otherwise a fun game.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s strength lies in its powerful narrative, digging into how one navigates the sadness, rage, and terror that accompanies the worst moments of grief. Its tale has its hiccups, but Zau’s adventure of coming to terms with loss resonates through the beating heart of the thumping musical score, standout vocal performances, and dance-like battles that feel straight out of Bantu myth. Loss is a universal human emotion, making Zau’s attempts to grapple with grief uncomfortably relatable. But there’s catharsis to be earned in working through that discomfort alongside Zau, and a touching story to enjoy along the way.
Indika Review – The Devil Makes Three
Indika is a hard game to define. It looks like a horror game, but it’s not scary–at least not in the conventional sense. It plays like a third-person puzzle game, but most of the puzzles don’t require much thought. What Indika definitely is, however, is a fascinating psychological examination of faith and doubt that’s supported by remarkable visuals and mature writing. Occasionally, its ambitions get a little unwieldy, but developer Odd Meter’s decision to take on these heady themes and confidently explore nearly all of them is an impressive feat.
You play as Indika, a nun tormented by a demonic voice in her head, as she travels across a nightmarish interpretation of 19th-century Russia to deliver a letter. Most of the game consists of traveling from point A to B, solving a few puzzles, and watching cutscenes, but within these tasks are moments of introspection and self-discovery. Along the way, she meets an escaped convict named Ilya who claims God speaks to him. What ensues is a nuanced exploration of faith and doubt, love and hate, and pleasure and suffering. Both characters believe in the same God; rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith. This specificity allows Odd Meter to delve into different shades of Christianity and examine how the same texts, rituals, and prayers can be bent to ascertain different meanings.
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These frequent philosophical exchanges could have easily come off as overwrought or self-indulgent, but all these musings are in service of the characters and their development over the course of the story. For example, Indika tells Ilya she joined the convent of her own volition, but because her decision was fueled by emotions and experiences that were out of her control, can she really say she became a nun through her own free will? Ilya challenges this notion, and declares that free will is how we rise above our biological dispositions. Reflective conversations like these are key to Indika’s character as she grapples with her faith and attempts to make sense of her life.
It helps that Indika is portrayed by the fantastic Isabella Inchbald, and Louis Boyer embodies Ilya with equal confidence. There’s a raw authenticity and conviction to their performances that bring both characters to life. You can hear the fear and doubt in Indika’s voice and the desperation and hope in Ilya’s. Meanwhile, Silas Carson’s portrayal of the devil is humorous, sadistic, and cordial in his demeanor as he deftly narrates the action. While the writing and acting are great, they are occasionally undermined by awkward animations. Sometimes the action will look a bit too robotic, or dialogue won’t quite sync up with a character’s mouth. These are minor issues overall, but sometimes it was just enough to take me out of a scene.
Nevertheless, Indika is one of the most visually arresting games I’ve ever played. Developer Odd Meter uses framing, color, and lighting to achieve a look and feel that is rarely seen in games. Wide-angle shots often distort Indika’s facial features and warp the background to give the experience a voyeuristic feel. The framing, meanwhile, consistently impresses as it accentuates the action and world. In one section, after being chased by a wolf the size of a truck, the beast takes a tumble and wedges itself in a water wheel. What follows is a subdued conversation between Indika, Ilya, and the devil in her head about whether or not a beast can be sinful, as the camera tracks the dead wolf being dragged underwater by the water wheel. It’s a macabre scene given the context alone, but the stylistic choices allow the tone to meet the moment more effectively than a standard shot/reverse shot conversation would.
Rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith.
These choices aren’t just for show, either. They are bold and sometimes jarring creative decisions that reflect Indika’s inner turmoil as she travels across Russia. There are sections where the world–at least from Indika’s perspective–is split in two. When this happens, an oppressive and discordant synth kicks in as hellish red light soaks the scene. Through prayer, Indika can reforge the world around her and suppress the chaos. To progress, you–and by extension, Indika–must rip apart and merge her world by alternating between Indika’s cacophonous hell and her quiet reality. Although rare, these moments give weight and meaning to Indika’s gameplay as they leverage Indika’s themes of faith and doubt.
The same can’t always be said for the game’s puzzles, though. Most are simple and mundane: Move some boxes around, manipulate a crane, and strategically align lifts and elevators. Puzzles like these make sense in the early hours, as the game familiarizes you with Indika and her menial life. But as her world expands, these bland puzzles start to feel tonally and narratively incongruous as Indika struggles with her faith, especially when some puzzles literally let you tear the world apart, while others have you shove a box around.
With these criticisms in mind, it may seem like this story would be better told as a film or book. What’s fascinating, though, is that Indika clearly understands the medium it inhabits. It brazenly leverages video game tropes to elevate its themes. You’ll earn points for acts of faith, such as performing the sign of the cross at crucial moments, lighting altars, and collecting religious texts. You can then use these points to unlock skills that increase the amount of points Indika can earn. The thing is, these points do nothing. The loading screens even tell you they are useless. They have no discernible value and are simply a shallow way to measure Indika’s faith.
Yet, I didn’t want to miss any of it. I lit every altar, collected every text, and mashed the sign-of-the-cross button (yes, there’s a button) at every opportunity. It’s almost silly to gamify this stuff, but putting Indika through the motions as she builds up an arbitrary “faith” score while she’s actively questioning her faith is brilliant. I grew up religious. I went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic school. There was a distinct period in my life when I was questioning my beliefs, yet I still held on to some of those ingrained rituals. There was a quiet guilt that I couldn’t expunge: a feeling that could only be alleviated by going through the motions. In a way, it feels like Indika is using the language of video games and my understanding of them to reinforce her feelings of faith and doubt. Indika is about the internal struggle of a nun who isn’t entirely sure what she believes anymore, but seeing her cling to tradition–through my actions–is powerful.
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Although Indika does an excellent job exploring its themes of faith and doubt, there’s one subject the game doesn’t handle with the care it requires. In one particular scene near the end of the game, it touches on some uncomfortable territory that–depending on your interpretation of the story and its themes–might feel unnecessary. Up until that point, the evil that exists in the world feels intangible and theoretical. Indika and Ilya talk of hell and demons, but it always feels distant, almost as if God is protecting Indika on her journey. That is, until the final moments of the game, which allude to a sexual assault. The reasoning behind this scene is to test Indika’s faith, but as it stands, the scene in question feels like a means to an end rather than something Odd Meter wanted to properly explore.
Given the Catholic Church’s long and pockmarked history of sexual abuse, it makes sense that it plays such a critical role in Indika, but it’s not examined with the care that is necessary. The scene and what follows are clearly intended to elicit a lot of different emotions and speculation, but when those knee-jerk reactions stem from something so traumatic, it feels unearned. It’s almost as if the game wants you to move on as quickly as it does, which stands out as unusual in a game that is otherwise very thorough in its interrogation of sensitive subject matter. To be clear, Odd Meter doesn’t botch this scene entirely. Atrocity is often the most difficult test of faith, and they had the good sense not to show the assault itself. However, once the scene ends, it feels like Indika is barrelling towards its conclusion, while I was still trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’m often frustrated when developers lean on religious iconography but fail to explore faith in a meaningful way. Some of the greatest works of art exist because of religion, either as an exploration of it, a testament to it, or a denouncement of it. Human history is inextricably tied to religious faith. Yet, outside of a few exceptions, games tend to avoid commenting on religion without obfuscating it behind fake dogmas and fantastical gods. Indika’s direct examination of Christianity allows it to better explore the gray areas of religion and faith that are often lost when the recognizable specifics are swapped with allegorical fiction. And while the execution occasionally falters, its willingness to grapple with these difficult themes, and the conclusions it draws, make Indika a fascinating journey.
Endless Ocean: Luminous Review – Hope You Really Like Fish
Between the advent of cozy games, farm sims, rhythm games, narrative adventures, and more, we’re in something of a golden age of non-violent games. If you want to take a break from shooting and punching and instead just relax with some chill vibes, you have myriad options available to you. Endless Ocean: Luminous is an aquatic take, letting you freely explore the ocean with no danger or violence to speak of whatsoever. It sometimes straddles the line between game and edutainment in ways that could be engaging, but achingly slow progression and a lack of realism leave it feeling washed up.
Scientists say only 5% of the ocean has been explored. The name Endless Ocean, and the unexplored nature of the ocean itself, suggests an incredible degree of possibility and adventure. In practice, though, there actually isn’t all that much to do in Endless Ocean: Luminous. You can take part in a Solo Dive, in which you explore a seemingly randomized map; a Shared Dive, which is just a Solo Dive with friends exploring the same map together online using Nintendo’s Switch Online service (complete with its usual shortcomings); and Story Mode, which gives you short missions consisting of objectives accompanied by a little dialogue.
With this dearth of options, its approach to progression gating further compounds the lack of variety. After the first handful of story missions, the others are locked behind scanning ocean creatures in Shared or Solo dives. To scan you just hold the L button in the direction of sea life until the meter fills, which then gives a detailed look at the creatures in your scan. But the progress gates are set so absurdly high that the novelty wears off quickly. One of the earliest gates is set at 500 scans, which felt high but reasonable. The next was at 1,000, so I had to get another 500. That rubbed me the wrong way. By the time I reached the next gate, set at 2,000–meaning I needed another 1,000 scans–the chill vibes were gone. I was just annoyed. It’s hard to overstate how frustrating it is to spend almost an hour roaming around a randomized map scanning fish, only to exit the map and find I’ve only gained another 200 pips toward my next story goal. Plus, judging by the creature log, there are just under 600 species of sea life total in the game. Why would you need to scan 2,000 times to see a mid-game story mission?
Not that there’s much story to tell. You’re a new diver accompanied by an AI companion, exploring phenomena of glowing fish, and sometimes you’re accompanied by a brash (but actually cowardly) fellow diver named Daniel. The story missions are short and largely uneventful. Sometimes they end so quickly that I was genuinely surprised. Other times, they feel like a glorified tutorial, which makes it that much stranger to gate it behind so much free-roaming playtime. At least one of them is just a cutscene with no actual diving gameplay whatsoever. Occasionally, the story mode will deliver something unexpected and fun, like a massive or fantastical species of fish, but those moments are few and far between. There is a meta-story involving an ancient relic with 99 slots, which you fill in by discovering certain artifacts scattered randomly throughout dives or by fulfilling achievement objectives, but it feels more like a busywork checklist than a real story-driver.
And because the scanning requirements are so excessive, small inconveniences feel more impactful than they should. It’s easy to pick up a fish you’ve already scanned while trying to register a new one. Every time you scan any fish, it zooms in on them for a moment, forcing you to hit B to back out of the detailed view. If you scan multiple species at once, they’re grouped in a listing together, which is meant to be a convenience feature–but new species aren’t prioritized in the list, so you need to scroll down to find any with a “???” designation to mark them as discovered. If you don’t, the unidentified fish remains unidentified. If you scan a large school of the same fish, they’ll all be listed separately. In Solo Dives, the map is slowly charted in segments as you explore, but keeping an eye on the map to make sure I was filling in the little squares meant I could fail to notice a fish swimming by, or I could miss a depth change that may reward me for diving deeper.
Your dives get you experience points to level up, which increases your dive capacity, which you can use to tag sea creatures to swim alongside you. At first, these only include the smallest of sea creatures, but as you build capacity, you can swim with larger ones that are used to solve riddles. A stone tablet might challenge you to come back with a particular type of turtle or a fish that “sails as it swims.” Even then, though, the solutions are too rigid. When I returned to the tablet with a “Sailfish,” nothing happened, presumably because it was not the specific solution the riddle had in mind.
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In addition to story progress and dive capacity, leveling up also opens new but severely limited tiers of customization options. Those include palette swaps for your diver or individual SCUBA suit parts, different stickers to apply to your profile, and emotes. There isn’t even a different helmet or mouthpiece, just the default in different colors.
It feels as if the goal was to create a virtual, interactive aquatic museum, and the variety of sea life does support this nicely. It actually is exciting the first time you see a new species of sea turtle or an extinct megalodon shark, even if you know that it can’t hurt you. But the mechanical underpinnings get in the way of its potential as a museum too. For example, every species of fish has a blurb with some interesting marine facts, complete with a reading of it from your AI companion. This could be a cool and educational feature, but when you’re pressed to perform thousands of scans, it’s hard to bother listening to every blurb. There also isn’t an indicator for when you’ve already heard a blurb, and since you’ll see species repeated a lot, it’s nearly impossible to remember which ones you have or haven’t heard–even if you can tell dozens of roughly similar-looking fish apart, which I can’t.
In part due to its non-violent nature, Endless Ocean does not present the depths very realistically, even to my layman’s eyes. Your oxygen is unlimited, and you don’t need to worry about temperature or depth. You’ll never freeze or get decompression sickness or drown. More aggressive species will never attack you. Species of fish seem to be scattered more or less randomly around the map, which leads to oddities like finding large-scale creatures in shallow waters, or discovering deep-sea dwellers in middle-depths instead of the deepest, almost pitch-black parts of the ocean where they actually reside. And while this is likely a limitation of the Switch hardware, the fish, coral, and ocean floor themselves aren’t rendered photorealistically enough to instill a sense of awe and majesty.
It seems Endless Ocean wants you to spend most of your time diving with friends to pass the time. The Shared Dives option is the first one on the menu, after all, and it is easier to fulfill the simple procedural objectives when you’re paired with other divers. But like most Switch games, you join friendly games using a digital code, and there isn’t built-in voice chat, so you can’t really treat it like an underwater virtual lobby. Even if you could, though, scanning fish with your friends would not sustain the group fun for anyone but the most devoted of sea-life enthusiasts.
Endless Ocean: Luminous could have been a realistic SCUBA sim with all the treacherous hazards that real underwater divers need to consider, a relaxing chill-vibes game that’s mostly about finding fish with your friends, or a story-driven game centered around discovering awesome and even extinct underwater beasts. It has pieces of all of those, but it doesn’t commit to any of them. Instead, it takes the enormity and glory of earth’s largest and most mysterious region and turns exploring it into a dull, repetitive chore.
