Surgent Studios Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a Metroidvania-style platformer with a moving story about grief. Out April 23 on Switch, PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X.
Loss is inevitable, and yet, knowing that makes it no less difficult. Grief is all but guaranteed to touch your life — to touch my life. And, most certainly, it already has. That assuredness — that we’ll all be touched by death — is part of the reason so much art is dedicated to interrogating those feelings. For so long, video games have been one medium that, for all its death, dying, and multiple lives, had not quite unpacked the emotion of grief. There was little reason to: When you die in a video game, you always come back to life. The danger of death amounts to nothing but a few hearts on a screen, a number. Oftentimes, it’s encouraged. The more kills you get, the better. Death is not something to mourn there, but a celebration. But this isn’t a universal truth across all games. More and more video games are exploring what it means to lose — no longer just a level, but the more tangible, life-altering loss. It’s games like Spiritfarer, a “cozy management game about dying,” which is about life after death; What Remains of Edith Finch, about the stories that are left behind; or A Mortician’s Tale, which has you going hands-on with death. You’ll find grief in games, too, that are not explicitly about loss; like I said, it’s inevitable.
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Surgent Studios’ Tales of Kenzera: Zau is the latest game about processing grief; in fact, that’s at the very core of the game. Led by House of the Dragon actor Abubakar Salim, the development team at Surgent Studios has not shied away from the topic. When he announced the game at The Game Awards in 2023, Salim said Tales of Kenzera: Zau was a way for him to process his grief in a manner that felt familiar to him, as someone who grew up playing and loving video games. The game is a tribute to his father, who died of cancer in 2013.
Set in a colorful, Afrofuturist world, Tales of Kenzera: Zau begins with a boy grieving the recent death of his father. His father had been sick for a long time, his death anticipated but no less devastating. The boy is not ready to say goodbye, so instead he picks up a book that his father was writing. Inside this book is where the majority of Tales of Kenzera: Zau is set, in a world that mirrors the boy’s own. Grieving the death of his father, a young shaman named Zau makes a deal with Kalunga, the god of death, to bring his father back.
