Tales Of Kenzera: Zau

This year’s 378,992nd metroidvania

Sometimes a game has one critical flaw that stops it being an easy recommendation, such as dodgy platforming physics or the publisher accidentally filling the box with angry wasps. At other times you get a game that suffers from a thousand cuts, lots of minor irritations doing a really good job of obscuring the undeniable quality of what you’re playing. Tales Of Kenzera is one of the latter. We’re happy to recommend it, but if you ask us for an opinion after one of its bloody chase sequences, we’ll laugh bitterly in your face while writing a ‘1’ in that box in the bottom-right corner.

It starts well, with the kind of appealing graphics you get when EA is signing the cheques. The game is from Abubakar Salim, the voice actor who played Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins, aka the best part of Origins. The game’s told in the form of a storybook left to a boy by his late father; it’s the tale of Zau, going on a metroidvania journey to try to defy death itself and get his pop back. You can predict how well that’s likely to go, but the plot’s got a few nice twists, with strong writing, and the voice acting – as you’d expect – is outstanding.

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