Artist Ackeem Durrant and animator Griffin Warner on Tales of Kenzera: Zau [EN]

In between the chaos, unnecessary celebrity cameos and bombastic trailers, The Game Awards 2023 also included a welcome change of pace. The sincere speech of Abubakar Salim, and the announcement and trailer that followed, were the highlights of the night for me. The game in question? Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Salim, who led the project as Creative Director, spoke about this upcoming metroidvania with so much love that the game instantly took the top spot of my upcoming games I’m most looking forward to list.

In the meantime, four months have passed, the demo is live, and the release of Tales of Kenzera: Zau is close at hand. We spoke to Lead Artist Ackeem Durrant and Lead Animator Griffin Warner about the characters, art style and their personal takeaways.

Welcome, Ackeem and Griffin! It’s wonderful to have you, thanks for taking the time to chat with Pixel Vault. It’s been a few months since Tales of Kenzera: Zau was announced, but the game has of course been in the works for much longer. Did you work on it from the get go, or were you brought on board later in development?

I was brought on pretty early on in the project as part of that cool team that started stuff, but we were still looking for people at the time.

Yeah, it’s been a while. [For me] not quite the very beginning, but still in the prototype phase. It was before we went into full production. Three or four years ago, I’ve lost track… But it’s been a good time.

So, the game really takes inspiration from Bantu culture and tales. We haven’t seen a whole lot of representation of this culture within gaming. What was it like to merge Bantu tales with the Afrofuturistic style we see in the game?

It was a really cool challenge. With everything you do, you’re looking for an icon – a visual representation. So going back to source material that hasn’t really been tapped into in the same way other source material has, is just always really exciting. To take new inspirations, pull them out. When we’re talking about Afrofuture, we’re looking at modern architecture in various parts of Africa, or looking up music videos and other IPs that have come out. It’s a really nice challenge to wrap your head around and tackle with the team. Everyone’s just excited to create something that we feel is genuinely different and new.

Yeah, it’s not something you see very much of. When I joined the project, the art style was what drew me to it in the first place. Something that wasn’t really in movies and games today. Seeing that brought to life was just something I really wanted to be a part of.

Any other particular modern inspirations like the architecture and music you mentioned?

A lot of architects I’d love to shout out – I have them all in a document. For example, in Nigeria they have very cool contemporary designs. And because of the way houses are cooled there versus in the west, the form and functions follow different rules.

So you get different visuals automatically! And there’s much cool art of people tapping into this, where maybe it’s not popular culture yet, but it’s still cool art that poses a good design challenge. We’ve also read a few older books, from the 1980s, where [Afrofuturism] started. It’s informed by its own decisions and trying new things. It’s very inspiring.

In the game itself, there’s this dichotomy between the 2.5D of the platforming action and the cel shaded figures we see during dialogue. What was it like to work on that?

Some of that was born out of necessity. The style of gameplay didn’t work particularly well for seeing the characters and their personalities up close. But we’ve always been inspired by comic books as well, so that style really came to the forefront in the UI and dialogue boxes for characters we can see in detail. Ackeem’s team did a wonderful job with that. We couldn’t get the same level of detail in the [zoomed out] characters during gameplay, because of where the camera is. It’s quite far. So we’ve found a nice compromise where we mixed two styles that weren’t the same but worked well together.

Yeah, I can only echo that. Early on, we played with the 2D dialogue system and tried different styles. We were looking for something punchy that people could hold onto. We’ve been talking about the comic inspiration from the inception of the studio. We wanted to bring that heart into it, along with the expressions.

You have these really expressive characters from different ages and backgrounds, so it’s cool to see them have that dialogue and how they emote. The voice acting is another push for us, so [we went], “What’s the best bang for our buck?” That 2D dialogue system tied that together efficiently. We are a small studio, so we’ve had to figure out the best way to do it.

It also ties into the Afrofuture elements. The comic books being a bit more contemporary – the characters in the world would read them. Zau would be into comic books. It’s a mishmash of this old, historical, cultural story with modern media. We also have a digital comic book with the pre-order [of the game], that tells the story leading up to the game. The style worked perfectly for that.

Did your teams also work on that comic book?

Yes! Tumo [Mere] is our artist who worked on the comic. He’s already done comic book illustrations and covers [in the past] and so he really went to town. We sat down with narrative and our Creative Director Abu [Salim], and went, “What do we want to create here? What story do we want to tell?” And then we just left Tumo to his devices. It’s similar to the portraits as well – it’s his hand. You’ll see his style injected all over the game.

For the masks, we landed on the sun and the moon. It gives a nice balance.

Beeld: Zau met de twee maskers. Surgent Studios / Electronic Arts.

The masks are a very central gameplay element – they give young Zau his powers of the Sun and the Moon. How did you go about creating the masks and their special effects?

The designs came first. There are so many layers to the masks; they’re a tie between Zau and his Baba, so that’s the narrative side of the story. They are a metaphor for masking your feelings, and the abilities for each mask represent different emotions of loss and grief. So those were the initial driving factors. We initially had three playable masks, plus an extra version. But during playtesting, it proved a lot to juggle. Simplifying it to two made the gameplay more streamlined and the narrative more compelling.

It was a really tough cut. Thematically, it ended up making a lot of sense. We landed on the sun and the moon, we had that nice balance. With those two things, we could also distinguish the gameplay brilliantly. The sun and moon, the push and pull… On the design front, masks are an integral part of African art and culture, so we let those references inspire our design. And then we also ran with the blues and reds, blue being more ethereal and nebulous, whereas red is hard lines, fierce and melee-focused. We always play with the theme, so there’s a feeling connected to everything. But to the player, it’s also just meant to feel great when you hit those buttons!

The design of the masks also really ties into the characters from the Afrofuture – it’s [Zau’s] ‘vision’ of how the masks would look. They’re two sides of the same coin; like Ackeem mentioned, blue feels cold, distant and aloof, while red is ferocious. If you look closely, you can also see that the dreadlocks attached to it are bladed.

And then that’s tied together with the Dance of the Shaman. It’s supposed to be this balance of switching, juggling, interplay between these things when you’re fighting. And culturally speaking, dancing and movement is so important. So all those decisions tie into Bantu culture.

An interesting thing about the combat: the inspiration came from Dambe, a form of African boxing that originated in spear-and-shield fighting. The stance is very wide, with one arm for blocking and one for hitting. The bouts in Dambe matches are usually preceded by music, like percussion. That element of dance and music is felt throughout the whole game.

The music, then, also plays a central role in the game. Maybe you didn’t work on it directly, but were any choices informed by music you listened to during development, or did the game’s music retroactively change anything?

During working, I love listening to music. We had an internal playlist [for the team], that was a well-rounded approach to what we were doing. You might sit down and visualise whatever you’re hearing. It ties in so well, it helps everyone and has heavily inspired what we’ve been doing.

In the same way that the art has been set up, [consisting] of past and future through the Afrofuturism, the music is the same. The score is incredible, Nainita [Desai]’s done an amazing job on it. I want the record, and I want to play it all the time! It has techno and futuristic elements that bleed into the legacy music. So some very traditional, fantasy-like tracks, blending in with these futuristic elements.

We have that range of emotions on this journey of grief. When you listen to the audio, it takes you down there. With everything being so percussive due to the inspiration, you really get a sense of the feel. When it comes to rage for example, there’s a certain track. It’s one of my personal favourites because it hammers home the feeling. And then there’s the cultural aspect as well. The more traditional you go, the more raw it becomes.

It definitely mirrors the journey, even in the demo; we start off a little adventurous, and then you get a bit lost. The music is everywhere, it feels all over the place – like Zau’s feelings. Once you get back out into the highlands, the music picks up again. It follows the journey.

There’s a tendency to not show feelings and just soldier on. The game explores how it’s healthy to emote and process grief.

Beeld: Surgent Studios / Electronic Arts.

And that journey is one of processing grief, but Tales of Kenzera: Zau is also a coming-of-age story. How does the backdrop frame this story?

The story hits you straight away, and you go along with it. When it comes to both [legacy and future] eras helping that, it’s nice to have a slightly different skew on things, but ultimately it’s a human story of something everyone will eventually go through. Everyone’s interested in their past and what came before them, and we love exploring that in games and media.

[In Zau], we have this from a slightly different perspective. For me, it’s nice to see it from that frame of mind. When you look into Bantu cultures, you realise there are many different versions of the same stories. It’s nice to then open that up and see that across the continent, there are all these other ways of thinking about things as well.

I also think that, traditionally, as a young man who lost his father, Zau would be seen as the head of his household. There’s a tendency to not show these feelings and just soldier on. The game explores how it’s healthy to emote and process your grief. It’s something that’s not shown in stories a lot.

When we talk about this portion of the story, I must say I love the game being so colourful despite it being about grief in the first place. Other stories tend to get very emotional and dark when handling sadder storylines, so what was that process like?

That also comes from the inspirations we’ve taken! It’s a cultural representation to have grief be a certain thing, like wearing all black to the funeral. But around the world, it’s not that way everywhere. I’m Jamaican, and we have a night dedicated to the person before the funeral. It’s very much a happy occasion. It’s nice to show those customs and that variation. It’s a celebration of life, rather than the loss of the person. You definitely get that in the game as you go through the story. In the end stages, you’ll feel it well up even more! I won’t spoil too much, but it’s nice to be able to represent grief in this way.

Yeah, exactly! Different cultures, different ways. Everything in the backdrop that we drew inspiration from is super colourful and celebratory. So while the moment is sad, and Zau as a character is having a really tough time dealing with it, everything around him still reflects that celebration of life. It hopefully helps him come to terms with that.

It’s beautiful how you can use the game as a reflection of culture around death. I’m looking forward to experiencing the whole story! What are you most looking forward to regarding the release of the game? It’s pretty close now…

Yeah, too close!

Yeah, we’re still nailing those last minute bugs, but it plays so well. I’m happy to have seen it come together like this. On a personal level, I’m very much looking forward to seeing people speedrun it, and maybe break the game a little bit. The nature of speedrunning communities is that the people who really enjoy a game end up putting hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours into it. They know the game and story better than any other type of player. I’d love for people to get so involved in Tales of Kenzera that that’s what they would like to do.

Griff is our resident speedrunner, he breaks the game in many cool ways we’re looking to fix! For myself, like I said, I’m a music person. I love listening to a soundtrack when I’m going through something. And the narrative we’ve tied into this metroidvania, [that combination] is going to be different for people. I’m curious to see how players take that on.

I very much like having moments of gravity, and then having the music come in and you hear these endearing sequences between characters. And then you continue on in your adventure. So yeah, a combination of all of those things – I’m looking forward to seeing how the community receives that slight change in the formula.

I think if even just one person plays the game and finds meaning or belonging, or the sense that it just gets them, that’d be amazing. Just to reach a person like that. So hopefully, there are many people out there it resonates with!

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is planned to release for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on the 23rd of April. The game will also be available in the PlayStation Plus Catalogue on release day.