Games Are For Everyone: Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is Making Great Games More Accessible For All
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a diverse game that reflects the philosophy that games are for everyone. To reflect this in a concrete and active manner, creative director Abubakar Salim and Surgent Studios have lowered the barrier to experience the journey of ZAU by reducing the game’s price across platforms and regions while gracefully addressing targeted harassment on social media.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU / Electronic Arts
Video games are no longer a simple form of entertainment. Over the years, the medium has evolved into a fully-fledged narrative vehicle for sharing experiences, exploring perspectives, and navigating complex emotions. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a game that checks all three of these boxes while paradoxically refusing to sit quietly in a box. Developed by Surgent Studios, a transmedia studio founded and led by Abubakar Salim (Napoleon, House of the Dragon, Assassin’s Creed Origins), Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is an immersive game filled with rich mythology, satisfying and fast-paced gameplay, and a gripping story that deals with grief, acceptance, and unburdening.
The game is a huge step in Black and African representation in video games. Months before Surgent Studios released Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, the trailer’s premiere at the 2023 Game Awards garnered heaps of praise and anticipation from fans watching at home who saw themselves represented through the rich visuals, setting, and main character. The studio indeed prides itself in centering stories from diverse perspectives, which is a sight for sore eyes in the video game (and more broadly, the entertainment) industry, but some unfortunately choose to see representation and accessibility as mutually exclusive.
Along with the overwhelmingly positive reception to Tales of Kenzera: ZAU across reviews, both Salim’s and Surgent Studios’ social media pages have been targets of harassment veiled as criticism by bad actors who claim that the very representation that Surgent Studios incorporated in the game constitutes a form of gatekeeping from those who cannot relate to the story, setting, and character of ZAU.
Salim remained firm yet admirably open-minded in a video message posted on his X/Twitter page on May 31st where he addressed the constant harassment and reiterated the philosophy behind his creation.
“But at the same time, we are being faced with constant targeted harassment from people who see diversity as a threat, from people who look across the vast landscape of modern media and decide that anything that doesn’t speak to them or centers around them is unnecessary and inauthentic,” Salim said. “If there are people who aren’t like you in a game, I want you to know that that game is still for you. [...] These games are an opportunity to experience something different, something new. You just need to be open to it.”
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU / Electronic Arts
Salim referenced the price point for ZAU at release - the price of a pizza - as a way to lower the barrier to entry for this game, and announced that he was beginning the process of setting the game’s price even lower, to less than 15$ USD. The sale rolled out on Nintendo Switch on that same day, and Salim and the team are working to expand the discount to all platforms and regions throughout the month of June.
The release price was even surprisingly low given the quality of the game, and Salim revealed in an X/Twitter post that his desire to make ZAU as accessible as possible stemmed from the very relatable experience of only being able to purchase one game per year growing up due to the sheer cost of gaming as a hobby (a cost that continues to rise in recent years) - an experience that many of us gamers have likely shared at one point.
“Games are for everyone,” he reiterated many times throughout the video, and he could not have put this better; this philosophy resonates strongly with each and every one of us who has ever felt anything while playing a video game.
The familiarity and inexorability of such concepts as grief, fear, healing and acceptance transcend skin color, race, and gender. But neither should we simply “look past” diverse representations and pretend that they are inconsequential. Diversity does not take away from accessibility - instead, it enhances it by giving us a chance to access and experience perspectives that we never would have encountered otherwise, or even allowing us to experience pride and joy at seeing ourselves represented.
Games are for everyone, and Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a game that embodies this ideal both inside and out, and it is an inspiration to see a team so committed to creating rich, diverse, and accessible experiences through video games.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is available on Xbox, Playstation, PC, and Nintendo Switch.