The Steam Next Fest is now underway and that means we've got an awful lot of game demos to plow through in a very short amount of time. One early standout I've run is a metroidvania called Tales of Kenzara: Zau, a story about a shaman in the land of Kenzara attempting to reclaim his father's spirit. Tales of Kenzara: Zau was first revealed at the 2023 Game Awards: it's the debut project from a new studio headed up by Assassin's Creed Origins voice actor Abubakar Salim.
Gameplay in Tales of Kenzara: Zau is familiar: Running, jumping, and sliding across a multilevel 2.5D landscape, with pauses to do battle with various sorts of fantastical creatures and, of course, the occasional boss fight. It's fast, smooth, and accessible even for non-metroidheads: Zau wields an arsenal of upgradeable ranged and melee combat powers but a "relaxed" gameplay mode keeps fights from becoming too overwhelming, and while it recommends a gamepad I found the mouse and keyboard controls perfectly fine, aside from some aiming wonkiness with ranged attacks.
