The creators of “beautifully designed yet imprecise platforming adventure” Tales Of Kenzera: Zau are working on an Afrofuturist gothic-horror RPG with isometric visuals and a body-sharing dual character premise. Currently known as Project Uso – the Swahili word for ‘face’, ‘appearance’ or ‘surface’ – it’ll take place in the same world as Kenzera, and will take inspiration from Surgent Studio founder Abubakar Salim’s experiences of parenthood. Providing, that is, the developers can find enough money to make it.
“As soon as my daughter was born I knew what I wanted to cook,” Salim (who is otherwise known as the voice of Bayek from Assassin’s Creed: Origins) told Eurogamer‘s Ed Nightingale yesterday. “This idea stems from this question of ‘who am I?’ Zau was a question of ‘who am I without a parent?’ This is essentially looking at ‘who am I now as a parent?’ I really wanted to make this very dark and visceral, a cross between an RPG and a beat ’em up power fantasy.”
In Project Uso, you play a kind of android vampire called the Solost, who exists to hold the souls of the deceased, but who is also the vessel for Eshu, a trickster god from Banshu mythology. You’ll get access to the powers of both the android and its divine passenger, but they’ll sometimes disagree. When this happens, you’ll have to carry out a Crucible Check – a dice roll battle, seemingly – to decide who gets control of the Solost’s body. According to Eurogamer‘s report, the overall experience is redolent of Disco Elysium, the Batman Arkham games and Resident Evil.
I’ve never played Tales Of Kenzera, but the shift away from platforming and into the more writing-led RPG genre makes sense, based on Alice B’s (RPS in peace) review. “Tales Of Kenzera shows great precision in its character and world design, in the writing, in the voice acting, even down to individual animations,” she wrote. “But it lacks precision in some areas of the combat, in particular the platforming, which arguably is the bit that matters more in a platformer.” Still, Alice B went on, “I’d like to see what other tales can be told in Kenzera”.
It sounds like Salim has plenty more to tell. “Where else can we pluck from and play that could be really exciting within this space?” he comments in the Eurogamer story. “I designed it that way as a whole.”
If there’s room for the setting to grow, however, there isn’t necessarily the means. Surgent are pretty hard up at the minute. Kenzera doesn’t appear to have sold well, prompting Surgent to make layoffs in July. With Project Uso still early on in development, the company’s games division is “on hiatus” while they try to rustle up some funding. It’s an especially bitter predicament given the racism Surgent Studios had to face down from some quarters over Kenzera’s protagonist and setting.
I hope Surgent can pull things together. Characters who share bodies are always entertaining, and I’d love to play more RPGs inspired by Afrofuturism. I’m a bit less convinced by Salim making a game about fatherhood, simply because this is an emotive gambit I associate with triple-A dudes who no longer wish to be associated with their previous gory action games, but that’s mostly just me being cynical. If the concept art above grabs you, you might enjoy We Are The Caretakers.