Tales of Kenzera: ZAU Creator Says It’s Time for AAA Studios to Move Away From Safe Bets

ign.com:

The 15-person team behind Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was recently put on notice, following struggles to find funding for their next project. But Surgent Studios isn’t shutting down, its staff aren’t gone forever, and it’s not asleep at the wheel, according to its founder, Abubakar Salim.

They are, he says, “literally raring” to go the second money comes in, like a “cocked gun.”

“We still have so much more to say and so much more to build on,” Salim tells IGN. “And the audiences that we've already started to build as well, and the players and the people who want to champion us, they want to hear more…We are ready. We're so ready. It is just about taking that leap of faith with us.”

So what’s the leap of faith? It’s called Project Uso, and it’s a single-player, isometric, Afro-gothic action RPG. You play as a vampiric android containing the spirit of Eshu, the Yoruba god of chaos. As Salim explains, the idea is to explore the idea of two minds in one body through the mechanics of tabletop RPGs. But rather than rolling against a dungeon master, in Project Uso, the player sometimes must roll against themselves.

Project Uso is about the concept of identity, with Uso meaning “face” in Swahili. It’s inspired by Salim’s exploration of his own dual nature in the wake of his daughter’s birth. While ZAU was about who he is without a parent, Salim says that Uso is about asking who he is as a parent.

“As a parent, I always used to find myself being like, I love my daughter, cleaning her dirty nappy. I also want to go see my mates to the cinema, go outside with my mates or whatever. You know what I mean? There's a battle of freedoms here. And there's that sense of, do I do this or do I do that? Or even when I'm talking to my daughter and I'm making choices, how do I make sure that she listens to me? Am I strict or am I soft? You are having this battle within you.”

Salim is candid that he’s relatively new to game development. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was the first game he’s made, having come