Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a beautiful, devastating meditation on loss
Loss is inevitable, and yet, knowing that makes it no less difficult. Grief is all but guaranteed to touch your life — to touch my life. And, most certainly, it already has. That assuredness — that we’ll all be touched by death — is part of the reason so much art is dedicated to interrogating those feelings. For so long, video games have been one medium that, for all its death, dying, and multiple lives, had not quite unpacked the emotion of grief. There was little reason to: When you die in a video game, you always come back to life. The danger of death amounts to nothing but a few hearts on a screen, a number. Oftentimes, it’s encouraged. The more kills you get, the better. Death is not something to mourn there, but a celebration. But this isn’t a universal truth across all games. More and more video games are exploring what it means to lose — no longer just a level, but the more tangible, life-altering loss. It’s games like Spiritfarer, a “cozy management game about dying,” which is about life after death; What Remains of Edith Finch, about the stories that are left behind; or A Mortician’s Tale, which has you going hands-on with death. You’ll find grief in games, too, that are not explicitly about loss; like I said, it’s inevitable.
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Surgent Studios’ Tales of Kenzera: Zau is the latest game about processing grief; in fact, that’s at the very core of the game. Led by House of the Dragon actor Abubakar Salim, the development team at Surgent Studios has not shied away from the topic. When he announced the game at The Game Awards in 2023, Salim said Tal
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