The Tales Of Kenzera devs are making a Gothic horror RPG beat 'em up where two characters fight over one body

rockpapershotgun.com:

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