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Master the twisty levels of Tales of Kenzera: Zau with our beginner’s guide
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Dave Tach
Players take on the role of Zau, the grieving Shaman of Amandla. Zau is on a quest to save his Baba, a reverential honorific for father in several African languages.
In our Tales of Kenzera: Zau beginner’s guide, we’ll help you get better with tips for combat, traversal, the best skills to buy early, and the subtle nuances that took us hours to learn in developer Surgent Studios’ strong debut.
Embrace the genre
Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a Metroidvania game, which means that it follows certain rules of the subgenre set forth by its predecessors, many of which are available in the Epic Games Store. Namely, it's a large, interconnected world that you explore using an escalating library of moves and abilities.
Though there’s a huge map, you’ll be locked to certain geographical limits until you find a way out to the next. Your job is to explore the map (more on that soon) and find your way forward. Tales of Kenzera: Zau executes on this formula perfectly, and the quicker you embrace this exploratory mindset, the sooner you’ll find what you're looking for—as well as some surprises off the beaten path. Both are important.
Get the best early-game skills
In Tales of Kenzera: Zau, you can switch between the Mask of the Moon and the Mask of the Sun. You begin with the ranged combat of the former and obtain the melee-focused alternate mask shortly thereafter.
Collecting Ulogi energy from around the world—often hidden in out-of-the-way places that you’ll only find if you explore—will earn you Shaman Points, which you spend to earn skills.
The first two skills available on each skill tree are worth upgrading as soon as you can afford them.
- Perfect Recharge (Mask of the Moon) gives you bonus damage if you press the reload button at the right time while your Light Charges refresh.
- Perfect Strike (Mask of the Sun) gives you bonus damage if you press attack just as Zau’s attack reaches its conclusion.
Every skill is useful, but consider your decisions carefully. When you add a skill, spend the next few minutes incorporating it into your fighting style. There’s danger in adding too many and forgetting what you have. You should also consider pairing and practicing your available skills when you encounter tougher enemies for the first time. Nothing's worse than having to re-learn the basics.
Use special attacks to perfect combat
Tales of Kenzera: Zau doesn’t usually require significant combat finesse, but when it does, you’ll be glad that you practiced some optional moves before you need them the most.
One of the most powerful early-game moves takes more skill and concentration than just whaling on enemies with the attack button, which you can mostly get away with in your first few hours. You can use the heavy attack button to launch an opponent into the air. Then you can keep attacking and juggling your enemies up there, which is a more safe approach than sticking to the ground.
That’s a good move to have in and of itself, but it’s not necessarily intuitive; it takes practice. There’s no better place to deploy that move than on a crowded battlefield, but there’s also no worse place to practice it, especially for the first time. Try launching and juggling in easy battles, so that when you really need it, you won’t tie your fingers in knots trying to pull it off.
Use Trinkets to upgrade special attacks
Special moves get even better when you pair them with Trinkets, which are bonuses granted by finding special items hidden throughout the game world. You can only equip them at a Workbench, which are scattered around the game map.
The Lifted Spirit Trinket, which you can get early in the game, makes launching and juggling even more effective. As its description says, “juggling enemies in combat increases the amount of Spirit gained.” Equip it for an added incentive to master this fundamental part of Zau's combat.
Divide and conquer
Combat in Tales of Kenzera: Zau is mostly straightforward. You either hit your enemies directly or fire at them from a distance, and you usually only face a couple at a time. Until you don’t, that is.
Sometimes, the game throws half-a-dozen tough shielded enemies at you, and you’ll be reloading at a nearby checkpoint again and again. The secret is to focus down and fight enemies one at a time. Taking on too many is a recipe for quick and unsatisfying death.
If and when you find yourself dead and frustrated, try a new strategy. Fight the enemy closest to you. Take cover from the jerks throwing projectiles your way. Stand your ground, and make your enemies come to you.
Fighting is healing
Fighting is the way you earn most of your health in Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Every time you hit an enemy, you fill up Zau’s Spirit meter in the bottom left corner. It’s split into two sections. When you fill them up, you can heal with the press of a button.
It's easy to forget to heal, to the point where the game occasionally reminds you with a pop-up notification. Pay attention to that, and heal when you can. It's pretty easy to die in Tales of Kenzera: Zau, so this'll keep you alive that much longer.
Check your map constantly
Half of the challenge in a Metroidvania game like Tales of Kenzera: Zau is finding your way—both to the place you need to go and to the secrets hidden just off the critical path. And there’s no better way to make sure you’re finding everything than learning to love your map. If you check it constantly, even to a nearly absurd degree, you’ll be frequently rewarded.
Did you drop down a chasm and find that you could go left or right? Check your map. What about if you wall-jump up to a new area, and it seems you can only head left? Check your map. It doesn’t matter where you are, what you’re doing or even how many hours you’ve played—the right move will always be to check your map, lest you miss a hidden outcropping that you wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. These crevices and crannies will ultimately reward you with lore or experience that you can cash in for skill points.
Your map also shows the number of special items and locations in your current area, including Trinkets, Echoes, Reflections, and Spirit Rituals. Use that as a checklist as you explore.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau won’t tell you exactly where to go to find some of the most interesting stuff, but you can work it out with typical video game logic. If you’re generally heading up and to the right, keep an eye out of things down and to your left. They’re usually two-minute tangents that lead to significant rewards.
Persevere
There’s a surprising early-game combat difficulty spike that'll test you, and you’ll need to use your head, skills and Trinkets to surpass it. Button-mashing isn’t going to cut it.
If you’re having trouble, head to your skills section and either buy new skills or remind yourself of the ones you aren't using.
For example, using a combination of Perfect Strike (Mask of the Sun), which requires timing, and Extended Form (Mask of the Sun)—which adds an additional attack to the light-attack combo—can instantly turn difficult enemies into manageable targets.
Follow your curiosity, but don't be afraid to leave
In a Metroidvania game like Tales of Kenzera: Zau, many things are hidden. And sometimes more hidden things are nestled inside the secret areas. (It’s hidden things all the way down.)
Always look for anything that catches your eye, because the game will reward your curiosity. Sometimes that will happen immediately, but sometimes, you might not be able to capitalize on your discovery. Some areas are discoverable but inaccessible with the skills that you have at the moment. Remember those for later.
Come back
It’s always difficult to balance what you might be able to do with several minutes of concentrated effort and precise button-pressing with the limits of your patience, no matter how good you are with a controller. You might even need an ability you don't have yet. A fast-travel point is a good indication that you’ll want to come back to an area later. If you just can’t seem to conquer a challenge right now, take a screenshot of your map to remind you to return after you've made progress elsewhere.
You can play Tales of Kenzera: Zau now on the Epic Game Store.