Can Tales of Kenzara: Zau unlock a new world of video game stories?

“Every story begins at the end of another.”

These are the phrases that greet gamers once they boot up Abubakar Salim’s debut video game – Tales of Kenzera: Zau.

It’s becoming as a result of the British actor, seen in TV sequence Raised by Wolves and shortly to look in House of the Dragon, is chatting with BBC Newsbeat simply days earlier than its huge launch.

This is the ultimate chapter of Tales of Kenzera’s four-year improvement cycle – a chapter that begins final December, in Los Angeles.

Abu, as he likes to be recognized, is standing on-stage at The Game Awards, addressing a crowd of 4,000 individuals within the Peacock Theater. An viewers of tens of millions is watching on-line across the world.

Unveiling Tales of Kenzera, he launches into an emotional speech explaining how the game is impressed by the loss of life of his dad Ali 10 years in the past.

Like Abu, the game’s title character Zau, a younger shaman, has misplaced his father.

Unable to just accept it, he summons the god of loss of life and goes on a quest to deliver his dad again to life.

“Truly, at its core, it’s about a young boy who’s grieving,” Abu tells BBC Newsbeat.

His heartfelt reveal strikes a chord with many, and the clip of The Game Awards second goes viral.

People seen genuinely impressed by the game’s trailer, too. Its vibrant graphics, stirring orchestral rating and setting immediate many so as to add it to their wishlists.

“The reception has been wild. It’s been brilliant, and fantastic,” says Abu, who believes the “universal” theme of grief helps his pitch to resonate with players.

But for some players there’s one other ingredient, additionally influenced by Ali and Abu’s Kenyan heritage, that will get them excited concerning the game.

It attracts closely on myths and legends advised by the Bantu peoples – a whole bunch of completely different teams who stay round Africa.

These tales are sometimes handed down, word-of-mouth type, from technology to technology, one thing Abu skilled first-hand.

“It was really inspired by the stories that my father would tell me as a kid,” he says.

“My grandfather was an Nganga, which is like a conventional non secular healer.

“And so my father would share these actually cool worlds and concepts.

“And because the game is about that journey of grief, that kind of connection between me and my dad, it had to exist in the space.”

But a high-profile video game with a black most important character is a uncommon factor. And one that attracts closely on African mythology is much more uncommon.

So for a lot of players seeing Abu on stage stirs up one other set of emotions.

“It was amazing to see him up there,” says Annabel Ashalley-Anthony. “We don’t get to see that very often.”

Annabel – the founder of Melanin Gamers, which advocates for extra inclusivity within the trade – admits she was already a fan of Abu because of his work as most important character Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

But the sight of a black creator at The Game Awards – also known as “the Oscars of the industry” – resonated together with her.

“For him to debut there was so important, visibly seeing ourselves represented in such a nice way,” she says.

“I was like ‘this is something that I must play’.”

When Abu debuted the game, greater than a few individuals made comparisons between Tales of Kenzera and a sure record-breaking film.

Annabelle agrees the parallels are there.

“It’s definitely the Black Panther of gaming,” she says.

Surgent Studios, the event firm Abu set as much as make the game, has acknowledged the affect of the Marvel hit – each have parts of Afro-futurism, the aesthetic that mixes science-fiction and African tradition, and the game’s soundtrack options the identical choir heard within the film.

And when Abu revealed the game, he wore a vibrant scarf by Nigerian artist Ikiré Jones, whose designs appeared in Black Panther.

Annabel’s brother, Alan, who additionally runs Melanin Gamers, remembers the “cultural movement” that constructed up behind the movie and thinks that is “opened the floodgates” for video games like Zau to return about.

“When it comes to these kinds of projects that come on to the big stage, and blow everybody’s shutters wide open, it’s like ‘oh my gosh, there’s a massive potential there, let’s capitalise’,” he says.

“Loads of individuals, their first intuition can be Egyptian mythology, and so they suppose that is the one mythology that the African continent has to supply.

“But there may be a actually huge, untapped market on the subject of African mythology as a complete.”

Abu mentioned it was vital to him to “honour and respect” Bantu culture as seen in Tales of Kenzera, and “additionally have fun it, since you do not actually essentially see a lot of it”.

And, for Abu, the tip of Zau’s improvement story may very well be the beginning of one other.

He’s hoping to show Tales of Kenzera into a full-blown franchise, with movie, TV and comedian spin-offs.

“Even although you are constructing this actually cool world, not everybody’s going to be taking part in the game,” he says.

“If I can get my mum to, for instance, watch the TV present, I can then no less than speak to her concerning the game and discover the connections there. And I fairly like that.

“And also it’s a great way of inspiring other writers and other creatives to tell stories within that universe or even create their own universe.”