"The beautiful thing about what Black Panther did was it essentially showed there can be heroes that look like me," says Abubakar Salim."The feeling I had when watching was I wish I had this when I was a kid, because it shows to me, as an actor, I don't have to be the best friend of the cop, or the buddy character. I can actually be a hero."If this game has that same effect to audiences and to players and developers, then great. We're doing a good thing.
The Bantu Tales are a series of myths passed down through the Bantu people of Africa, comprising numerous ethnic groups and several hundred Bantu languages. For Salim, these were his first introduction to stories - the equivalent to nursery rhymes - passed down from his father and grandfather, who was a nganga or spiritual healer. As such, basing the game on these stories is Salim sharing his own perspective.
"The vulnerability aspect and being honest and open about my grief and sharing that grief wasn't actually the hard part," he says."The hard part was conveying it in a way that felt fun and almost universal."Peters adds the whole development team could empathise with this core theme of Tales of Kenzera."It makes it very personal for people working on the game and knowing what it can mean to other people who are playing the game," he says.
"However, it provides you with the tools that are going to essentially aid you to get over it," he continues."You are going to feel sad, you're going to feel angry. Some days you might even forget about it. The tools are there, but you have to discover them as you go on this journey. And to me that's exactly what a Metroidvania is. You're thrown into a world you have no idea about, but the longer you spend time in it, you get used to the idea of it.
Having autonomy over that storytelling is also why Salim set up the studio."My experience within film and TV is that if you create a script and you give it to a studio, nine times out of ten it changes and becomes something completely different," he explains."I want to tell a genuine, authentic story and especially because it was so personal and so linked to my own journey of grief, I felt like I needed to take the risk.