Before “House of the Dragon”, actor Abubakar Salim debuts his first game, “Tales of Kenzera”

There's a new video game out this week and it hails from a new addition to the "Game of Thrones" family, Abubakar Salim.

Abubakar Salim is still dealing with the fact that his life right now is a fantasy come true.

The British actor, 31, recently seen in Napoleon with Joaquin Phoenix and known for voicing Bayek in 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins, remembers the first day he arrived on the set of HBO's House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel he now joins in season 2 as key character Alyn of Hull. As a self-proclaimed geek with a deep love for this kind of genre title, he likens it to walking into Disneyland.

"It's really beautiful and powerful, and the level of care is just on another level, man," he tells Entertainment Weekly in an April Zoom interview. "That really is when it sunk in. Like, 'Oh, wow! I'm on an HBO House of the Dragon show.' They're not pulling any punches here."

But even more than being a fan of fantasy who gets to act in a much-respected fantasy universe, like that of George R.R. Martin's Westeros, Salim can also call himself a world-builder. This week marks the release of Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a Bantu myth-inspired title and the first from the gaming studio he founded in 2020, Surgent Studios. Growing up on a healthy diet of Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Salim admits that fact hasn't sunk in yet.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm making it up," he says. "It is weird because I always said if I was going to ever have the chance to tell a story that I have control over, I really want to make it big."

Salim also voices the title role of Zau, a young Nganga (spiritual healer) who's grieving the loss of his father. The single-player fantasy adventure begins when Zau makes a bargain with Kalunga, the God of Death, to bring his Baba back to life. In exchange, he must journey across the world of Kenzera, an Afrofuturistic landscape heavily inspired by Bantu lore, to defeat three great spirits on Kalunga's most-wanted list. He'll do so with the aid of two relics that imbue him with cosmic powers: the Sun and Moon Masks.

The pitch Salim gave to EA Originals, the gaming publisher that released Tales of Kenzera: Zau this week, was "like Discworld and Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings had a baby and it's in Africa."

"I remember them being like, 'Maybe we should start small,'" Salim continues. "I just remember thinking, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure,' still in my mind building this huge world."

Every detail of Tales of Kenzera: Zau reflects a personal connection to Salim's own story, which is perhaps why he's so protective of the game. His grandfather was a Nganga, which influenced the character of Zau. "He was in touch with, as my father would say, 'all the spirits and stuff,'" Salim recalls of his grandpa. His dad, too, told him tales from Bantu myth as a young boy which gave way to the world of Kenzera. But the real core of the game connects to a personal loss in Salim's life.

Salim's father was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer when the actor was in his late teens, just as he was entering drama school. He died from the condition in 2013. "It felt like someone snatched these rose-tinted glasses from me, and I'm seeing everything in full HD now," Salim says. "It really changed me, man. It was something that I just needed to express in some way, shape, or form."

The form he chose was a game that would become Tales of Kenzera: Zau, which itself is a meditation on Salim's evolving relationship with grief — even though you might not realize that while playing through the highly entertaining and challenging adventure saga. Kalunga, especially, is not like the traditional Western depictions of Death. "A lot of the time Hades is depicted as someone quite malevolent or jaded or harsh," he explains. "But within Congolese myth, there is almost a vulnerability to Kalunga and how he's depicted. Even though he is the guardian between the realm of the living and the dead, there is almost an element of bargaining with humanity in a weird way all the time."

Tales of Kenzera: Zau feels like a jumping off point for Salim. The colon in the title says it all: you could add anything after that to expand the tales told within the universe of Kenzera. "I want to be like Kevin Feige," Salim says of the head of Marvel Studios. "How can I pair this with other writers and other creators to flesh out this world? Kenzera is the franchise; Zau is literally just the entry point. I think that's how I've always seen it."

Of course, he's also expanding his acting career. He's wary of talking about his House of the Dragon character. Even though he knows the story of Alyn of Hull is laid bare in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire companion book Fire and Blood, the context will be somewhat different on the show, introducing Alyn as a sailor in the Velaryon fleet who has a brother named Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty).

"I know this trajectory that my character goes through, so it's really exciting to know the end goal," he says. "It's almost like, as an actor, reading a play because you know how it ends and you have fun with the journey of how you get to where you want to get to. I'm really enjoying that."

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

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