A year ago, Surgent Studios stood at the precipice. The studio that had poured five years of work into Tales of Kenzera: Zau, an ambitious afrofuturist metroidvania that earned critical praise, had watched it stumble commercially. In July 2024, layoffs came first: roughly a dozen staff. Then, three months later, redundancy notices went to everyone else. It was the kind of collapse that has become grimly routine in game development over the past few years.
Yet the story took an unexpected turn. Rather than fade, Surgent has accelerated. The studio has since released not just one but two entirely different games, each moving away from the long-development-cycle model that had defined its early years. Director Abubakar Salim, an actor best known for voicing Bayek in Assassin's Creed Origins and appearing in the HBO series Raised by Wolves, reflects on what shifted. "We were very much close to going down the route of making a game every three to four years and going bigger and bigger," he says. "We just had to adapt and change because we're still indie, and we're still quite close to the ground."
The pivot represents a practical reckoning with how games are made and sold today. The reality of Steam's endless release schedule makes long bets on single projects unsustainable for small teams. But there is something else at work here: an insight Salim absorbed from an unlikely source. Working with Ridley Scott on the television series Raised by Wolves taught him something crucial about how to build creative momentum. "When I worked with Ridley on Raised by Wolves, this guy was constantly working," Salim explains. "He was constantly doing something, working on Raised by Wolves, then he was doing Napoleon, then he was doing X. And it's because he built this conversation with the people that he uses."
That observation became a philosophy for his studio. Part of the reason Surgent can produce games like Dead Take at speed is through having developed institutional knowledge and mutual understanding of workflows within the team, creating "a really nice cadence between each other." The lesson, in essence, is simple but powerful: creativity accelerates when you work repeatedly with the same people, when the conversations become shorthand, when everyone understands how everyone else thinks.
What strikes you about Salim's approach is that he doesn't minimise the value of Zau itself. The institutional knowledge developed through making that game is precisely what allows faster production now. Smaller, shorter projects are much more viable not just because they are cheaper, but because they enable indie developers to go through game development multiple times, building institutional knowledge that might eventually lead to something incredible.
Looking ahead, Salim hasn't ruled out returning to larger projects. He doesn't rule out returning to larger projects in the future, and on Zau in particular, Surgent "wouldn't say no to visiting a sequel." But he is clear about what his studio has learned. "You have to do the work in order to find that voice, or find that thing that makes you kind of stick out and stand out," he notes. The work, it turns out, comes not from making one monumental game but from showing up repeatedly, learning from the team beside you, and building the kind of creative trust that Scott's example made visible.
What emerges from Surgent's survival and pivot is a quiet argument about how creative industries should function. There is something healthier, perhaps, in a model where smaller bets replace all-in gambits; where teams grow together through multiple projects rather than burning out on singular visions. As Salim reflects, "if Supergiant—the ones who made Hades—if they had released their game in this climate, it would have been so difficult. They had to work with one another and find the rhythm to get to Hades. It's like any other director in film and TV or actors."