This is known trail whenever a modern action game is revealed that gets people excited, there’s a tendency to assume it’s a Soulslike. That was the case with Stellar Blade and even Armored Core 6 earlier this year. The latest victim is Black Myth: Wukong. Search for the game online and you’ll find dozens of articles, Reddit threads, and gaming forum topics asking if Black Myth: Wukong is a Soulslike game, as well as sequels explaining that, in fact, no, Black Myth: Wukong isn’t a Soulslike game after all.
I want to put this on record and say once and for all that Black Myth: Wukong is not a Soulslike. However, it is a great character-driven action game that draws inspiration from Dark Souls, alongside many other great action games, including God of War and Bayonetta.
What makes something soul-like?
What people mean by Soulslike can vary slightly (or sometimes significantly), but they often mean games with a risk-reward element, such as losing souls, XP, or resources upon death, complex bosses, melee-focused combat, and narrow healing. Dark Souls and Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki defined the genre to IGN in an interview, calling them “those dark third-person action games with a heavier emphasis on melee combat and a sense of accomplishment.”
Personally, I think the hallmarks of a true Souls-like game are the challenging boss fights, the leveling system that depends on defeating enemies—hence the need to respawn after every checkpoint—and the element of exploration. All of FromSoftware’s games have sophisticated map layouts, with shortcuts and routes that can backtrack and connect to each other like one large maze.
Black Myth: Wukong certainly meets some of those Soulslike criteria – the boss fights are certainly challenging, it has a similar dodgeroll and melee attack style of combat, and the exploit of stamina bars and finite health items – but I’d argue that it actually has a lot more in common with a boss rush game like No More Heroes. The level design is almost entirely different to any FromSoftware-created world – the maps in Dark Souls are a sophisticated puzzle box, while Black Myth: Wukong is fairly linear, leading our Destined hero from boss to boss in an almost straight line.
The reason for this non-Soulsian format is actually inspired by the original novel Journey to the West, on which the game is based, in which Sun Wukong must overcome 81 trials in his quest to obtain sacred Buddhist scriptures. It’s a plot device that IGN China editor-in-chief Charles Young describes as being almost similar to completing 81 levels of a video game.
As mentioned in our reviewour brief, early moments with Black Myth: Wukong during the preview event initially led us to believe it would be a Souls-like game, “given the checkpoint system, the stamina bar that governs your actions in combat, and the dodge-based fighting style.” But once we got our hands on the full game, it quickly became clear that Black Myth: Wukong was doing its job.
And that’s true for many games. The Souls series has had such a huge impact over the past decade that “Soulslike” is a moniker that’s been attached to so many action-adventure games, when in reality it’s just subspecies action adventure game.
FromSoftware’s Lasting Influence
A lot of what FromSoftware has done in its current era has found its way into other games, but that doesn’t automatically make them Soulslike games. I’m talking about things like the limited-use health item, the stamina bar, and respawn points that reset all enemies. A mix of any of these elements now appears in numerous non-Soulslike games, like Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade, and FromSoftware’s Sekiro (which isn’t a Soulslike game, and I’ll argue with you about that).
Previously, it would be fair to say that the stamina bar and limited-use health items—like the Estus Flask in Dark Souls—were integral to Dark Souls gameplay due to how they affected the overall difficulty. However, since their proliferation, more and more games have incorporated these ideas into their own action games. Stellar Blade, which features a combat system similar to Black Myth: Wukong and also borrows the Soulslike checkpoint system, gets rid of the stamina bar entirely. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, has a stamina bar (and some surprisingly powerful bosses!), but no one would ever mistake it for a Soulslike game.
It has become abundantly clear that gameplay mechanics that were once the exclusive domain of Soulslike games are now in games that don’t fit into that subgenre. And we have to accept that we live in a modern, post-Souls reality for the action genre, where just because a game has Some FromSoftware’s style doesn’t mean it’s a Soulslike game.
This is an significant distinction to make because, believe it or not, there are a lot of action game fans who don’t necessarily enjoy the Soulslike style. And that’s fine, but it would be a shame if those fans missed out on games like Black Myth: Wukong or even Sekiro (again, it’s not a Soulslike!) because they misclassified the games as falling into a very specific subgenre.
Instead, we should take the opportunity to look at games like Black Myth: Wukong and appreciate how much FromSoftware changed the action genre as a whole, and in my opinion, for the better. While also accepting that the industry has moved on to a modern reality where not all great action games with challenging boss fights are automatically considered Soulslikes. That in turn means we can all the more appreciate games like Black Myth: Wukong, which, as our review points out, shines thanks to all the different mechanisms and imaginative elements that they are not borrowed from the Soulslike genre.
Matt TM Kim is a senior writer for IGN. You can contact him at @lawoftd.
