Black Myth: Wukong Review

These animals may not have thumbs, but they sure do have hands. Tony the Tiger studied a blade to carve my ass into a pumpkin, and I’m not even mad; in fact, I’m impressed. The entire zoo is out for blood in Black Myth: Wukong, a stunning action game that’s clearly inspired by the Dark Souls series, but is so distinct that calling it Soulslike doesn’t do it justice.

Dark Souls has never let me stick out my tongue as a giant frog and smack my enemies with it. It’s also never let me spawn a squad of clones to slam an evil pile of rocks back into the ground. If Dark Souls is the trial, Wukong is the adventure. Or, if you want to be precise, it’s Journey to the West , but with animals with health bars. Wukong imagines a version of the classic Chinese tale, in which a fox upgrades your healing potion. If there’s anything about it that truly reminds me of FromSoftware games, it’s how much it lets its wealthy world speak for itself.

Wukong doesn’t waste time trying to figure out why there’s a forest of werewolves or why you’re serenaded by a headless man. It opens with protagonist Sun Wukong laughing in the face of a council of gods who promptly punish him so severely that it takes hundreds of years for him to be reborn as a level 1 ape. Journey to the West isn’t required reading before playing Wukong, but reading it would go a long way toward reducing the ambiguity of its world. Still, I had no problem appreciating the eccentric cast of talking animals, who are either so hilariously pathetic that you pity them or so earnest that you feel like you’ve barged into their third act.

Surprises like a giant frog leaping out of the elevated grass and a snakelike dragon snapping at me high above a frozen lake kept me going—each level is a series of bizarre cutscenes that break up what was supposed to be a straightforward task. Wukong is peppered with boss fights, which aren’t nearly as terrifying as they seem. The difficulty of these encounters is so uneven that you never know what to expect. You can run into a giant rat and come out unscathed, but you’ll need to fully lock down to defeat a rabid bear. Many bosses celebrate the spectacle rather than demand your sharpest reflexes.

A similar ethos applies to the sections between these large fights. Wukong’s level design starts off incredibly linear, almost to the point where combat is reduced to one large highway of enemies, but it gradually opens up over the first few hours. You go from bashing wolves in the forest to tiptoeing past skeletal snake-men. In the second chapter, every kind of rat shows up to shoot you from rooftops or set you on fire with clouds of gunpowder. Wukong gently nudges you to take side paths that lead to treasures or side quests that will strengthen you for what lies ahead.

In the desert terrain, I took out a few shield-wielding hedgehogs and jumped off a bridge to find a man who had been turned into stone and was begging for facilitate. When I returned with the item he had asked for, he laughed at me for being naive enough to fall for his trick—a classic 16th century joke! Suddenly I could block him, so I hit him a few times and he fired back a spell that allowed me to block attacks by turning into stone.

Rather than throwing the player into a meat grinder where you have to carefully place enemies between each boss like many Soulslike games do, Wukong lets these open sections breathe, allowing the player to soak up the game world before diving into the next large battle.

When the fights get tough—and some definitely are—Wukong’s malleable skill tree and upgrade systems keep most of them from feeling like brick walls. At each shrine, in Dark Souls’ version of Wukong, you can move your skill points around at control bonfires that spawn nearby enemies, investing them into a range of powerful magical abilities. Investing in immobilize gave me a tool to freeze enemies just before they strike, so I could heal or retaliate. Maximizing the duration of a spell that turned me into a wolf with a flaming polearm felt like a second life for multi-phase bosses. While I wouldn’t call them he is buildingWukong has a ton of ways to nearly nullify the worst parts of a fight so you can survive it. His spells are so powerful that I suspect some players will choose to fight without them, like all the Reddit ascetics who proudly refuse to employ mimicry in Elden Ring.

But doing so will deprive you of some of Wukong’s most satisfying combat elements. Aside from a few minor damage upgrades for your staff, you don’t have a weapon loadout to choose from. You do, however, have a creature loadout to choose from. Special enemies encountered in the levels drop their spirits, which can be equipped with a passive buff and a devastating signature attack, such as transforming your head into a giant hammer or transforming into a swordsman for a single tidy slashing attack. Combat is largely about creating gaps in enemy attack patterns with your spells and buying time with dodges until they come back online.

Most battles are a dance of flips, somersaults, and puffs of smoke as your monkey man takes on the forms of various beasts that you collect like Pokémon. Once you find your rhythm, you move from playing as a warrior to playing as a magician.

A tough start

Nothing is more frustrating when that flow is interrupted by something that can’t be improved with a little better timing or foresight. In the test build of the game, stuttering frame rates and occasional crashes ended a few early battles prematurely. Wukong is another game afflicted with the curse of graphical shaders, which drag down performance so much that instead of swapping skill points, you’re swapping video settings to find the combination that gets you through the next section, and no amount of raw GPU rushing can do that.

While Wukong’s environments are fairly linear, they’re dense with attractive detail, like a sunlit desert with twisted trees or a forest of glowing leaves. It’s a shame I had to muddy everything up by dropping the settings to medium on my Nvidia RTX 4090. This solved my issues without spoiling too many of the gorgeous vistas, but there’s a chance the experience could be even worse at launch for those with much less fancy graphics cards.

A handful of deaths due to impoverished performance can’t ruin Wukong’s impressiveness as an action game that isn’t content to live in FromSoftware’s shadow. It may have many of the trappings of a Soulslike, but it uses its difficulty in a more fun, accessible way. Wukong avoids many of the punishing difficulties that are synonymous with the Soulslike genre, making it one of the best games to recommend to anyone who’s avoided them or who doesn’t like how grim they are. The bosses that close out each chapter are the closest you can get to the ones you’ll find in Elden Ring, but you can skip the usual memorization of move sets and trial and error, patiently dodging until you feel comfortable entering. Checkpoints are never more than 30 seconds away from the bosses. The rewards at the end of each chapter are delightful little animations—one of them a stop-motion parable about a man rescuing a wounded wolf—that make the effort worthwhile.

These scenes reinforce the enthusiasm with which the game’s creators drew from such an iconic piece of folklore. GameScience has given Wukong a dizzying amount of creativity. Aside from performance issues, the biggest disappointment comes from outside the game itself: Last year, IGN report detailed a history of sexist remarks from GameScience’s leadership. The studio has refused to acknowledge the allegations in recent interviews, and while I found nothing in the game that reflected an extremely regressive view of women (though there simply aren’t that many in the game), the behavior taints what would otherwise be an simple recommendation.

Wukong is one of the most happy action RPGs I’ve ever played, simply because of how lovingly it treats its world and characters, and by extension how clearly it wants me to love them too. It worked: aside from the fast-paced combat, I wanted to keep running through each area to meet another strange little creature with a mysterious quest or get attacked by another animal that’s learned MMA. In a pool of games about fallen kings and melancholy dragons, it’s refreshing to play an action game that isn’t overwhelmed by grimness, and where the best way to deal with the most grueling fights is to employ as many fun abilities as possible. In a year with the incredible expansion pack Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, I never thought I’d play a game that veers in such a completely different direction, but manages to reach similar heights, even if it lacks the sheer scale and complexity of FromSoftware’s masterpiece.

Wukong is his own beast and if he’s going to be called a soulslike then I think we’ll have to come up with a novel definition. There’s nothing quite like it.