Our Verdict
Black Myth Wukong is the Journey to the West adaptation I've always wanted – an ambitious action RPG with stunning visuals, colossal boss designs, and snappy combat. However, sluggish camera tracking, restrictive exploration, and early-game difficulty spikes might be a dealbreaker for some.
In the early noughties, Nestlé launched a marketing campaign that proudly proclaimed its Yorkie chocolate bar was “not for girls!” – it even had a no-women-allowed sign on the wrapper. Setting aside the moral outrage this evoked in third-wave feminists, this slogan also lit a spark of mutiny in my tweenage self. I had long since disregarded Yorkies as a painfully average chocolate bar, but I saw this marketing slogan as a call for reclamation. “They’re not for girls,” I’d say, breaking off a square. “They’re for me.” Such is the case with Black Myth Wukong.
I am, of course, talking about the controversy that’s dogged the action RPG since an exposé from IGN levied allegations of systemic misogyny at developer Game Science last year. Wherever you stand on this hot-button topic, I feel justified in bringing it up in my review because I went into Black Myth Wukong with a distinct impression that this was not made for someone like me. It’s ironic given that its source material, Journey to the West, endures because of its universal message of perseverance and spiritual growth. It’s also the defining tenet of soulslike games, and the cross-medium tie that binds my love of both.
It’s hard to understate the degree of influence Journey to the West has had on the videogame landscape; there are references to Sun Wukong and his exploits just about everywhere you look, from Pokémon to Warframe. Black Myth Wukong is an epic journey based on a truly epic novel, but it isn’t a 1:1 adaptation of Journey to the West. Instead, it’s positioned as a sequel of sorts, as its protagonist – a simian ‘Destined One’ of no renown – follows in Sun Wukong’s footsteps to collect five relics and resurrect the legendary hero. It’s the quintessential Hero’s Journey, propelled by magical MacGuffins.
In this regard, Black Myth Wukong follows the same plot beats and characters as its source material while giving Game Science a free license to take creative liberties without upsetting literary fans. If you have a passing familiarity with Journey to the West, you’ll be able to follow Black Myth Wukong’s story with minimal fuss; if you’re completely new to it, you might lose the thread of character motivations and miss the impact of certain reveals. That said, a plot that warrants further examination isn’t so much an obstacle as it is an opportunity for players to dig into this landmark text for the first time; such is FromSoftware’s influence.
Like most players, I went into Black Myth Wukong assured by Game Science that it takes approximately 15+ hours to complete. This is categorically false. The average first playthrough is at least double this prospective playtime, and that’s before you include time to backtrack, explore, and complete side-quests. Tack on any additional hours to refine your build for tricky bosses, and Black Myth Wukong is a veritable odyssey on par with Dark Souls or God of War. I’m not mad about it. When positioned against the promise of 81 bosses, Game Science’s estimate had me envisioning a hollow boss rush set at a breakneck pace. Instead, Black Myth Wukong gives opportunities to slip off the beaten path to find treasure chests, secret locations, NPCs – and yes, more bosses.
The carved-out trails of Black Wind Mountain left me worried that Black Myth Wukong would be a painfully linear experience, but as I progress beyond this opening chapter, the world begins to dilate. While a forward trajectory remains, remote mountain forests and bug-infested caves offer far more freedom of movement. Quests in Black Myth Wukong aren’t as obtuse as FromSoftware’s, but their formula persists. There is no quest log; fulfilling a request relies upon listening to NPCs and picking up clues that signpost an item to give them or a location to visit; the choice to pursue them is left entirely up to me.
However, my attempts at exploration are constantly brought up short by the invisible walls endemic throughout the environments, and the overall impression is a world with its guard rails up. While the detailed rendering of its forests, deserts, and snowfields gives the illusion of a far larger space, it also makes it difficult to ascertain which areas are accessible and which are just window-dressing. Can I scale that ledge, or is it a no-go zone? Sometimes, the answer is obvious, but other times I feel a little bit like a wasp in a pint glass. This lack of consistency can also seem a bit unfair; the invisible walls that prevent me from going over a cliff disappear the moment Game Science decides that a fatal fall should pose a viable threat.
Game Science maintains that Black Myth Wukong is not a soulslike – and in some respect, I agree. There’s no question that all the hallmarks of soulslikes are here, including stamina management, animation priority, and tough-as-nails bosses. However, its skill-based character progression aligns more closely with God of War than Dark Souls or Sekiro, and there are no corpse runs to retrieve currency after death. There’s no built-in parry either. Instead, the timed element in combat is a ‘perfect dodge’ that feeds the focus points I can expend to enhance the Destined One’s attacks. Stances are the principal element of melee combat – but again, they’re a very different beast from Nioh’s tug-of-war between offense and defense. Instead, they’re all about distance, speed, and verticality. I’m struck with the novelty of the pillar stance, which prompts the Destined One to scamper up his staff and drive it down onto an enemy’s head. Eventually, I’m won over by the thrust stance: a less ostentatious moveset with long range and a collection of rapid-fire varied combos.
No matter how you’d prefer to classify Black Myth Wukong, it’s refreshing to experience everything I love in a soulslike without any real fear of death. Rather than fixate on a number counter at the corner of my screen, I throw myself into boss encounters with abandon. If you struggle to keep calm in boss fights, Black Myth Wukong might be good exposure therapy; the Destined One kills about six impossible bosses before breakfast. It’s less rote than a shopping list, but with the sheer number of Black Myth Wukong bosses to defeat, it should be no surprise that some are more forgettable than others. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be forgetting my blood-soaked duel with the katana-wielding Tiger Vanguard any time soon – but my encounters with the Centipede Guai and Yellow-Robed Squire are an afterthought. A recurring frog boss, albeit with different elemental abilities to contend with in every chapter, also strikes me as more of a chore – the Wukong equivalent of laundry or dirty dishes.
That said, the diversity of visual and mechanical design in these bosses is undeniably impressive; I have never respecced as much in any RPG as in Black Myth Wukong. When it comes to character progression, I’m a creature of habit – unless I’m planning a specific challenge run, I usually ferret out the most optimal build and stick with it until I find something even better. This works well in FromSoftware-style soulslikes which force you to live with your bad decisions. Instead, Black Myth Wukong introduces a new spell or ability, lets you have fun with it for a bit, and then pits you against a boss that counters it with ease. This ever-changing path of least resistance forces me back to the drawing board, and it might be more of an annoyance if respeccing weren’t straightforward and absolutely free. Instead, it’s a welcome relief to take in the breadth of equipment on offer and find a use for almost everything, instead of letting it all gather dust in my inventory.
Camera issues are a genre staple at this point, but there’s a reason FromSoftware started with the slow combat cadence of Dark Souls and worked its way up. Sekiro and Bloodborne mitigate bursts of action with brief moments of stillness that help the camera and player reorient themselves before the next assault; Black Myth Wukong is an explosion of movement right out of the gate. Attack strings often go on for a move or two longer than expected, and their whip-fast animations leave me dodging blind as the camera struggles to keep up. Throw in the occasional encounter with multiple enemies in small spaces, and you’ve got a real recipe for an unfair death. I’ve learned to rely on the cadence of attack patterns over reading animations to successfully dodge without looking, but this sluggish tracking will no doubt serve as a point of frustration for players who already take issue with FromSoftware’s camera.
Black Myth Wukong’s skill trees also don’t save it from the same awkward ‘teen’ phase endemic in soulslikes – the brief period after the tutorial where the kid gloves come off before you’ve accrued the abilities, equipment, and stats to match it. Quite the opposite; it’s exacerbated. There are only so many skill points to go around in those early hours, forcing me to weather difficulty spikes with little more than my reflexes and game sense until I’ve leveled up enough to activate more skills at a time. Consequently, Black Myth Wukong begins life as a soulslike and eventually mellows into the action game that Game Science intends. From a story perspective, this makes sense: the Destined One has to be a nobody before he becomes a mythological hero. However, this frontloaded difficulty is liable to turn players away before that journey even gains momentum.
This eventual mellowing is in part thanks to the myriad abilities that the Destined One accumulates throughout his journey. Black Myth Wukong spells eschew the usual selection of magic projectiles and aura buffs in favor of abilities that would otherwise appear at the end of an action RPG. I can freeze enemies, turn invisible, and summon clones to come to my aid. I’m a bona fide monkey god – when I have mana, that is. As a finite resource for much of the game, I spend the first half of my playthrough leaning into Black Myth Wukong’s main gimmick: transformations. Like Sun Wukong before him, the Destined One can transform into an array of creatures, from a spear-wielding wolf monk to a musclebound, fire-breathing rat. These transformations are undeniably cool, but their movements are often slow and clumsy. What’s more, the limited number of slots available is a drop in the ocean compared to how many transformations are on offer; I find that I ignore the vast majority of them for the ones offering the best passive effects. Like I said, I’m a creature of habit.
There are moments in Black Myth Wukong I’ve never experienced in a videogame before. I join forces with Zhu Bajie to escape a trickster monk’s magic sack; wrangle a dragon to dislodge cymbals balanced precariously on the back of a giant turtle; scale a pagoda dungeon to silence a colossal mani stone; and face down the heavenly army itself. Every set piece is like epic poetry come to life, and its sense of scale is perhaps only matched by Shadow of the Colossus. Everything, from character models to landscapes to particle effects, is beautifully realized. More importantly, it all performs with minimal stutter.
I’ve used “refreshing” as a descriptor multiple times in this review, and I think it just about sums up my experience with Black Myth Wukong in a single word. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The length of its development time left me skeptical, as did the hyper-polished Unreal Engine 5 trailers and tall talk of 81 bosses. It all seemed too ambitious; too good to be true. After 2023’s Lords of the Fallen left me frustrated and bored, I went into Black Myth Wukong with an open mind and low expectations. I found a striking adaptation of a beloved literary classic that captures the remote surrealism of Chinese mythology; an imperfect but ambitious action RPG that looks to iterate upon FromSoftware’s legacy rather than use it as a crutch. Break me off a square. I’ve got a taste for it now.