Black Myth: Wukong is not a Soulslike. It's a third-person action RPG based on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, and it isn't particularly hard. It flows like the modern God of War games, not just because of all the gods around, but also the mix of color-coded gear, character skill trees, and linear paths with half-open sections attached. It is first and foremost an adventure, more inviting than punishing. But it does take a page from the book of Souslikes by hiding a ton of content from you, including some of the best moments and most challenging encounters.
You could blast through Black Myth: Wukong as a 20-hour boss rush, but you could also spend over 40 hours hunting down every boss, collectible, and NPC. A full half of the game is in the margins. I gave myself time to backtrack, and I'm glad I did, but as I reflect on Black Myth: Wukong after 34 hours, the stuff I know I didn't find hogs a lot of my headspace. That said, most of what I found was good, often great. Black Myth: Wukong can be incredibly frustrating on occasion, but it's an overall rock-solid action RPG with dozens of fantastic bosses in an absorbing, refreshingly weird world.
A world worth wandering
Release date: August 20, 2024
Platform(s): PC, PS5
Developer: In-house
Publisher: Game Science
You play as a staff-wielding monkey warrior known as the Destined One, following the footsteps of the late legend Sun Wukong by collecting his six relics, or senses. This pursuit takes you through five main areas separated as chapters – plus a special final one I won't spoil – each with their own bespoke setting and subplot, which you can revisit whenever you want. Collecting six MacGuffins is a suitably video game-y way to package a dense tale, and it's a welcome lifeline in what remains a heady experience. Black Myth: Wukong is less of a story told to you and more a sprinkling of parables left for you to find. It's a matter of verbs; this is one of those stories that feels built for active interpretation over passive enjoyment.
As someone who's not familiar with the source text, it feels like starting a book on page 200. One benefit to this approach is that the world feels lived-in. You get the sense you're a small part of this place and can't do everything yourself, and the offhandedness of absurd events reinforces the mystical atmosphere. It's hard to overstate how casually people just shapeshift – into foxes, cicadas, birds, or deceitful disguises. This is just how this world of Yaoguai, deities, and immortals operates. The sheer irreverence is hammered home by a cast that's almost universally larger than life. I played with Chinese VO and found even the most metaphor-heavy characters effective – effectively likable, effectively hateable, or whatever their role demanded. This made me wish the Destined One wasn't a passive mute. The English VO seemed mostly fine with a few standout performances, but less memorable overall.
The presentation can be confusing, but the ending – that is, the ending I got, as there are multiple – helped several details click in my brain. And even when the experience seems to be on a tangent, it is always eye-poppingly gorgeous. Rather than the way it adapts Journey to the West as a story, Black Myth: Wukong hooked me because of how it reconstructs it as a space. Every area is dripping with detail – lively forests and quiet snowfields, intricate temples and rough-hewn crags. "What comes next" becomes a powerful lure.
There is so much to see and explore – arguably too much to see and too little to explore. Black Myth: Wukong is a stunning Unreal Engine 5 game capable of both stylized art and realistic graphics, but its visual language is terrible. Many levels are oversized and end up spreading encounters and collectibles too thin, the world littered with invisible walls blocking off what looks to be navigable terrain. Where you can and can't go feels bafflingly arbitrary and limiting. This turns those gorgeous environments into minefields of disappointment. Will I find a cool secret, or an inexplicable dead end? Over time, this blunts the joy of exploration. Similarly, many levels are so visually cluttered that it can be hard to make out key items. It's dangerously easy to miss a permanent health pickup, for instance, when it's locked in a tiny gold box on a tiny gold shrine in a dimly lit room flooded with particle effects. Black Myth: Wukong is crying out for a map and clearer indicators like light beacons.
Monkey business
Apart from opening anything with a button prompt, your main concern while exploring is hitting anyone that the camera can lock onto. The Destined One is a melee brawler whose fighting style revolves around fixed staff attacks and a suite of more flexible spells. A shared light attack combo connects three staff styles that have unique heavy hits. The default smash style spends Focus points on overhead slams. (Focus is temporarily charged up by holding the heavy attack button, or permanently charged by dealing damage, dodging attacks, and fighting skillfully.) The pillar style sends the Destined One aloft, out of reach of ground attacks as he uses his staff as a pillar, with Focus attacks prioritizing AoE sweeps. My favorite, the thrust style, has access to fast and far-reaching lunge heavy attacks, plus a mid-combo dodge that can chain into an invincible follow-up. It's as good as it sounds.
You unlock new moves by spending ability points in your skill tree, which is broken up into core stats, the staff styles, and your spells. Most points are earned leveling up via XP collected from defeated enemies, which is separate from the Will currency spent at merchants, but some points are obtained through meditation spots found throughout levels. You can redo all of your points for free at any checkpoint, which is a huge quality-of-life win. I changed my build frequently to experiment with different moves and lean into specific armor or staff effects.
Black Myth: Wukong averaged 75 - 80 FPS at 1440p (super resolution set to 75 by the game's own benchmark) on medium settings on my PC, which is just above the recommended specs with an i7-9700k and RTX 2080 Super. I noticed minor and infrequent stuttering and the game crashed once, and forced me to ALT+F4 another time due to an animation glitch. The final area occasionally tanked my FPS into the 40s for reasons I won't spoil. Load times seemed long given I have a good M.2 NVMe SSD, but nothing deal-breaking.
I was extremely hungry for skill points in the first half of the game but soon found that maxing out one staff style and sticking to it felt optimal. Combat would benefit from more interplay between the three styles. There was no need to use anything other than thrusting style once I unlocked it. Pillar style felt clunky and smash seemed like a worse thrust. Each style also only has a few nodes for new attacks, and there's sadly no way to expand your light attack combo, so be prepared to see the same attack animation about a million times.
Combat gets a little same-y – it doesn't help that many normal enemies are so slow, weak, or easily staggered that they're non-threatening – but chaining Focus heavies and slow-mo perfect dodges is so dang fun that I was never close to bored. Sound design puts in a lot of work. The woody thunk of your staff battering a shield, the resonant gong of cracking iron-skinned monsters, the glassy swish as you spin around a boss in slow motion – you feel details like this in the heat of the moment, like tiny rewards for playing well, and it makes duels more impactful.
Black Myth: Wukong is at its best in boss fights. There are dozens and dozens of bosses, back-to-back at times, and most of them are real spectacles. Some are rehashed, but the audio-visual feast is delightful. Levels sometimes feel like mere appetizers before the next boss. I did notably beat most bosses on my first try. To put the difficulty in perspective, the final boss took me two attempts. The hardest optional boss I found took me seven or eight tries. I'm good at action RPGs but I'm not the God King Of Space, so as I said, this game is not very hard, though a few bosses seem to be packing comically bad hitboxes. The thing that killed me most was a frankly horrific platforming section that is thankfully the only one of its kind.
Build a better Wukong
Despite an underwhelming skill tree, there's deep character progression in Black Myth: Wukong. To go with armor set bonuses, you can upgrade your favorite gear to keep it around, boosting its stats and subtly changing its appearance. I was partial to a double two-piece armor setup that gave me extra Focus from perfect dodges and a parry-style spell called Rock Solid. Your healing gourd, which refills whenever you rest, can be upgraded for more uses and customized through different drinks and soaks. Some drinks heal for less but come with an attack buff or mana refill, for example, while soaks can make your gourd heal extra, mitigate status effects, and much more.
You'll naturally increase your base health, mana, and stamina through items primarily found after bosses, and you can further boost stats of your choice using collectible stones that, again, you can reallocate whenever you want. Staffs can be upgraded almost Monster Hunter-style using parts from bosses. Equippable accessories called curios bring boosted stats, conditional attack buffs, and more. Gathered materials are used to craft medicine to temporarily boost your stats or cure statuses. It wasn't hard to maintain a stock of medicine for damage reduction, attack boost, and max health boost, and these became my boss fight snacks. And we still haven't gotten to the magic.
Spells have cooldowns and cost mana which is generally only refilled when you rest at a checkpoint, so rationing spells is important. Rock Solid is my GOAT, but I was also a big fan of Immobilize, which freezes enemies in place for several seconds and, with upgrades, increases the damage they take. Immobilize does work on bosses, by the way, and it's even stronger than you think. It's free damage, obviously, but also a guaranteed moment to heal and a way to interrupt some problem combos. It's also the first spell you unlock, which sets the bar high. You get a few options for your spell slots, with quite a few spells tied to optional content. You can change your equipped spells at checkpoints, but I almost never took off Immobilize or Rock Solid, stubbornly clinging to time-stopping and pseudo-parrying in this proudly dodge-focused game.
The most varied spells are the transformations. Proper transformations let you fight as vanquished enemies for a short time, dealing damage without getting hurt yourself since these alternate forms have their own HP. Lesser, equipable spirits provide passive stat bonuses and function as special attacks tied to a Qi meter. You can sneak in spirit attacks during normal staff combos, and while I only found five transformations, I had nearly 50 different spirits, and I'm sure there's plenty more of both. There's a running theme of harnessing the strength of your enemies, and this brings some welcome variety to fights. I'd regularly open with Immobilize, get in a staff combo, finish with a spirit, then launch right into a transformation. You can spend most of a boss fight playing as anyone but the Destined One if you invest into transformations.
I absolutely loved Black Myth: Wukong for the first two chapters, but recurring annoyances and some drawn-out sections began to wear me down around the halfway point. Combat carries the experience, the story is interesting albeit too fragmented to put me on the edge of my seat, and the world is a wondrous place to be. It's exciting to see such a rich setting, which has gone largely untapped in games, treated with clear love and care by an action RPG of this scale. Despite some frustrations, Black Myth: Wukong feels great and finishes strong – so strong that I've half a mind to give New Game Plus a try, if only to find yet more stuff I missed.
Black Myth: Wukong was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.
