One day, a monkey decides to wake up and go on a killing rampage.
That’s the general premise of Black Myth: Wukong, anyway: a loose retelling of the seminal Chinese novel Journey to the West. Your monkey avatar is the Destined One, a reincarnation of Wukong himself, and he’s on a quest to reclaim his six relics, generally by beating the ever-loving daylights out of various Yaoguai, or mythical creatures, dotting the world.
Though the storytelling itself isn’t much to write home about (and very confusing), there are plenty of other selling points in this richly re-imagined fable: the first Chinese video game to break through in the west.
The first thing to say about this game is that it’s absolutely, stunningly gorgeous. The full ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 3 that my gaming laptop used to run the game made colours seem richer, the world more lived in and every shadow gob-smackingly realistic - while the GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs let me max out pretty much every setting without issue (which, when it came to combat, made everything feel significantly higher-stakes).
And the little touches added by the developers (for instance, the mini-animated sequences explaining how each evil boss came to be are very charming).
Fortunately, the combat lives up to the visuals. The game makers have insisted that Black Myth isn’t a soulslike – all the better for me – but there are elements of it here. Players fight their way through a series of levels (which are laid out in a pleasingly non-linear way), using shrines to rest and save their progress and killing enemies to amass XP.
The boss fights are hard: think stuck for hours kind of hard, trying to beat the system. This is not a forgiving game; come with plenty of free time and a lot of patience. There are no difficulty levels here, though at least players aren’t punished for dying: the idea of having to fight my way back to the place I’d died to recollect loot might have broken me.
The key to succeeding is in achieving the perfect combination of dodging at exactly the right time, and mastering the game’s thorny combat/ magic trees. Though you only have the one weapon (a staff, not super handy), the game lets you create a build and level up your character based on whether you prefer speed, strength or dexterity.
And the true pleasure here comes from the spells that get picked up over the course of the game. Yes, they use mana and have a cooldown time, which makes the question of when to use them a case of expert strategizing. As well as transformations, which let you morph into various creatures you’ve brought down in previous battles: with a bit of effort, the battles can be dynamic and fun. When you’re not dying, again and again.
Despite the controversies around the game’s release, Black Myth: Wukong is a stunningly ambitious piece of work. When it flies, it soars – a bit of fine tuning and it’ll be ready to go.
