Black Myth: Wukong
Discussion
You might have seen some hype around this game online, being one of the fastest selling games of all time on Steam, no mean feat for a developer founded 10 years ago whose only previous works were two mobile games. Wukong is a sort of soulslike / God of War-ish kind of game based on Journey to the West, one of the most popular and famous works of literature in China and across Asia.
The plot is often nonsensical for westerners who aren't familiar with the tale and the cast, with frequent references to places, events and characters you won't understand, as each of the game's chapters focuses on the protagonist's quest to retrieve one of Sun Wukong's relics in the hopes that the deceased monkey king might be resurrected if he is reunited with them. In the process, you'll visit a number of locations, with the lush bamboo forests of central China, the rocky deserts of the north west and the snowy border area with India all being visited. This is certainly an interesting premise to me, given that Chinese mythology is not often explored in video games. The last game I can think of that really delved into this world and landscape rather than just sampling from it was Jade Empire and that game was released 19 years ago.
The cast are interesting, if hard to grasp, all being different kinds of deities and celestial beings with backstories that aren't really expanded upon in the game. The voice acting for the English dub is awful, so play it with the Chinese original voice acting for a much better experience. My advice would be to enjoy the grand plot of the journey to get the relics and not focus too much on the individual chapter plots as they're a bit nonsensical, at least to me, as a westerner with no knowledge of the cast other than Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie.
The gameplay is stellar, being incredibly crisp and precise. The game has more in common with Sekiro than any other game, if only for the way the combat is focused on a single weapon, a quarter staff, with a tight combat system built around dodging to build focus, a transient resource used to power parries and crucially, your most powerful attacks, some of which nullify and weaken enemies when you use them to smash through an incoming attack. The game punishes attack spam and panic dodging, instead teaching you perfectly dodge the enemy, which builds focus rapidly, before unleashing your devastating charged attacks. The combat is visceral and extremely satisfying to say the least.
The game has been criticised for being a boss rush and that is somewhat true, in the 45 or so hours it took me to complete my first run, I encountered probably 70 bosses, maybe more now that I think about it, with most of them being unique. Between bosses, most of the regular enemies can be easily crushed if you're decent at the game and the very forgiving flask system means exploration is easy, you'll never be desperately hunting for a bonfire here, as you can refill gourd charges for healing by collecting the essence of dead enemies on your travels. On that note, the gourd system is amazing, allowing you to add different kinds of wines and fruits and seeds to your gourd which give you different buffs on healing.
The gourd and equipment system allows for some interesting builds too, which was a surprised in such a tightly-focused combat system. One staff deals massively increased damage and poison enemies when your character is poisoned, this can be complemented with a wine soak that poisons the antagonist when healing and an armour set that massively reduces poison damage, allowing you to effectively get a huge attack buff and poison enemies on command by using your gourd on the way into a fight. There's quite a few different builds possible and the skill trees are fairly vast, which I was impressed with and pleasantly surprised by, considering other games of this ilk haven't really catered for that sort of thing before.
In terms of difficulty, I'd say it's about as hard as an average soulslike, the difficulty does ramp up towards the end (occasionally straying into BS territory with the occasional cheap tactics employed by some of the bosses) but it's balanced out by combat in the general exploration areas being quite easy for the most part. With that said however, the true final boss you need to beat to get the secret ending is a real tough cookie, harder than anything in any Fromsoft game, yes, even harder than Consort Radahn. These endgame bosses are tough because there's really no way to cheese them as far as I can see, you need to just be good enough to beat them. There's no shieldtanking, no block button, no bleed builds, no summons etc.
Exploration can be a bit of a chore and the maps are not really laid out like a Fromsoft game, beautiful as they are they can be maze-like and lacking in landmarks to help guide you. It can be easy to miss shrines (bonfires) and hidden areas in some of the larger, open-plan areas.
My biggest criticism of the game is the graphics. On my PC (RTX 4090, Ryzen 7950X3D, 65GB RAM) it looked absolutely stunning and almost always ran like a dream even with ray tracing on and every graphical setting on ultra and motion blur turned off. There were a few bits where the optimisation was sub-par, including one boss fight that takes place in a reflective room filled with marble and gold surfaces, where the boss shoots lasers and explosions all over the place, I dropped some frames there, however the overall look of the game is stunning. Probably the best game I've seen in terms of visual fidelity, incredible texture detail, lighting and environmental effects. This is in part achieved by being a fairly linear game with low environmental interactivity (Cyberpunk it ain't) but it cannot be denied that the game looks stunning.
At least, it looks stunning on my PC. I've seen some PS5 footage and even taking into account the YouTube compression, the image is considerably less sharp and in some of the boss fight footage I saw, the fps was all over the place at times and I saw numerous complaints from players saying they couldn't read some boss attacks because the frames were dropping too hard to properly read the dodge timing. It almost feels like this game was developed with high-end PCs in mind, because it looks like they had to make significant concessions to the graphics for PS5 and the console can hardly run it. I doubt it will ever come to Xbox and Microsoft will insist on a Series S release and there's no way that console is running this game in anything approaching a playable state.
In some ways, it's a great shame. On the one hand, I feel so glad to have played this game and had such an incredible experience with it as the devs mostly intended. On the other hand, I know that others will not have the same experience if they don't have a really powerful PC. Maybe I'm being too harsh, since most feedback I've seen from PS5 players still has them loving the game. I think perhaps the incredible journey of the game is worth gritting one's teeth and dealing with the technical issues and just enjoying the game, though that's easy for me to say as I didn't have to do that.
Overall, an incredibly competent and polished game from a studio few thought would deliver. I almost expected this to be a scam game, the pre-release footage looked almost too good to be true. I thought the released product would fall so far short and just be a scrappy, amateurish mess, how wrong I was and how I am to be wrong. I finished my playthrough and didn't feel the immediate urge to start a second playthrough, frankly I needed a rest after the intense combat experience, but I know I'll go back one day for NG+ run.
The more I reflect on it, the more I think this game really is an incredible experience. I think I'll remember this one fondly, despite the flaws.
The plot is often nonsensical for westerners who aren't familiar with the tale and the cast, with frequent references to places, events and characters you won't understand, as each of the game's chapters focuses on the protagonist's quest to retrieve one of Sun Wukong's relics in the hopes that the deceased monkey king might be resurrected if he is reunited with them. In the process, you'll visit a number of locations, with the lush bamboo forests of central China, the rocky deserts of the north west and the snowy border area with India all being visited. This is certainly an interesting premise to me, given that Chinese mythology is not often explored in video games. The last game I can think of that really delved into this world and landscape rather than just sampling from it was Jade Empire and that game was released 19 years ago.
The cast are interesting, if hard to grasp, all being different kinds of deities and celestial beings with backstories that aren't really expanded upon in the game. The voice acting for the English dub is awful, so play it with the Chinese original voice acting for a much better experience. My advice would be to enjoy the grand plot of the journey to get the relics and not focus too much on the individual chapter plots as they're a bit nonsensical, at least to me, as a westerner with no knowledge of the cast other than Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie.
The gameplay is stellar, being incredibly crisp and precise. The game has more in common with Sekiro than any other game, if only for the way the combat is focused on a single weapon, a quarter staff, with a tight combat system built around dodging to build focus, a transient resource used to power parries and crucially, your most powerful attacks, some of which nullify and weaken enemies when you use them to smash through an incoming attack. The game punishes attack spam and panic dodging, instead teaching you perfectly dodge the enemy, which builds focus rapidly, before unleashing your devastating charged attacks. The combat is visceral and extremely satisfying to say the least.
The game has been criticised for being a boss rush and that is somewhat true, in the 45 or so hours it took me to complete my first run, I encountered probably 70 bosses, maybe more now that I think about it, with most of them being unique. Between bosses, most of the regular enemies can be easily crushed if you're decent at the game and the very forgiving flask system means exploration is easy, you'll never be desperately hunting for a bonfire here, as you can refill gourd charges for healing by collecting the essence of dead enemies on your travels. On that note, the gourd system is amazing, allowing you to add different kinds of wines and fruits and seeds to your gourd which give you different buffs on healing.
The gourd and equipment system allows for some interesting builds too, which was a surprised in such a tightly-focused combat system. One staff deals massively increased damage and poison enemies when your character is poisoned, this can be complemented with a wine soak that poisons the antagonist when healing and an armour set that massively reduces poison damage, allowing you to effectively get a huge attack buff and poison enemies on command by using your gourd on the way into a fight. There's quite a few different builds possible and the skill trees are fairly vast, which I was impressed with and pleasantly surprised by, considering other games of this ilk haven't really catered for that sort of thing before.
In terms of difficulty, I'd say it's about as hard as an average soulslike, the difficulty does ramp up towards the end (occasionally straying into BS territory with the occasional cheap tactics employed by some of the bosses) but it's balanced out by combat in the general exploration areas being quite easy for the most part. With that said however, the true final boss you need to beat to get the secret ending is a real tough cookie, harder than anything in any Fromsoft game, yes, even harder than Consort Radahn. These endgame bosses are tough because there's really no way to cheese them as far as I can see, you need to just be good enough to beat them. There's no shieldtanking, no block button, no bleed builds, no summons etc.
Exploration can be a bit of a chore and the maps are not really laid out like a Fromsoft game, beautiful as they are they can be maze-like and lacking in landmarks to help guide you. It can be easy to miss shrines (bonfires) and hidden areas in some of the larger, open-plan areas.
My biggest criticism of the game is the graphics. On my PC (RTX 4090, Ryzen 7950X3D, 65GB RAM) it looked absolutely stunning and almost always ran like a dream even with ray tracing on and every graphical setting on ultra and motion blur turned off. There were a few bits where the optimisation was sub-par, including one boss fight that takes place in a reflective room filled with marble and gold surfaces, where the boss shoots lasers and explosions all over the place, I dropped some frames there, however the overall look of the game is stunning. Probably the best game I've seen in terms of visual fidelity, incredible texture detail, lighting and environmental effects. This is in part achieved by being a fairly linear game with low environmental interactivity (Cyberpunk it ain't) but it cannot be denied that the game looks stunning.
At least, it looks stunning on my PC. I've seen some PS5 footage and even taking into account the YouTube compression, the image is considerably less sharp and in some of the boss fight footage I saw, the fps was all over the place at times and I saw numerous complaints from players saying they couldn't read some boss attacks because the frames were dropping too hard to properly read the dodge timing. It almost feels like this game was developed with high-end PCs in mind, because it looks like they had to make significant concessions to the graphics for PS5 and the console can hardly run it. I doubt it will ever come to Xbox and Microsoft will insist on a Series S release and there's no way that console is running this game in anything approaching a playable state.
In some ways, it's a great shame. On the one hand, I feel so glad to have played this game and had such an incredible experience with it as the devs mostly intended. On the other hand, I know that others will not have the same experience if they don't have a really powerful PC. Maybe I'm being too harsh, since most feedback I've seen from PS5 players still has them loving the game. I think perhaps the incredible journey of the game is worth gritting one's teeth and dealing with the technical issues and just enjoying the game, though that's easy for me to say as I didn't have to do that.
Overall, an incredibly competent and polished game from a studio few thought would deliver. I almost expected this to be a scam game, the pre-release footage looked almost too good to be true. I thought the released product would fall so far short and just be a scrappy, amateurish mess, how wrong I was and how I am to be wrong. I finished my playthrough and didn't feel the immediate urge to start a second playthrough, frankly I needed a rest after the intense combat experience, but I know I'll go back one day for NG+ run.
The more I reflect on it, the more I think this game really is an incredible experience. I think I'll remember this one fondly, despite the flaws.
I really fancy it but i've got three concerns:
1. Overall, how difficult is it? I'm happy with a challenge but repeating the same boss fight 30 times over doesn't appeal.
2. How well it would run on my PC. Mine is probably considered mid-range these days with the following specs:
GPU: RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 core 16 thread
RAM: Adata Spectrix RBG 16gb DDR4 4133mhz
3. Did you try playing keyboard and mouse at all? I stopped using controllers due to a problem with my thumb and I've found on a lot of games that I'm hampered playing K&M when the game was natively designed for consoles.
Any thoughts on the above appreciated
1. Overall, how difficult is it? I'm happy with a challenge but repeating the same boss fight 30 times over doesn't appeal.
2. How well it would run on my PC. Mine is probably considered mid-range these days with the following specs:
GPU: RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 core 16 thread
RAM: Adata Spectrix RBG 16gb DDR4 4133mhz
3. Did you try playing keyboard and mouse at all? I stopped using controllers due to a problem with my thumb and I've found on a lot of games that I'm hampered playing K&M when the game was natively designed for consoles.
Any thoughts on the above appreciated
MesoForm said:
Thanks for sharing, couple of questions:
1) What do you mean by "crisp and precise gameplay"?
2) What's a gourd system?
Crisp and precise to me means the gameplay feeling 'tight' so to speak. There is very little input lag, your character's animations are quick to start as soon as you press the button command for them and there are plenty of opportunities to cancel out of things, including an unlockable ability to keep your attack combos going after dodging. The light attack combo is made out of four elements and you can dodge between any of them, or each of them and still complete the combo, allowing you to attack between enemy attacks so you can damage them in the middle of their combos without taking damage yourself. This is fundamentally different to other soulslikes where you need to commit to a combo only when you can finish it, or rely on single attack pokes.1) What do you mean by "crisp and precise gameplay"?
2) What's a gourd system?
Additionally, the parry system allows you to "see through" an enemy attack, as the game puts it, by inputting a heavy attack during your light combo just as the enemy attacks (to be fair, it's not a true parry, more of a counter), this nullifies the incoming damage and allows a heavy follow-up for big damage if you have enough focus charged. The last time I played a game that felt so sharp and responsive was Sekiro which has a similarly focused combat system, though if Sekiro is all about the parry and stance-break, you could say Wukong is all about the dodge and staying in the pocket with the enemy, attacking them while being in harms way. Both achieve this by having only a single weapon type, a sword for Sekiro and a staff for Wukong.
The Focus system is what powers your strongest attacks with the staff, you gain the most focus by doing light attack combos and perfect dodges, which are dodges input right as the enemy attack is about to hit. This causes time to slow for a split second and provides a hefty boost to your focus gauge. The optimal way to play is to be aggressive and use perfect dodges to charge your strongest attacks and counters quickly. You can try to play safe, dipping in and out of range and using safe early dodges to avoid attacks, but your offensive capacity will shrink if you play this way. The game wants you to embrace the aggression of Sun Wukong and with that, you have to walk the tightrope of being right in the face of danger. This kind of gameplay design simply doesn't work as well when games have slow, baggy input systems, slow animations start-ups and long animations that you can't cancel out of.
On the gourd system, it's basically the Estus flask of the Dark Souls games. You fill your gourd with wine, which recharges at shrines (bonfires / checkpoints) or when you absorb the essence of dead people or certain enemies. Different gourds have different perks, some offer more wine capacity, some give you resistance to certain status ailments etc when you drink from them. Different wines have different effects, heal different amounts and offer various bonuses, and you can add "soaks", which are like bits of fruit and plants from Chinese medicine that sit in the gourd and soak into the wine, which also impart stat buffs or other beneficial properties. This allows you to customise your healing, so you can activate effects which play into your build. It's quite simple once you get into it but it adds another levels of depth to the gameplay.
Snubs said:
I really fancy it but i've got three concerns:
1. Overall, how difficult is it? I'm happy with a challenge but repeating the same boss fight 30 times over doesn't appeal.
2. How well it would run on my PC. Mine is probably considered mid-range these days with the following specs:
GPU: RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 core 16 thread
RAM: Adata Spectrix RBG 16gb DDR4 4133mhz
3. Did you try playing keyboard and mouse at all? I stopped using controllers due to a problem with my thumb and I've found on a lot of games that I'm hampered playing K&M when the game was natively designed for consoles.
Any thoughts on the above appreciated
It's not that hard, at least I didn't think so, apart from some of the optional bosses towards the end of the game. On the scale of action games, it's definitely a lot harder than something like God of War, being much closer to Dark Souls / Elden Ring type difficulty, albeit having quite a lot of differences in the combat models. To get the true ending, you have to complete most of the side quests in the game and then fight a hidden boss and that final fight is seriously tough, tougher than anything from a Fromsoft game. For the most part, I beat each boss in a few tries, once I had read their combos, their big area attacks etc and got the dodge timing down. It's only the endgame bosses, mostly the optional ones, that really crank up the difficulty. For the most part, I found the difficulty very fair, with only a few bosses relying on BS tricks (like the ones who can input read your focus level 3 or 4 charged heavy attacks) but that didn't spoil the experience for me.1. Overall, how difficult is it? I'm happy with a challenge but repeating the same boss fight 30 times over doesn't appeal.
2. How well it would run on my PC. Mine is probably considered mid-range these days with the following specs:
GPU: RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 core 16 thread
RAM: Adata Spectrix RBG 16gb DDR4 4133mhz
3. Did you try playing keyboard and mouse at all? I stopped using controllers due to a problem with my thumb and I've found on a lot of games that I'm hampered playing K&M when the game was natively designed for consoles.
Any thoughts on the above appreciated
For your hardware, I can't speak to how it will run, maybe check on the Steam forums. the game has sold something like 11 million copies in it's first week, so there's bound to be loads of people playing it on similar rigs. I'm probably being over-dramatic as the stunning visuals were such a big part of the experience for me, but I imagine if you turn it down to 1440p, drop the shadow detail down and don't use ray tracing, it's probably playable. The game is such a good experience that as much as I'm apprehensive to recommend on mid-range PCs or PS5, I also wouldn't want someone to not experience it just because they don't have a top tier PC.
As for mouse and keyboard, I didn't try, I use a Nintendo Switch Pro controller for 3rd person games on PC where precision shooting isn't required. The game does give a warning on start-up that it's best played on controller. If you've got previous experience with playing similar games on M&K, I should have thought you'd be ok with this one.
Edited by Mastodon2 on Friday 30th August 12:14
Fat Thor said:
I am loving it, on a ps5 too, having no issues and looks amazing.
Just finished chapter 2.
Boss I died the most at so far is the black loong, hit their in the end but probably should’ve waited till a bit further through game…. But wanted the rewards !
Glad you're enjoying it. I'm pretty sure there's a hidden area containing a boss in each of the main chapters, so be sure to seek them out. You should be able to beat each of those bosses as you pass through the chapter they appear in but they are tough. Just finished chapter 2.
Boss I died the most at so far is the black loong, hit their in the end but probably should’ve waited till a bit further through game…. But wanted the rewards !
A big hint, without real spoilers; you'll have picked up some seeds by now. If you finish chapter 3 and haven't found the gardener, you've missed an optional quest, go back and finish it before pressing on through chapter 4. Being able to farm materials for the buff potions is very, very helpful if you're struggling. I beat the game without using them but don't underestimate how powerful they are. Once you unlock the farm, there's another even more useful bonus tied in, so don't miss that quest. I was in chapter 5 before I realised I'd missed it, I could have made the game a good bit easier for myself if I'd found it earlier on.
I think when I've cleared my next gaming to-do list (Space Marine 2 and Test Drive: Solar Crown), I'm probably going to have to go back and do a NG+ run on Wukong.
.:ian:. said:
Its based on the same story as this program from the late 70s?
Remember watching this and not having a clue what was going on
Yes. one of the most widely-read literary works in history, apparently. I haven't read it, though I was aware of some of the major plot elements. No clue as to who half the characters were or why they acted the way they acted, nor am I any closer to understanding having finished the game Remember watching this and not having a clue what was going on
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