Black Myth: Wukong, Reviewed After 40 Hours and One Minor Breakdown

Let me start where the original review starts, because it is still the most honest sentence I can write about this game: at the forty-hour mark, sitting in a kitchen at 2am after another failed attempt on a boss, I briefly understood why someone might joke about marrying a video game instead of maintaining a normal human life. That is not a healthy sentence. It is, however, an accurate description of what Black Myth: Wukong does to people who love action RPGs. It frustrates you in the specific way that only a game you respect can frustrate you — not because it is unfair, but because you can feel yourself getting better and still not being good enough yet.

Context matters here. I have played games for roughly twenty-five years, finished multiple Dark Souls games, an embarrassing number of JRPGs, and every major FromSoft release since Demon's Souls. I am not saying that to brag. I am saying it so you understand the weight of calling Wukong the most frustrating action RPG I have played in a decade and meaning it as praise. Frustration, in this game, is not a bug. It is the curriculum. The game teaches you, boss by boss, to stop mashing, stop panicking, and start reading. The first hours will punish button-mashing with death. By the middle stretch you will start dodging things you did not even see the first time. By the later stretch you will be reading boss attacks several moves ahead, like a chess player who has finally learned the board.

The combat systems deserve that slow praise because they are built to reward expression, not just optimisation. Your staff has stances to unlock, your transformations let you become a cicada, a bug, a golem, a wolf, and many other things, and your spells sit alongside a Spirit system that charges as you take hits and lets you unleash summons of named characters you have defeated. What that produces in practice is combat that feels more expressive than Sekiro and more punishing than Elden Ring. You are not assembling a generic build and watching numbers go up. You are learning a specific rhythm for a specific fight, and then unlearning it for the next fight, and that constant relearning is exhausting in the best possible way.

The boss fight that explains the whole game

I do not want to spoil boss fights, but I will dwell on one example because it captures the design philosophy perfectly. There is a fight, late in the first chapter, against a wolf priest who is faster than you, who has a lightning attack that punishes low stamina, and who has a clone phase that will make you weep. When I finally beat him, I stood up from my chair and did not sit down for about a minute. I know that feeling intimately. It is not triumph in the simple sense of winning. It is the physical relief of a problem you have been carrying in your thumbs and shoulders finally resolving. Games that can produce that bodily response are rare, and they are the reason people put up with difficulty that would be intolerable in any other medium.

What makes Wukong more than a very good boss-rush game, though, is the source material, and here I want to agree loudly with the most important claim about this game: most Western coverage has undersold how literate this adaptation is. Game Science clearly cares, deeply, about Journey to the West as a text. The bosses are pulled from specific chapters. The environments quote specific temple designs. The music samples Chinese opera structures in ways that move you even if, like me, you are admittedly not an expert. That care is not decoration. It changes how the game feels to play, because you are moving through a world that has a literary memory, not just a visual style.

The central idea is the one that stayed with me longest. The game treats Wukong, the protagonist, not as a straightforward hero but as a tragedy. The original Journey to the West is a story about a trickster who is punished by the cosmic order and eventually redeemed through suffering and humility. The game engages with that directly, without spoiling its own ending: you are not playing as the Monkey King himself, but as a monkey searching for the relics of a King who was broken and scattered. That framing is elegant, and its subtext — about cultural loss, reconstruction, and what it means to pick up the pieces of something that was once whole — gives every boss fight a second layer. You are not just defeating an enemy. You are recovering a fragment of a story.

That is why the game sent me to the library, and why it sends so many players back to thinking about how rarely action games do that. Most games send you to a wiki. Wukong sends you to a centuries-old novel, and it does so without lecturing you about it. It trusts that if the world is rich enough, and the tragedy is felt rather than explained, curiosity will do the rest. The comparison that most Chinese children encounter this novel in school the way American children encounter Tom Sawyer is useful not as a precise educational claim but as a scale claim. This is foundational literature, not obscure lore, and the game treats it with the confidence of a team that knows its audience already knows why it matters.

What does not work, and why it still scores so high

None of that makes Wukong perfect, and a 9.2 that ignores its flaws would be dishonest. The camera is the biggest problem, especially in enclosed spaces. In open environments it is fine. In narrow caves or tight arenas with large bosses, it loses the target, clips through geometry, and costs deaths that are entirely the game's fault. That is not difficulty. That is friction, and it is the kind of friction that should be patchable. A game this precise about combat should not have a camera that occasionally stops being precise about where you are.

The middle chapters sag for a related reason: they ask you to do a lot of linear corridor fighting with elite enemies who no longer threaten you, between boss fights that are the reason you are here. A tighter edit through that stretch would make the whole experience noticeably better. This is a common AAA action RPG problem, and I do not want to single Wukong out unfairly, but the contrast makes it more visible here. When the boss fights are this good, anything that feels like waiting for the next boss fight feels longer than it is. The game is at its best when it trusts the player to handle density and danger, not when it pads the road between peaks.

The localisation is the subtlest flaw and, in some ways, the saddest one. The English subtitles are competent but not lyrical, and much of the poetry of the original language does not seem to make it through. Playing with Chinese voice acting and English subtitles leaves a constant sense that jokes and cadences are being lost. If you speak Mandarin, play it in Mandarin. If you do not, know that you are getting most of the writing but not all of its music. A better localisation pass would have been welcome, not as a cosmetic fix but as a literary one, because this is a game whose writing deserves to be heard in full.

And yet the score holds, because the larger claim holds. Wukong is not the most innovative action RPG — that title still belongs elsewhere — and it is not the most accessible, because its difficulty will lose players who would otherwise love it. But it is the first AAA action RPG I have played that feels like it is in conversation with a non-Western literary tradition on equal terms. It is not trying to be a Japanese game or an American game. It is a Chinese game, made for Chinese players first, and confident enough to ask Western audiences to come to it. That confidence is the whole story of why it matters beyond its own sales or its own boss fights.

We have been promised for years that non-Western AAA games would arrive. Wukong is the proof that the promise was real, and the next decade of action RPGs is likely to be more globally diverse than the last two because of it. Play it on PS5 or a capable PC, give it the forty hours it asks for, accept that the camera will occasionally betray you and the middle will occasionally drag, and finish it. Your thumbs will heal. The feeling of having pieced something broken back together will not fade nearly as fast.

Final score: 9.2/10. Docked mostly for the camera. One of the best games of the year. Go play it.