Black Myth: Wukong is too mediocre for all this drama

Black Myth: Wukong is a hit: breaking all-time peak player count records on Steam, beating out Counter-Strike and Palworld to become the second most-played game on the platform, and selling more than 10 million copies across all platforms. In the few days after its release, it has become one of the most talked-about games of the summer - but for all the wrong reasons. 

Discussion of Wukong on social media has been dominated by people arguing about what constitutes a valid criticism of a piece of art. Reviewers of the game have become the target of harassment, and the general tenor of conversation has reached a level of toxicity that would likely make any potentially curious player run screaming for the safety of yonder Fortnite hills - myself included.

Despite that trepidation, I wanted to know what, if anything, about Black Myth: Wukong as a game was worth all the digital ink being spilled on its behalf. And while no game is worth any kind of harassment, a few hours with Wukong have left me wondering: this is it? Wukong is a gorgeous game, but its simplistic combat drags down the experience into something that's beautiful to look at but aggressively just OK to play.

Black Myth: Wukong is a retelling of the classical Chinese fantasy novel Journey to the West. Its opening moments feature a flashy combination of cinematics and gameplay that has Sun Wukong, the monkey king, facing off against a godlike foe while a pantheon of Chinese gods and their celestial armies observe menacingly in the distance. It goes incredibly hard and tickled all my wuxia / Chinese historical drama-loving bits. However, Sun Wukong is defeated, and the game starts in earnest with the player being given control of a new character tasked with finding the relics that will awaken the monkey king from his centuries-long slumber.

Wukong has some elements of a soulslike game. There are various user interface elements that remind me of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Death causes enemies to respawn and resets player progress back to checkpoints called shrines, but it does not cause the player to lose leveling-up currency. The Destined One (DO), as he's called in the game, can string together combos of light and heavy attacks. There's a dodge system that rewards you with essentially more powerful attacks when executing perfect dodges. You also have magic at your disposal that lets you freeze enemies for a short amount of time or transform into creatures that have their own combat capabilities. 

I've been playing on the Steam Deck, which probably isn't the best device for the game. (Wukong isn't labeled as Steam Deck certified, but that hasn't stopped it from being the most-played game on the platform over the last week.) In some spots, it chugged ferociously, even at the lowest settings. Nevertheless, the game's environments are wonderful to behold, and I respect that the developers built moments into the game specifically to appreciate that beauty. Early on, I found a spot where DO can meditate, and the camera pulled back to show off an utterly gorgeous vista of a mountainous forest.

Despite its bombastic opening, the next few hours of the game did not come close to those initial heights - and combat is to blame. Enemies were trivially simple, and beyond one aberration of an encounter very early in the game, the bosses were, too.

After suffering ass-beating after ass-beating in Shadow of the Erdtree, I didn't mind Wukong's button-mashy combat style, but after a while, it got boring. The game's narrative offset my boredom enough to keep me going. There's a bestiary with highly descriptive entries that read like fairytales. Every time I defeated a new enemy, I'd immediately pause to read the new entry and see the enemy's portrait that looked like a traditional woodblock painting.

It'd be nice if the conversation about the game ended here, but unfortunately, Black Myth: Wukong has launched with a lot of baggage. In 2020, the game was introduced in the West with a slick, 13-minute trailer highlighting graphics and action that were impressive for a game still early in development. However, in November of last year, IGN released a report on Game Science, the studio making Wukong, that featured sexist comments from the game's developers made on Chinese social media. When asked about those comments in recent interviews with other outlets, Game Science's response has been "no comment."

Then, in the run-up to the game's launch earlier this week, screenshots of a document from Game Science began circulating on social media featuring instructions on what influencers were and were not allowed to discuss. The prohibited topics included covid-19, politics, the Chinese game industry, fetishization, "feminist propaganda," and "other content that instigates negative discourse."

Prerelease embargoes are common, though they're usually limited to things like special character appearances, boss fights, plot twists, or anything the developers want to keep as a surprise for players. But it's odd for a developer to dictate how a reviewer can talk about a game. 

This strange move has made Wukong a cause celebre within certain video game communities on social media. There is a small but loud contingent of gamers who applaud Game Science's refusal to speak on the sexist comments made by its employees, seeing the game's success as a repudiation of what they call the "woke" video game industry and its concerted efforts to include the opinions and perspectives of marginalized identities. So much so that reviewers who don't enthusiastically praise the game, or bring up its developers' history of making sexist comments, have received Gamergate-levels of harassment. 

In Screen Rant's review, the author's byline was removed "for their safety." The IGN reporter who wrote the initial report on Game Science was also subject to harassment, including since-deleted fabricated quotes saying they were "devastated" Wukong had amassed so many players. This level of violent response feels really silly for a game that's already sold millions and is sitting comfortably at an 81 on Metacritic. 

Curiosity is a powerful enticement, and I'm glad mine led me to try Black Myth: Wukong rather than dismissing it out of hand for the unfortunate discourse. As I've said earlier, I love Chinese historical dramas, consuming them voraciously wherever I can get them. They have a tendency to run long - sometimes upwards of 100 episodes - and, unfortunately, not all of them can be bangers.

Playing Wukong felt like those middle episodes of a Chinese drama when the plot is spinning its wheels on the same conflict between the heroine and her evil stepmother / empress / sister / concubine. Nothing's happening, but it's still too damn pretty to put down.