Black Myth: Wukong

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As the great philosopher-musician Beck once said: in the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey. And why wouldn’t I be? Monkeys represent the heart and soul of the human experience. It’s the screeching, the swinging through trees, the poop flinging…all of this comes together to really emphasize the romance of the monkey experience. What better way to allow us lowly humans to embrace our primate roots than by allowing us to be a monkey in a video game?

That’s where Black Myth: Wukong comes in, a title that combines the primal energy of the monkey with the cold brutality of a Soulslike, all wrapped within the Chinese classic Journey to the West mythos.

via YouTube

There’s a pretty good chance you’re at least somewhat familiar with the story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, an ape who managed to reach enlightenment and who appears all over the place in various bits of Asian mythology. Black Myth allows us to walk a mile in his paws, battling the minions of Erlang Shen and the celestial bureaucracy in an effort to protect Wukong’s home. The exact wheres and whats of the plot might be a little difficult to follow, but let’s be real: you’re here to smack bad guys with Wukong’s iconic staff until there’s no bad guys left to smack, right?

It’s fortunate, then, that Black Myth makes Wukong a pretty satisfying experience. Wukong’s got light attacks and heavy attacks, with the latter consuming a Focus meter that can be recovered by landing light attacks or charging up power; Focus management can be a pain, but the results are definitely worth it. There’s also stamina and mana to manage, with stamina used for dodging about and sprinting while mana fuels Wukong’s array of spells. Those spells go a long way to victory here, as they allow you to freeze enemies in place, leave a decoy and sneak around invisibly, summon a horde of clones and more. If that’s not enough, Wukong’s also capable of capturing the spirits of powerful foes, then taking on their forms to unleash powerful attacks or even shapeshift completely and take on a new set of moves. All of this can be upgraded via skill points you’ll collect throughout the journey, which makes for a nice sense of progression.

There’s plenty to see and do throughout Black Myth, including treasures to find, meditation points to muse on and optional bosses to battle. Those bosses are really the highlight of the experience, as they come in a variety of menacing shapes and sizes. While you might have heard “Soulslike” and felt your sphincter clench a bit, Black Myth’s difficulty writ large tends to be on the gentler side of the genre, with many of those bosses feeling a bit more like Monster Hunter battles than something out of Elden Ring. Invest in health early on and you’ll find that Wukong can take plenty of hits and you’ve got plenty of tricks to keep him going. A little patience and effort will see our hero through.

Black Myth is a pleasant experience, all in all, but it’s certainly not perfect. The designers seem to have really gotten into the idea of making vast, expansive worlds to explore…but then realized that it’d be easier to block off much of them with invisible walls rather than fleshing every corner out with content. This isn’t a dealbreaker but it can be frustrating at times. Likewise, this is a great-looking game, but you’re going to need some pretty killer hardware to get the most out of it. Play on a nice, beefy PC if all possible, and even then you should expect that you’ll need DLSS or such with frame generation to keep things running nicely. You get what you put into this one presentation-wise, so this is the game to make your expensive rig sing if you’ve got one.

All that said, Black Myth: Wukong is some solid twenty hours or so of monkeying around. Souls fans will love it, fans of Journey to the West will love it, and fans of throwing poop will…I dunno, I can’t speak for them, but they’ll probably love it too! It’s a pretty demanding game when it comes to performance and you’re definitely going to be stymied when you see areas you can’t actually reach, but these are relatively minor complaints in the face of a game that does so much right. It’s the time of the chimpanzees. Become a monkey.