Black Myth: Wukong Review

The art is the reason to play it. Yaoguai design pulls from Journey to the West with a specificity Western studios cannot imitate, temple interiors and mountain passes are photogrammetry-dense, and the animated interludes between chapters are genuinely beautiful short films in different styles. Unreal Engine 5 is pushed harder here than in most first-party games. The combat is where it slips. Three stances plus a focus meter sounds flexible, but light and heavy strings are short, dodging lacks the generous invulnerability that would make aggression readable, and too many bosses resolve into waiting for one opening and repeating it.

Spells like Immobilize are so strong that they flatten encounters that would otherwise be interesting. The narrative assumes deep familiarity with its source and gives newcomers almost no support, so a rich story arrives as a sequence of disconnected episodes. Enormously impressive as a technical and artistic statement, uneven as a game to actually play.