The versatility of the Souls-like genre is that a lot of its best ideas can be applied to just about any action-RPG and work well, and Black Myth: Wukong is a good example. It carries a lot of the subgenre’s conventions, such as bonfire-like checkpoints that respawn enemies in the area around you, a flask for healing that has a finite number of charges and refills when you rest at a checkpoint, and upgrade points you drop when you die and have to find and recover.
The difference with Black Myth: Wukong, however, is that it’s not nearly as slow, deliberate, dark, or perhaps even difficult as a usual Souls-like. I played a two-hour demo at Summer Game Fest 2024’s Play Days event, and found the game to be quick and agile, with boss fights that were tough and required a lot of reactivity and skill, but didn’t demand nearly as much time put into the usual intense process of learning an enemy’s moves or hitting specific openings to win fights. There’s difficulty in Black Myth: Wukong that echoes a Souls-like, and a lot of the beats are the same, like reading your opponent and dodging their moves, but this is more of a middle ground between traditional third-person action games and a Souls-like in terms of the overall experience.
In the two hours I played Black Myth: Wukong, I was impressed by how well it struck a balance between a Souls-like feel with an angle on faster gameplay. The game is based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, and you take on the part of Sun Wukong, a shapeshifting martial artist and anthropomorphic monkey. The demo was a portion of an early chapter of the game, and the impression it gave was that Wukong hadn’t yet unlocked most of his martial-arts capabilities yet. You fight through most of the game with a staff used to wallop enemies, but while you’re mostly using this one weapon, you’ll unlock additional stances over the course of Black Myth that give you different combos and move sets. At the start, however, you have a limited number of moves and abilities–namely, a light attack and a heavier attack you can link together into combos.
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