Black Myth: Wukong review – a fantastically exciting action game

Black Myth: Wukong is a video game obsessed with spectacle – but inspiring awe requires confidence. Such self-assuredness is a rarity in big-budget games, where concerns about mainstream palatability often inspire timidity instead on the part of their developers. Thanks to its state-of-the-art graphics, Black Myth: Wukong looks as though it belongs among the blockbusters, but this action game is actually the product of a Chinese indie outfit, Game Science. Yet the experience is so fully formed that it’s hard to believe that this is the studio’s first “premium” game.

It is based on the seminal 16th-century east Asian novel, Journey to the West, which has already inspired enormous swaths of modern pop culture, from Dragon Ball to the 2010 game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West . You play as a stone monkey, Sun Wukong, a major character in the novel whose description always seemed destined to become a video game protagonist. In the original story, Wukong is said to possess incredible strength and speed – but that’s not all. He can also transform into all sorts of animals and objects, and can manipulate the weather. Oh, and he can make copies of himself, too, just in case one all-powerful monkey isn’t enough to take care of the job.

All of these abilities are introduced in a tutorial where Wukong challenges mountain-sized deities and an army that disappears into the horizon. It’s like a shot of adrenaline, and the game does a terrific job of maintaining this momentum through its 40 hours of playtime. Wukong’s vast array of abilities is complemented by different characters that you can collect and use, Pokémon-style, to keep things fresh throughout.

Part of what makes Wukong such a striking experience is that it borrows modern action-game conventions suited to its story, and leaves the rest of what you might expect on the cutting-room floor. The most obvious influence here is the “Soulslike” genre, a type of game that’s notoriously challenging and brimming with magnificent, larger-than-life boss fights. In the original Souls games, the structure can be thought of as a sine wave of highs and lows. A single hallway with a couple of enemies can swell to feel like an entire universe as the player struggles to make it to the other side unscathed. Progress becomes so incremental and painstaking that achieving anything feels like a grand accomplishment. By the time you get to the fearsome boss fight, it’s almost like a relief. Finally, the source of your endless woe looks as grandiose as it feels.

Death may be a certainty, but it’s also like getting a taste of reincarnation. A game such as Wukong, which is rooted in Buddhism, is therefore a perfect fit for the Soulslike genre. Encountering immortals and yao gais is as thrilling and terrifying in the game as the myths suggest. The enduring nature of Journey to the West also grants a lived-in feel that rings true even if you are unfamiliar with the story. There’s a satisfying heft and swiftness to the combat, but even smaller details, like soaking gourds to amplify your abilities, make the universe feel more authentic.

Unlike most action games of its ilk, Wukong is not an open-world game: there’s no mini map dotted with tasks, no quest log to examine. Sometimes the lack of assistance can be overwhelming. Every new area comes with the possibility of getting lost, but the line between anxiety and excitement is thin. Wukong is streamlined, but it captures the enchantment of exploration better than games that flaunt the illusion of vastness, only to reduce their impressive world into a collection of digestible map icons. By forcing the player to hike down a perilous mountain or wade blind through a viscous swamp, Wukong directs you to trust the process. Minimising menu time envelops you more thoroughly in the marvellous landscapes. Such are the possibilities when a game takes care to curate the experience, instead of glorifying the fantasy of player choice.

Beyond the terrific exploration, Wukong does a tremendous job of rewarding curiosity. Parts of the world are hidden from the player at first, until you collect the right set of items or speak to the right characters. These optional sections are aptly called “Obsessions”. Buddhist thought heavily revolves around the perils of attachment, which in its view paves the road for suffering, so the items you find are a microcosm of that idea: that someone, at some point, had such a heavy attachment to the quest object that their anguish transports you into an ethereal space. It’s a great rendition of a world rife with mysticism and otherworldly spirits. And it is cheeky, too: obsessive players will uncover these areas, even if it means that they have to defeat another slew of mighty bosses.

Deservedly, Black Myth: Wukong has been enormously successful. Journey to the West is a tale with a proven track record, but no other adaptations of the novel have sold 10m copies in the span of just a few days. For some westerners, it seems to have come as a surprise that a game like this could hail from a country known for mobile games and micro-transactions; for others, its success is inseparable from its legibility to Chinese audiences, who have perhaps never been so well-served by a blockbuster game. It is as if the weight of an entire country’s cultural export has been placed on a developer that practically nobody would even have been able to name prior to this game’s release, and Game Science is clearly unused to the scrutiny it has received. But to look at Black Myth: Wukong purely through the lens of market sizes and tastes is a disservice that obscures the most critical fact of all: it’s a fantastic game.

• Black Myth: Wukong is out now; £54.99