Black Myth: Wukong

 Dear Reader,

We're nearing the end of the year! It seems that a lot of websites and social media fronts are doing their end of the year wrap up with statistics, memories, and the like. There's also a few awards ceremonies going on to look back at some of the entertaining releases we've had in the form of books, movies, music, and video games, all of which seem designed to frustrate the masses as taste and awards generally don't seem to line up.

Here's where I divert: Black Myth: Wukong.

At the 2024 Video Game Awards Black Myth: Wukong was up for game of the year amonst a smattering of titles that all kind of seemed lackluster. At the time I hadn't played either Wukong or ReFantazio, but I had safely assumed that one of the other would take away the award. Astrobot won, and it has a lot of people confused and ranting about the wrong things. I had just finished Astrobot a few days before the awards, and even I was confused since the game seemed like a Super Mario Wonder ripoff mechanically and in level design. That isn't to say it isn't extremely well done and totally deserving of the GoTY award. I enjoyed my time with it and it played great, looked great, and was exceedingly fun.

Then I tried Wukong: I'm only three hours into the game, but the initial excitement of being dropped into a Chinese fantasy world that mimics Dark Souls/Elden Ring has worn off. Black Myth: Wukong is bad. It stands in its own way almost from the very beginning and robs the player of the main thing that games are supposed to be: Fun. I'm playing on PS5 and have crushed Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodbourne, Elden Ring, ER: Shadow of the Erdtree, Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen (old and new), and a smattering of other Soulslike games. I have a pretty good idea on how these games play, so when I immediately notice there's significant input delay to my controller (outside of the intentional design choice of having heavy attacks/certain actions delayed/slow) then I have an issue. It was so bad that I went online thinking I was possibly crazy or doing something wrong. Nope. Digital Foundry did a pretty good look into the issue and came back acknowledging that input delay is indeed a big issue. So why oh why did the director of Wukong come out and say a bunch of condescending comments about how him and his company should have won when they put out an inferior product? It's like the cybertrucks brakes not working. Okay, you think the truck you designed is cool, but it inherently has design flaws that make it unenjoyable/downright bad. Worse still is the fact that this game has been out for nearly a year and the issue hasn't been fixed, which means the developer either wont acknowledge their mistake, don't know how to fix it, or refuse to fix it. Luckily I rented the game, but the real surprise is how a lot of gamers gave this game a perfect 10 out of 10 when it really wavers between a 6-7 and has been significantly less fun than Stellar Blade, another Soulslike that trended and reviewed worse than Wukong.

I guess this is one of those times that the expectations simply can't live up to the hype people have created.