Reaching the later stages of any game is a unique time in the gaming experience. By about thirty to forty hours, players have usually mastered the game's mechanics and have hopefully entered a kind of zen state where the whole, intended experience starts to take over. Black Myth: Wukong (2024) enters this state halfway through chapter 4, the area I entered during my fifth day of playing.

I can't emphasize enough how essential Zhu Bajie is to making this game a complete experience. Having a connection to ground the narrative gives so much purpose to the Destined One's journey. It is still a shame that the Destined One acts as a silent protagonist because it would be interesting to know what kind of dialogue they would have with other characters in this fantastical world. I can understand the choice of a silent protagonist; the developers want the players to experience the world for themselves and become immersed in it without a filter. Given the wealth of source material on the Monkey King, I can't shake the feeling that this was a missed opportunity. Still, I can respect this narrative choice, even if it makes the game seem somewhat barren, absent some exposition.

Chapter 4 truly shines in terms of narrative, in contrast to the preceding chapters. The narrative turns to Zhu Bajie and how his past has returned to haunt him. I won't go into spoilers here (as much as possible). Still, it is a love story that mingles societal obligations with regret, betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption while delivering some of the most epic boss battles we will see all year. If you were having trouble with the earlier parts of the game like I was, I highly encourage you to stick it out until Chapter 4, when the narrative becomes more grounded and shines due to its merits.

Sadly, as strong as Chapter 4 is, some gameplay and technical issues start to arise around this time and continue into Chapter 5. Around the end of Chapter 4, I began to experience noticeable stuttering when in boss fights and entering new areas. I don't know much about the Unreal Engine, but it seemed like the game would pause to load some needed assets, and this would cause the frame rate to hitch and plummet in some encounters. This was incredibly frustrating in fights because the game would continue to play out the enemies' actions, like hitting the player, even if the screen was stuck in a single frame for half a second. (Note: I was playing on my main gaming PC with a 4090 with 64 GB of RAM. This was not an issue with available resources, in my opinion, especially since the first parts of the game ran exponentially smoother.)

Unlike earlier chapters, it seemed like the game was having difficulty keeping up with itself. Additional hints, like assets clipping incorrectly or improperly placed, suggest that the developers had not finished optimizing or polishing the later levels when the game was released a few weeks ago. This is not unheard of for ambitious games in scale and scope, such as this one; Baldur's Gate III (2023) is still releasing new optimization patches a full year into its release. I fully expect that work will continue to improve the later parts of the game, given that we will get two DLCs early next year, and Black Myth: Jiang Ziya (TBC), a full sequel, is in the works.

Outside of my troubles with optimization, there were some scripting errors where I had to do a boss fight twice even though I had already done so, and I could have progressed to another area unimpeded. The camera is the most significant issue in BMWK, and I have not heard any other reviews address this. BMWK has one of the worst cameras I have ever seen in an action video game since the early days of action video games. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the camera in action games was a unique enemy that players had to wrestle with constantly, and it appears that BMWK's camera is a step back from earlier innovations.

In action games like BMWK, a lock-on mechanic is essential to combat. For the most part, locking on to a target works in BMWK, given you are in an open area. However, on levels like the Pagoda Realm, which features several enclosed areas, the camera doesn't clip through the wall to frame the action. There were several instances where I was fighting an enemy, and the cameral would be inside my body, completely obscuring my vision.

Even in open areas, if I were ever pushed against a wall or cornered by an aggressive enemy, the camera would pile on to ruin the encounter. To deal with this, I kited enemies to open areas or bypass them altogether. It's a shame since the Pagoda Realm was one of the most aesthetically unique areas I had encountered thus far; I indeed grew to hate that area and dreaded returning to finish a quest. I hope this gets addressed in a patch.

Despite the above issues, there is much to love about the later levels of BMWK. I will save most of my praises until I finish the game, hopefully later this week, because there will be much to say when it comes time to give BMWK its due.