After years of anticipation, Black Myth: Wukong (2024) was finally released in August 2024. On its first full day, BMWK reached a staggering 2.4 million concurrent players on Steam, with a reported gross revenue of $850 million at time of writing. This was the second-highest concurrent player count ever recorded, with Counter-Strike 2 (2023) retaining the top spot. By all accounts, this is a remarkable feat, especially for single-player games. Undoubtedly, one of the most significant reasons for this success is the game’s source material, the beloved Chinese fable Journey to the West.

It is hard to overstate the role of Journey to the West in Chinese culture. From an early age, Chinese children fantasized about the stories of Sun Wukong, the fabled Monkey King, who arose from a stone and went on a series of incredible adventures, even attaining immortality. The myths act as a cultural touchstone in Chinese culture and are comparable to the works of Shakespeare or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the West.

At its heart, BMWK is an action game with an easy-to-understand but hard-to-master combat system and incredible visuals, thanks to Unreal Engine 5. BMWK is heavily influenced by games like God of War (2005) and Elden Ring (2023) and shares many of the same features with these games, like drawing on mythology for its narrative, the bonfire system, and punishing epic boss fights.

Despite the apparent influence of these games, BMWK still finds a way to create its own identity and is a strong contender for Game-of-the-Year on its own merits. But, as impressive as BMWK is, issues like an inaccessible narrative, questionable world design, and a poorly implemented camera keep it from achieving greatness. BMWK is a game that unapologetically assumes that the player knows Journey to the West intimately and relies heavily on this knowledge to build out the world.

Knowing or not knowing these stories makes the difference between following the narrative or experiencing the disorientation of something like Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. BMWK’s narrative is grand and incredible, but it is intended for insiders familiar with its traditions; this game is not made for a Western audience despite being fully translated to English and heavily marketed in the West.

Before playing this game, I highly recommend that players familiarize themselves with Journey to the West to maximize their enjoyment of the game. It is disappointing that Game Science hid the narrative this way; it’s like making a movie and telling the audience they should bring the book to the theater so they can understand the plot. There are themes of redemption, forgiveness, and self-awareness that arise from what I can understand, and I am interested in reading the stories myself. Still, not putting the actual tale of Wukong in the game seems like a missed opportunity.

Whether you find the narrative enlightening or nonsensical, depending on your perspective, graphically, BMWK is one of the most beautiful games ever created and is a visual triumph. Every asset is beautifully crafted, and each area is stunningly detailed. The power of Unreal Engine 5 is very much on display in BMWK. I have never seen a game with graphical fidelity, detail, and jaw-dropping visuals like I saw in BMWK. During my playthrough, I must have stopped at least thirty times to marvel at the scene around me, even taking the odd screenshot in photo mode.

Unfortunately, as beautiful as this world is, it is empty. Between the boss battles, there is nothing to do except collect herbs, open chests, or wander aimlessly through the game’s all-to-frequent empty spaces. I encountered many beautiful yet dead areas that seemed to serve no purpose.  After a while, moving through BMWK’s world becomes tedious. The lack of an in-game map doesn’t help, and the game forces the player to navigate by memory. The verticality and similar visuals in many areas make getting lost frustratingly easy.   

In a later chapter, I received a cloud to fly on, and I was excited that my navigation frustrations were finally over. But, it is only usable in a single specific area. After about ten minutes of flying, I found only a few scattered bosses and many more empty spaces. Cloud flying quickly became a chore since I was again in these vast areas with little to do but slowly fly through them on my cloud. I appreciate the developer’s attempt to immerse the player and avoid an Ubisoft-like in-game map and icon system. Still, I was often frustrated by the lack of things to do or a direction to head in. Navigation was a definite low-lite of my playthrough.

Compared to a game like Elden Ring (2022), BMWK’s world design sadly feels shallow and confined. In Elden Ring, every space serves a purpose or has a reason for the player to be there and a way to access it; you can go anywhere you see if you find your way to it. BMWK, however, is filled with invisible walls—a relic I thought games had ditched decades ago. Throughout my playthrough, I walked towards areas that seemed accessible, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier. Eventually, I gave up trying to explore off the beaten path, likely causing me to miss some of the game's secrets.

Similar to Destiny (2014) at its release, BMWK tries to compensate for the world's lack of purpose with beautiful visuals. While the scenery is stunning, players will quickly become bored without any reason to be there. Much of the game’s world feels like it could be cut without losing anything meaningful—less is more, as the saying goes.

The levels also seem designed without enemy encounters in mind. Some areas are so large that the enemy population density was sparse, and their placement felt like they were just there as filler. One area was more reminiscent of 90’s MMOs than a modern triple-A action game; enemies were wandering around in plain sight, evenly spaced apart, with little thought to making the encounters unique. Regular enemy encounters were mainly bland compared to the boss fights, and I spent more time skipping them than engaging with them.

Rendering this world, as empty as it was, was not an issue. I had no problems getting BMWK running on my primary gaming PC, with an Nvidia 4090 and 64 GB of RAM. With all settings on cinematic, ray tracing off, and DLSS enabled, the game ran smoothly at around 130  FPS with stunning visuals. DLSS introduces some blurriness for distant objects, which did not detract from my enjoyment; BMWK isn’t a competitive FPS where details at a distance matter.

I strongly recommend avoiding ray tracing. It adds to the visual fidelity but eats up a lot of resources, even on high-end PCs. I experienced severe stutters during fights with ray tracing enabled, which got me killed more than a few times. The simulated lighting looks excellent anyway, so you won’t miss much. I would advise prioritizing a smooth frame rate over visual fidelity since BMWK’s combat system requires split-second timing for success.

BMWK’s combat system isn’t doing anything other games haven’t done before, but it is doing a lot well, considering this game has a single character who only wields a staff. There is a surprising amount of customization for players to discover. Players are not confined to one play style and can tailor their builds using spells, stances, primary abilities, or transformations.

Your build will flow from the unique abilities of the armor you receive from chests and defeated bosses. Each armor set comes with one or two of these abilities and activates if you wear a specific number of pieces from that set. Players can mix and match pieces from different sets if they want to utilize effects from other sets. It is an easy-to-understand system that hides a surprising amount of depth, which matters much more in the late game.

In the early game, I did not have to think much about the armor I was wearing. The set with the highest defensive rating was usually the best. I mainly focused on learning the skill tree and doing damage with light strikes, trying to proc the critical hit chance and critical damage as much as possible. (This is how I play most games. I’m a burst damage one trick, and I feel no shame. I know who I am.)

In the first few chapters, players will frequently receive new armor sets with higher armor ratings, making my old ones obsolete. Later on, there is a blacksmith who will upgrade armor sets to keep pace with higher-level ones, making all those old abilities relevant again. Introducing armor this way is a clever way to nudge players to explore the armor sets' abilities without forcing them to stick to the set that appears to be best on the surface. This plants the seeds for late-game builds, which are needed when the difficulty spike comes in later chapters.

Around the middle of Chapter 4, BMWK goes from feeling like a God of War action adventure clone to one of the more challenging Souls games very fast. Refining your build and knowing what type of damage your enemies do becomes incredibly important, regardless of the fighting style you find yourself drawn to.

I completed most of the game with my light-strike crit damage build, but eventually, I had to switch to an armor set that would give me a base damage boost based on a status effect while still offering a lot of damage mitigation. If you have cat-like reflexes and can time your dodges better than me, some late-game armors have more damage output at the cost of damage reduction; they also look really badass.

Overall, the combat system is accessible, allowing players to use their preferred playstyle. There is also a surprising amount of depth to explore, making NG+ runs worth it for those who want to hone their builds even more after their initial playthrough.

As interesting as the combat can be in BMWK, the camera can sometimes ruin the experience, especially when fighting in enclosed spaces. The lock-on works well in open areas, but in enclosed areas, like the cells of the Pagoda Realm, the camera becomes your enemy. While fighting enemies in this area, the camera would zoom in extremely close, causing more than a few deaths and much frustration.

Video: The camera is an enemy npc when fighting in enclosed spaces.

If an aggressive enemy attacked my character against a wall or into a corner, the camera would pile on to ruin the encounter. This didn’t ruin my overall experience, but I hope it gets addressed before the DLCs are released. Thankfully, this issue didn’t affect the best moments in the game, the boss fights.

At its core, BMWK is a game about fighting incredible bosses in dramatic setpiece battles that are so detailed it should be considered a privilege to get your ass handed to you over and over again. If one thing makes BMWK worth its admission price, it is the bosses. There are over eighty bosses, secret and non-secret, to be found throughout the game. Having fought about seventy-five during my playthrough, I was pleasantly surprised that no two bosses were the same; even if I did encounter a reskinned boss, they still felt like they had a unique fighting style and personality. I did face some similar skills, with minor variations in their timing and frequency, but this was infrequent enough that it didn’t affect the individual personality of any given boss.

BMWK is undoubtedly not the first game with challenging bosses; any Souls-like game does the same. However, what makes BMWK different is the level of detail the bosses possess and their pacing. Traditionally, players only get to fight the boss after fighting through an army of boring lesser enemies. Failing a boss means making the ‘walk of shame’ from the last checkpoint and fighting everyone all over again, ad nauseam. Game Science does away with this tired formula and makes the interlude between the epic boss battles, the place the players would rather be, as short as possible.

It is a simple enough spin on the traditional action game formula, but it’s a refreshing take on something no one has innovated for the last forty years. I spent more time fighting bosses than regular mobs. Almost every boss lair has a shrine close to its entrance, making return trips painless. It’s as if Game Science understands what the players want (i.e., to fight fantastical epic creatures in heated pitched battles) and provides it; it sounds so simple said like this.

The boss fights deliver some truly incredible moments. On almost every encounter, some big moment would arise where my eyes would widen, and I’d yell out in excitement. I never knew what to expect from any individual boss, and even if a fight failed, I was mainly happy to return and reengage, even taking over twenty times to beat some bosses. (Except for the Yaksha King. That guy can go fuck himself!)

As engaging as the boss combat is, it would only be half as engaging if not for the exceptional character design. The artistic design of the characters is the best I have ever seen in a video game. The character artists, modelers, and animators did their absolute best to make the characters look incredible and tell me something about their backgrounds. Above, I talked about how the narrative is somewhat inaccessible without knowing the source material; the incredible characterization on display partially recovers this.

Every character model, weapon, item, and special effect is so detailed and exacting, down to the pixel, that it makes other action games look like they belong on a PlayStation 2. With Unreal Engine 5 powering these stunning visuals, this game sets a new industry standard for characterization and graphical design. This level of detail is impossible without a caring and dedicated team who is passionate about their work. The developers at Game Science should be applauded for what they have accomplished in BMWK, and I look forward to what is next to come from this first-time developer.

With its engaging combat systems and obsession for detail, BMWK delivers some of the best-designed boss fights to grace your GPU this year. The game’s focus on big epic moments, when they matter most, makes it a memorable outing into the mythical Chinese countryside, one that will surely be on the minds of gamers and other developers going forward. Despite an inaccessible narrative and questionable world design, Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong is a strong contender for Game of the Year.