!!! IMPORTANT: BEFORE PLAYING THIS GAME, LEARN AT LEAST THE BASICS OF SUN WUKONG AND JOURNEY TO THE WEST !!!
I genuinely think people should know this before starting the game. If you know absolutely nothing about Sun Wukong or Journey to the West, there is a good chance you will spend a large part of the game wondering what the hell is going on.
I got almost halfway through the game without fully understanding the story. Who are these characters? Why am I fighting them? What happened in the past? Why are certain characters so important? The game explains a lot of this as if the player is already supposed to know the answers.
Eventually, I literally had to stop playing and research Sun Wukong and Journey to the West online. Only then did many parts of the game start making sense. Black Myth: Wukong isn't simply retelling Wukong's original journey from the beginning; much of its story takes place after the events associated with Journey to the West.
The problem is that the game doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining this to newcomers. It feels like the developers designed the story assuming everyone already knows Chinese mythology, Journey to the West, and Sun Wukong's story. If I have to leave the game and research the source material just to properly understand what the game is trying to tell me, I consider that a serious storytelling problem.
My other major problem is the length.
THIS GAME IS WAY LONGER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE.
And the lack of gameplay variety makes that problem even worse. You basically use the same main weapon, the staff, throughout the entire game. Yes, there are different stances, abilities, spells, and transformations, but for me, none of that replaces the variety that completely different weapon types could have provided.
For a game this long, I would have loved to use different weapon classes. After dozens of hours using the same fundamental combat system, encounters inevitably start feeling similar. The game is already long, and because the core combat doesn't evolve enough, it feels even longer than it actually is.
But one of my biggest problems with the entire game is easily the level design.
Some areas LOOK like you should be able to explore them. There is a perfectly normal-looking path in front of you. No cliff, no wall, no closed gate, no logical environmental reason why you shouldn't be able to continue.
You walk forward.
INVISIBLE WALL.
They literally put invisible walls in the middle of paths that visually look completely accessible.
Even worse, the environment constantly gives you the impression that certain places are explorable. You see a path, naturally follow it because you expect to discover something, and sometimes there is absolutely NOTHING at the end.
No item.
No enemy.
No secret.
No lore.
No reward.
Nothing.
Some areas even look like they should become accessible through a quest or lead somewhere important, but you walk toward them and once again hit an invisible wall.
This completely damages the feeling of exploration. Eventually, instead of thinking, "I wonder what's over there?" you start thinking, "There's probably another invisible wall."
Good level design should visually communicate where the player can and cannot go. If you don't want me going somewhere, put a cliff there. Put a locked gate there. Put rocks there. Put a collapsed building there. Give me ANY environmental reason why I can't continue.
Don't show me a perfectly walkable path and then put an invisible wall in the middle of it.
That's just bad level design.
The dead-end paths make this even more frustrating. The game presents these large environments and side paths as if exploration matters, but sometimes you spend time exploring only to receive absolutely nothing for it. At that point, exploration stops feeling rewarding and starts feeling like wasted time.
And then I learned something AFTER FINISHING THE GAME that annoyed me even more:
THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT ENDINGS.
I followed the main path, finished the game normally, and naturally assumed that the ending I got was the actual conclusion.
Then I discovered there was another ending that required additional content.
Why?
If the other ending provides a more meaningful conclusion to the story, why doesn't simply following the main story naturally lead toward it? Why should I defeat the final boss, finish the game, and then have to search "Black Myth: Wukong true ending" online afterward?
I have nothing against secret or alternative endings. They can be great. But hiding a more meaningful conclusion behind content that players can easily miss just feels unnecessary.
Visually, Black Myth: Wukong is incredible. Some of the boss designs are excellent, the animations are impressive, and the combat can be genuinely fun, especially during the earlier parts of the game.
But great graphics don't erase these problems.
I had to research outside the game to properly understand the story. The game is unnecessarily long. Having essentially one main weapon means the combat doesn't have enough variety to carry that length. The level design constantly gives misleading visual information about where you can explore. There are invisible walls in the middle of completely normal-looking paths. Some paths lead nowhere and reward you with absolutely nothing. And after finishing the game, you can discover that there was another, more meaningful ending you didn't even know existed.
Black Myth: Wukong, for me, is a game with some fantastic ideas and incredible presentation that becomes unnecessarily exhausting because of its design decisions.
And I'll say it again:
!!! BEFORE PLAYING THIS GAME, LEARN AT LEAST THE BASICS OF JOURNEY TO THE WEST AND SUN WUKONG !!!
Otherwise, you might end up like me halfway through the game, searching the internet and asking yourself:
"What the hell am I playing, who are these people, and what is even happening?"
