There’s a moment in Black Myth: Wukong that would be the perfect visual metaphor for the game’s hopeful, proud ascension as China’s big breakthrough into the Western AAA pantheon. Unfortunately, that moment is restricted, and we can’t talk about that. There are moments in Black Myth: Wukong of such enthralling beauty and visual poetry and mythmaking unlike almost anything in the current AAA gaming space right now.
We can’t show them to you or discuss their contents. There are reams of lore and mythology and parables and morality plays, dancing with such wild abandon with fantastical, whimsical, imaginative character work and design, giving depth and beauty and context to the otherwise quite obtuse narrative of Black Myth: Wukong. We can’t tell you anything about them.
There is something to be said about the fact that, despite being a rather major, all-encompassing element in the original texts, the goddess Guanyin is such a marginalized part of the game’s narrative. But, while reviewers aren’t restricted on “feminist propaganda” as streamers are, since discussing it requires delving into the particulars of the story–you guessed it–we can’t talk about that. That leaves precisely two things to really, substantively say about Black Myth: Wukong: It’s extremely pretty, and it’s not trying to ape (ha) FromSoftware’s work as much as you might think.
Fortunately and probably not coincidentally, those are the two biggest positives the game has going fo.