Saturday Morning Gaming: Deeper into Black Myth Wukong

I’ve been playing Black Myth: Wukong some more and, dang, the game is good.

I’ve had a handful of criticisms of the game and, as I play, I watch each of my criticisms evaporate.

The first couple of areas that they give you are exceptionally linear. Like, there’s a path and you follow it. It may branch but it meets back up again. You know the old Yogi Berra line? “When you get to a fork in the road, take it”? Well, the game does that… in the first couple of areas. It resulted in me missing *HUGE* swaths of the third and fourth areas because I figured that the game continued to have straightforward and linear maps.

It doesn’t! You have to start exploring as soon as you finish those first two areas!

I thought that most of the fights were too easy. Like, tap tap done. And then I encountered the poisonous snakes. Oh. If you get poisoned, you need antivenom. If you don’t use it, your health will just tick away until you die. Oh, and there’s a limited number of antivenom potions available too.

So I found myself complaining that I might soon run out of antivenom and so I needed to really sit and think about how I’d go about fighting these guys so I don’t get bit. I found myself strategizing which I should fight and which I could avoid if I timed it right.

And I realized that I was sitting and strategizing how to get through a level and do it right.

Holy cow! I hadn’t done that since Elden Ring!

And then my next criticism was that the fights were maybe a hair too easy.

And then I fought the Black Bear Guai at the end of chapter one.

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This was a fight that was *ALMOST* as bad as the one against Margit in Elden Ring (though maybe it’d have been easier if I bothered exploring the level instead of assuming that the path to the boss was the only path worth taking… maybe I’d have gotten something useful against him, or maybe even just gone up a level or two).

And then, after I *FINALLY* beat the fight, the game gave me one of the most amazing cutscenes ever to take me to Chapter 2.

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Where my new complaint is “wait, I want to go back to Chapter 1 and do it right this time!”

So if you’ve been hesitant *AT ALL* about this game, check it out. It’s really good.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is one of the gorgeous statues you walk past in the game. I don’t know who it’s supposed to be but it’s probably someone that makes people familiar with Journey to the West stand up on their couch and hoot and holler at the television. All screenshots taken by the author.)

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