MONKEY TALE

BLACK MYTH: WUKONG is the most delightful Soulslike

- Tyler Colp

These animals may not have thumbs, but they sure have hands. Tony the Tiger studied the blade just to carve me into a pumpkin lantern and I’m not even mad about it; in fact, I’m impressed. The entire zoo is out for blood in Black Myth: Wukong and I’m here for it.

Dark Souls never let me stick my tongue out as a giant frog and slap my enemies around with it. It never let me create a posse of clones to punch an evil pile of rocks back into the ground either. If Dark Souls is a trial, Wukong is an adventure. Or if you want to be accurate about it, it’s a Journey to the West, but the animals have health bars. Wukong imagines a version of the classic Chinese story where a fox upgrades your healing potion. If anything about it is truly like FromSoftware’s games, it’s how much it lets its rich world speak for itself.

Wukong doesn’t waste time trying to establish why there’s a forest of wolf men or why you’re serenaded by a man without a head. It opens with hero Sun Wukong laughing in the face of a council of gods who immediately punish him so hard it takes hundreds of years for him to be reincarnated as a level 1 monkey. Journey to the West isn’t required reading before playing Wukong, but doing so might make its world considerably less opaque. Even so, I had no troubles appreciating its eccentric cast of talking animals who are either so amusingly pathetic you pity them or so self-serious it’s like you barged in on their third act.