Black Myth: Wukong is incredible, but is literally lost in translation

REVIEW: An outstanding game with a story that can be a bit difficult to follow largely due to hit-and-miss localisation.

One of the end-game bosses, just the prove that I actually beat the game.

This is a repost of the review from the end of last week’s edition. Each week I write one main story and finish the newsletter with a game review that I’ve played. If you are new here, and like what you’re reading, well, the button below is for you.

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"What took you so long? Constipation?" says your crass boar-like companion Zhu Bajie as you release him from his prison inside two golden cymbals, achieved by ramming a defeated courtier-turned-thunder dragon into it.

That one sentence just about sums up Black Myth: Wukong. It's a game that's mechanically impressive with incredibly unique set pieces to boot. But also narratively difficult, localised unusually and hard to follow as a result.

You play as the Destined One, a monkey on a mission to revive Sun Wukong — a monkey god — by completing a pilgrimage that essentially mirrors the deity's own journey, recorded in the famous 16th century Chinese novel, Journey to the West. It paints a picture of a unique world that grapples with issues around greed, atonement, rivalry, and mortality.

Mechanically, the game plays somewhat akin to a souls-like. Enemies hit hard, bosses hit harder and you need to get good at dodging, learning their movements and pressing your advantage in order to progress through the game. Healing is limited, and area enemies regenerate when you rest at a shrine. Despite the frequent comparisons, that's perhaps where the similarities end. Black Myth: Wukong is more on rails than modern FromSoft titles and is arguably more like the recent entries in the God of War series.

Like many modern games in this action adventure genre, it offers a diverse skill upgrade tree for the Destined One. You can change the way you play with customisable spells and new equipment. Despite the Destined One only really having one set of combat moves, the game threads the needle of offering enough character customisation to keep your play-through unique and interesting.

Boss encounters are frequent and challenging. Some can feel like a game of four-dimensional chess, as they cleverly recognise when you are abusing one of their weaknesses and swap up their tactics as a result. There's an iconic scene with one of the final bosses where he abuses your efforts to heal and restores his own health instead. I won't spoil it any further, but it's a masterstroke moment and further evidence of fantastic fight design.

On that, you could go as far as calling Black Myth: Wukong a boss rush game, where it's really just a slideshow of tough encounters. It's curious that some of the game's most challenging fights are actually towards the start of the game, right when you are getting the hang of the mechanics. It's perhaps part of the reason I bounced off this game when it first came out.

Black Myth: Wukong isn't open world, but exploration of each of its six large main areas is encouraged and rewarded. While it wasn't in the base version of the game, later patches introduced both an area map and a smarter fast travel system that greatly aid in seeking out every nook and cranny of the world, and ensuring you aren't accidentally retracing old ground. You can also unlock a village that clusters together all the zodiac animals that upgrade your character and help you on your quest about halfway through the game. It's questionable whether this should have been made accessible a bit earlier — perhaps as early as first chapter — to make the title a little easier to navigate.

This is all to say that at its core, this is mechanically a very good game, and well worth the hype it generated, including its Game of the Year nomination. Let's dig into my sticking point with it: Localisation.

Comparisons to Elden Ring — whose groundbreaking DLC was released a month before Black Myth: Wukong last year — has somewhat given this game a free pass when it comes to storytelling. It's normal for FromSoft game to be very cryptic with its narrative. There are whole YouTube channels dedicated to piecing together its story from in-game item descriptions.

Black Myth: Wukong however, is designed to be a story-led game. Each area features plenty of cutscenes and voice-acting. Each chapter ends with a beautiful and unique animation, aimed at highlighting a key theme of the overall plot. It's an incredible tale, and pays so much homage to its source material. Which is why the occasional unusual snippet of dialogue — perhaps directly translated rather than rewritten — feels so odd.

Bosses bark unusual comments mid-combat, sometimes contradicting something they said earlier. Purposefully cryptic or foreshadowing lines come off as just plain weird. There are references to Buddhism and reincarnation that aren't really explained — or are assuming knowledge. You can tell a lot of metaphor and analogy was written into the original game that seemingly didn't land in the English localisation. It's reminiscent of 90s Japanese Role-Playing Games that were translated into English as an afterthought, but — to be clear — not nearly as poor.

While I am no expert in localisation, there's a world in which we just don't have the words in English to articulate what's being said in Chinese. Maybe this game wasn't even intended for global consumption, but changed its approach in its final phases due to its quality. Proper localisation may have required a full script rework and perhaps that was just impossible. Perhaps this is how French, Spanish and German players feel when English games release in their language? Who knows?

The only issue with this is that this game is inadvertently a fantastic ambassador for Chinese culture and mythology. The smallest amount of extra localisation polish would take it to the next level. Either way, Black Myth: Wukong has surely put China's game development scene on the map, establishing it as being more than just a maker of catchy pay-as-you-go mobile games. I'd love to learn more about Chinese mythology, I'm hopeful that future games will give me that chance.

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5 Pro

Worth trying if you like: Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarok, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Available on: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, GeForce Now, Microsoft Windows