there's a beautiful coat of paint to this world, but just barely beneath it are the fragile, uninspired wire structure of it's actual construction. overly simple and full of invisible walls and straight hallways.

the actual "game" is a secondary feature to hold up the parade of mythical figures that is the real point. they are thrown at you with haste, whether they fit or not. this is a trend through every aspect. every corner of the "story" and structure is overburdened with lore to the detriment of being more comfortably comprehensible. the dialogue is well worded but the narrative is uninspired. to someone unfamiliar with the source material it would be completely incomprehensible. and that's fine by itself. I applaud the idea of aiming something at a narrow audience. The trouble is that the goal is to reference and call back to the journey west as much as possible and that takes priority over creating a self contained experience. It has just barely enough internal consistency to swallow it. But you won't leave the experience with the intended appreciation for the source material so much as bewilderment.

I don't deny that a journey west is a cornerstone of literature and the origin of a great many tropes across a myriad of entertainment. it has made it's mark. The trouble with looking at the foundation piece is that much has been built on top since then and examining the original, it just feels worse than anything today. For all the wealth of references that drown out anything original, some of of the portrayals completely contradict the source text and make their own interpretation for the sake of making the game's plot work. Some characters are wildly different in their behavior and motivation than who they were in the journey west. Why go that far but still have so much fidelity instead of a comprehensible story?

It controls well and responsively, the boss fights are challenging, but its more interested in stapling as many flashy shape shifter powers and call outs to abilities sun wukong had than it is in making the combat more engaging. Despite this, the combat is still pretty good. Not a from soft game by any means, but good. Smaller enemies are just speed bumps added to give you some game to do in between bosses and more importantly, to add more mythology entries to the bestiary. This isn't to discard what is good here. The boss fights are a blast, at first. It doesn't keep up the momentum all the way through but it has a very hopeful start. The available abilities are still varied and fun to use. The skill tree is robust and surprisingly skill choices have a meaningful impact on game play, particularly in synergy with equipment bonuses. The beginnings of a good game are here. I just can't help but wish this was a boss rush game.

At the end of the day this game is primarily a self pleasure session about mythology in the journey west. If that's your special interest, great. It's going to be perfect for you. underneath that its an acceptable game. On it's own feet, it's okay. Not competitive with the best games mechanically. But adequate. Pretty. It doesn't deserve much in the way of praise for hitting the bare minimum of fun while being a mess in several ways and not being interested in being a game so much as a vehicle.

I have no doubt some joy can be taken in this game. but when we look back on it, there will be nothing memorable here. its not about to inspire a new industry standard. its just another game.

Put simply this is a good game. The impressive graphical quality and smooth combat have been the general media focus but I think the memorable and distinct music and character/art designs, the beautiful and poetic post-chapter animations, second half story and some very good bosses deserve more credit and elevate this experience over other AAA action-RPG games.

Things to consider:

• The story and quest design have an obvious souls-like influence, in that you are generally uncovering the remarkable events and lore of an area or character post-facto, and frequently not through direct exposition. I know there have been a lot of comparisons to GoW, FF16, etc. due to the general genre of the game but the narrative of this game is much, much more hands off. I will say that about halfway through chapter 3 (of 6) there is a companion character introduced that allows for a much more traditional story telling approach, and I resonated more with the second half of the game as a result.

• Some truly great bosses with complex but learnable attack strings, timings, gimmicks and unmatched aesthetics. Almost all of the bosses were satisfying but there are some exceptionally high highs with few low lows, if that makes sense. Despite the spectacle and theater of many of the bosses they never compromise the gameplay experience for that spectacle; very few mid fight cutscenes barring rare phase transitions, and despite flashy lightning effects etc. there were very few attack patterns that were visually difficult to discern. I appreciate not losing control of my character, or the most interesting elements of the encounter being canned mid-fight cutscenes, etc.

• The game should have had difficulty settings; I can see some people likely struggling with certain bosses in spite of the powerful tools provided and generally forgiving nature of the game. I don't see how a story mode (something as simple as making your character incapable of dying) would have hurt the game. This goes in the other direction; as a souls nerd I generally found the game a bit on the easy side, even handicapping my character with only the starting armor and avoiding the more powerful spells and abilities. I suspect the souls-lite "no difficulty" settings approach, without elden rings horizontal progression and ability to overlevel, summon or otherwise brute force challenges, was a mistake that will impact a portion of the potential player base.

I don't think its worth debating in depth the extent of the souls-like influence on this game, or whether it should be characterized a souls-lite, but I will say that there are very clear design influences for people familiar with the genre and that should be a consideration for people who dislike souls games.

The combat in this game is good; its just flashy bloodborne with a builder/spender system and a variety of spells, transformations and nioh-style yokai powers. Boss staggers are deterministic rather than hidden. The light attack string has attack commits and long animations on the 1st and 5th attack, and the mid combo attacks can be cancelled out of ala rise of the ronin or sekiro, making the combat feel smooth and allowing for generally safe mid-boss-combo pokes and counters that keep fights busy but deliberate. I could go all day about the clever souls-influence in their heavy attack animations, boss design and approach to stamina but honestly the game is fun even if you just dodge dodge R1 R1 dodge dodge like every souls game ever. As with most souls-influenced games, the fun of the combat is in interacting with the bosses moveset, not your own.

Rock solid.

This game has fallen a victim of a rather unjust journalism and weird reviews. Many compared it to Dark Souls, simply because of difficulty and stamina being included in the combat while the game is far closer to the likes of God of War, both in combat and theme, story, setting, but is better in every aspect.

I only expected a cool combat, good visuals and fun monkey (love monkeys) from this game, but got hit with great bosses, deep combat and a feel of actually being a part of mythology.

That is something that I lacked in games that dealt with that setting. Hades, 1 and 2, as much as I love them, they take a very "humane" approach to Greek mythology, first game is mostly about them having a very human family problems. That is fine since the story and characters are detailed, stylized and all is surrounded by endlessly fun gameplay loop. Hades 2 seems to continue with this.

God of War does a similar thing, humanizes gods, makes them less godly than the actual mythology paints them as and tries doing a dad-son story in a very much Hollywood movie style. Something I was not very found of.

Either way, neither of those two, at the moment most popular mythology based games tried to actually recreate the feeling of myth stories, they only took from mythology what they liked. Black Myth takes a vastly different approach of adding instead of taking.

Taking place after the famous Journey to the West, the story is divided into 6 acts, each of them telling a story out of this world, full of godly mischief, inhumane sentient being playing with the lives of mortals for reasons unknown or incomprehensible. Humans are far in the background, used as a distant thing in a vast world full of weird magic and unnatural rules that fill the world of Chinese mythology.

The feeling of being a part of a mythologic story that I got from Black Myth is unparalleled to any other game that took a jab at any mythology. It is as if the creators of this game dig up some ancient tablets telling more stories of Chinese mythos and decided to convey them to modern world in a form of video game.

All else seems like an addition to that. Combat is incredibly fluid, much more than that of God of War, and present more options and possible build. It is sometimes rather difficult, with difficulty spikes being a bit of a negative. None of the regular enemies are of a real challenge, and neither are 80% of the bosses. All of them are rather cool though, both visually and mechanically offering a huge variety.

Art is amazing, both the in game graphics, the visual style and art direction, heavily inspired by places both natural and man-made from China. Only a few locations stick out as being a bit of maze-like due to their natural similarities. And on top of that you have in between chapters little animated movies, each in different style, telling a story, to break up the pace after a culminating boss fight of the chapter.

One thing that I will probably forget is the music sadly, it escaped me too many times, and there are no tracks that will stick in my memory like some boss fight themes from Fromsoft games.

Unless STALKER 2 lives up to my high expectations, its my pick for the game of the year.