I still remember the Black Myth: Wukong gameplay video from 2020, when I wasn’t even sure if the final game would look that good. Since then, we’ve released multiple trailers and showcases for Game Science’s Journey to the West-inspired action RPG, and given the visuals, I have a feeling the game will only be playable on PS5 or Xbox Series X . I’m curious how it would feel if it made it to the Steam Deck. We’ve encountered a few current-gen games on the Deck over the past year or so, like Dragon’s Dogma 2, but others have run just fine, like Tekken 8. : Wukong, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was surprised by how it looked and how it ran on Valve’s handheld. I haven’t had enough time to finish it yet, so this review of Black Myth: Wukong is ongoing. I hope to have my full thoughts and comparisons on the PS5 in the near future.
Black Myth: Wukong is not a soul type. Let me just put it out there right now. It’s an action RPG that has some elements of an action-adventure game, as well as some aspects of the Souls-like genre, but comes into its own while delivering an amazing experience and great music. If you haven’t really paid attention to it yet and are curious what the best comparison point is for recent action RPGs, I’d say it has some elements of Nioh 2 and God of War (2018) but still manages to be unique in its The place feels unique. After playing through many bosses, different areas, and seeing quite a few upgrade options available, I can say that Black Myth: Wukong is a great action RPG so far, but I need more time with it Give it full marks. For today’s review embargo, I wanted to at least give you an idea of what it will look and feel like on the Steam Deck. I haven’t played it on PS5 yet, so I can’t comment on that version, but I hope to have some impressions of it when I update this version with my full score.
After a grand opening cutscene, you’ll enter a multi-stage tutorial where you learn the basics of combat and get to know your destiny. I say combat basics because you don’t learn your first major skill until an hour or two into Black Myth: Wukong. I replayed the first four hours with both English and Chinese dubs, and while I initially preferred the latter, I ended up using English on my main save to get a sense of what it felt like later on in important story moments. The Chinese dubbing option is very good and I think you should try it first and see how you find it. However, the embargo prevents me from showing some screenshots of the cutscenes right now. What I can say is that I really like the structure of this game so far. The game is divided into good-sized areas, which may have allowed the developers to really improve the visuals. Even on the Steam Deck (I played at low presets with TSR upscaling enabled), Black Myth: Wukong looks very good on a handheld device.
I found the difficulty curve to be a bit inconsistent when it comes to the bosses and even enemy encounters so far. It was easier than I expected at first, but I’ve hit two walls so far that feel like big spikes. I’ll need to see how others feel about it, but so far the bosses have been excellent, including some that feel a bit hidden.
Black Myth: Wukong PC Control
On PC and Steam Deck, Black Myth: Wukong offers full controller support in addition to keyboard and mouse input options. You can customize bindings and see live layouts of your keyboard and mouse to see which keys do what. I played Black Myth: Wukong on the Steam Deck using the deck itself and my 8BitDo Ultimate controller. You can set the game to display PS5 or Xbox button prompts, use two control presets, and adjust vibration intensity.
Black Myth: Wukong PC display settings and options
Based on my experience on the Steam Deck OLED, Black Myth: Wukong allows you to choose the display (monitor), calibrate brightness, display mode (no borders and windows, seemingly no full screen), aspect ratio (16:9 , 21:9 and auto (no 16:10 or 32:9 yet)), frame rate capping (30, 60, 90, off), toggle v-sync, adjust motion blur intensity and camera shake (I turned it off).
Black Myth: Wukong PC Graphics Options
Black Myth: Wukong has quite a few graphical options. First, you can have the game recommend graphics based on your hardware application. On the Steam Deck OLED, it’s initially a mix of low and medium, but after patching or when I try it on other Steam Decks, it presets to low for everything in 90 resolution scaling, FSR, and frame generation. You can then adjust super resolution (upscaling) to increase image quality from 45 to 100, select upscaling options (FSR, XeSS, and TSR), toggle frame generation, adjust ray tracing (low, medium, very high), and select from Few graphics presets.
These presets let you adjust view quality, anti-aliasing quality, post-effects quality, shadow quality, texture quality, visual effects quality, hair quality, vegetation quality, global illumination quality, and reflection quality. Most of these settings have a live preview image showing the changes, as well as a text warning telling you that the current settings may cause performance problems because they exceed the hardware’s recommended settings.
Recommended graphics settings include FSR at 90 resolution with frame generation enabled. I wanted to try all the upgrade methods in Black Myth: Wukong, and in the end I liked the results of using TSR the best among the three.
Black Myth: Wukong Steam Deck Game Impressions
To be honest, I didn’t expect Black Myth: Wukong to even be playable remotely on the Steam Deck, but it’s more than that. When using the suggested presets without making any changes, I replayed the opening times (while testing other voice options) and saw anywhere from 20+ seconds to 40+ seconds after disabling frame generation. Enable frame generation and FSR using the recommended settings, and set the scaling resolution to 90. Better visual effects.
If you turn everything down, super-res to 45, TSR on, and frame generation off, expect to see 40 to 50 fps early on. That might not sound great to some, but given the demands of the game, I honestly didn’t even expect to hit 30 fps with everything turned off and FSR turned on. Since this is a very heavy game, the performance overlay shows a power consumption of around 22W on my Steam Deck OLED, which gives an estimated battery life of just under 2.5 hours at full brightness. I don’t usually measure battery life, but I wanted to make a note of it given the visual impact.
Given my early experience with frame generation playing games like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, I initially ended up forcing the GPU clock to 1200 MHz, so I decided to try it out while playing at the lowest settings as well. I enabled the “Allow tearing” option, forced the GPU clock to 1600 MHz, and turned off v-sync in the game to see the effect. In order to achieve the best compromise between visuals and performance in Black Myth: Wukong, I will update this with more results as I get into the second half of the game, the HUD screenshot above should give you an idea of it How it works and looks like.
Black Myth: Wukong also comes with a good camera mode. This lets you adjust field of view, scrolling, depth of field, brightness, contrast, vignette, use many filters, switch headgear, switch stains on the body, use frames, add logo stickers (there are several options), sticker position, sticker size , and save these settings. Even now I love photo mode. It’s not as in-depth as the best implementation, but it’s much better than what we usually see from developers.
One final note is that Black Myth: Wukong is a massive game in terms of its footprint. It takes up over 127GB on the Steam Deck. This is worth keeping in mind if you have a 256GB Steam Deck. Currently, it also doesn’t seem to be saving some settings, such as control options, but I imagine this will be fixed soon. I encountered no other errors or crashes when I installed it on my Steam Deck OLED and LCD models.
I’ll need more time to finish it, but Black Myth: Wukong is an impressive action RPG with great music, great visuals, and I want to replay it on console after the Steam Deck game. Surprisingly, it’s already playable on Valve’s handheld, and I imagine things will only improve through updates once Valve and Game Science optimize it for the hardware. I’m curious how it will feel when I get my hands on the PS5 version.
Black Myth: Wukong Steam Deck Rating: TBA
