After closing out last year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live with the surprise reveal of Black Myth: Zhong Kui, developer Game Science strongly implied there’d be a long wait before we’d see more of its follow-up to the global breakout success of Black Myth: Wukong—a success that was, nonetheless, dogged by the controversy surrounding its studio’s sexist history.
Just under a year later, it turns out that wait wasn’t so long after all. Earlier today, Game Science released a 15-minute gameplay trailer for Black Myth: Zhong Kui, providing our first look at its player character, how he fights, and what tapestry of foes inspired by Chinese mythology and folklore he’ll face.
Embedded above, the trailer follows our hero: a dishevelled adventuring swordsman, whose dishevelled adventuring swordsman business sees him interrupting a wizened old man just as he’s preparing to take a choice bite of chicken thigh. The two become companions across a montage of sipping creature barnacles, kicking logs, dropping torches into mysterious holes that spew geysers of paper talismans, and building rafts that are soon destroyed in a confrontation with a biblical-scale tidal wave.
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As is often the case in a videogame, the wave deposits the pair on a beach where action happens. The second Black Myth is once again dabbling in a pseudo-soulslike combat space, with deliberate and committed attack animations, deflections, and parries. But compared with Wukong, there’s a satisfying economy of motion and sense of confidence in the player character’s movement: His dodges aren’t always dramatic rolls or sidesteps , often, he simply turns aside just enough to let an incoming blow miss by narrow inches.
In combination with some of the more elaborate twirls and emphatic thrusts of his swordplay, it gives his martial artistry a striking affect—even if there’s a bit of transitional ricketiness around the edges of the animations. But considering the four years that passed between Wukong’s first gameplay footage and its 2024 launch, Game Science likely has plenty of time to tighten up some of that awkwardness.
The video gives an impression of the more unconventional options in the player’s combat toolkit. When faced with a cluster of creatures emerging from an oily swamp, he flings a firebomb that ignites the enemies and their surroundings. Content to let the fire sort the creatures out, he uses the opportunity to magically channel the fire he’d just made into his sword, apparently imbuing it with temporary fire damage in his next fight.
Later, he charges his sword with lightning. He summons a spirit to fight alongside him—a hulking (tiger?) man with a massive curved sword who’ll fight on his own, but who the player character can also project himself into and control directly.
Also, there’s a boss fight against an oyster man. It doesn’t go well for him, on account of the aforementioned sword and spirit stuff.
The trailer closes with another montage of fantastical scenes: The protagonist brushes shoulders with glowing mushroom men, buries some kind of demon alive with a shovel, gets an impressive faceful of makeup, and plays music with the coolest trio of skeletons I’ve ever seen. What’s unclear, however, is whether or not the player character is Zhong Kui, the titular ghost-slaying Taoist deity who appeared in the reveal trailer and is once again seen riding his tiger mount at the very end of the latest showing.
That’s information we’ll likely still be waiting on for quite some time. According to Game Science, Black Myth: Zhong Kui “is still in early development.”