A year after Black Myth: Zhong Kui was revealed at Gamescom 2025, Game Science has put out fifteen minutes of it running. Not a cinematic. Not a sizzle cut of five-second slashes. An actual chunk of play, which is more than most studios offer at this stage, and credit where it’s due.
And it looks like Black Myth: Wukong. Roll, parry, slice, repeat. New protagonist, same grammar.
The safe follow-up
That’s a defensible call. Wukong sold in numbers that make caution look like malpractice, and the combat was the part people actually liked. When your first game clears that bar, the pressure isn’t to reinvent, it’s to not break anything. Fifteen minutes of confident, legible action is exactly what you show to reassure a market that already bought in once.
But I’d have preferred to be surprised. Wukong’s hook was never purely mechanical; it was the density of the source material, the sense that someone had read the whole thing and picked the weird bits. A sequel that mostly proves the dodge button still works is a sequel banking on goodwill it has already spent once.
The protagonist swap is where it gets interesting, and where the footage says the least. Zhong Kui isn’t the Monkey King. He’s a demon queller from Chinese folklore, a figure defined by hunting and subjugating the things that go bump, not by trickery or escape. That’s a different relationship to the enemies you fight. Wukong’s whole deal is transformation and evasion. Zhong Kui’s is authority over what he catches. If the combat system doesn’t reflect that difference, the character is a costume.
What fifteen minutes can’t tell you
Here’s the honest limit of this trailer, and of every piece of coverage that ran off it, including this one: gameplay footage is the easiest thing in a modern action game to make look good. Boss encounters get tuned for demos. Enemy AI gets a haircut. The stuff that decided whether Wukong held up over forty hours, level structure, pacing between fights, the long middle stretch where the novelty wears off, none of that shows up in a curated quarter of an hour.
So the coverage cycle does what it does. Two outlets, same fifteen minutes, both landing on “first proper look” and “looks like more of that.” There’s not much else to land on. Game Science hasn’t given a release window that I’ve seen, hasn’t detailed progression, hasn’t said how big the thing is.
What we know: it exists, it runs, it parries. The reveal was a year ago and the gap between then and now produced a gameplay video rather than a date. For a studio that came out of nowhere and shipped one of the biggest games of 2024, a second showing that says “still on track, still the same idea” is either discipline or a holding pattern. The next thing they show will tell us which.
Zhong Kui, incidentally, is traditionally depicted having died by smashing his own head against a palace step.