circle
When Chinese developer Game Science announced its first console game, Black Myth: Wukong, last year, it immediately created a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, the action-packed film sees the titular mythical monkey Sun Wukong battling demons from Buddhist folklore and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in beautifully rendered forests. Smartphone games are extraordinarily popular in China but console game developers remain scarce, so anticipation for Wukong was at an all-time high in Game Science’s home country. Within 24 hours, the trailer had garnered two million views on YouTube and more than 10 million on Chinese video-sharing site Bilibili, surprising and delighting its creators. One excited fan said:
Breaking into the developer’s office
eager for more information about the game.

After playing Wukong for an hour and a half in a London hotel suite, with a few Game Science folks nervously watching, I was convinced that, by some miracle, this masterful Dark Souls-infused take on Chinese mythology lived up to the promise of its splashy trailer, blending fluid combat with reflex-testing difficulty and the expensive cinematic sheen of God of War. Sprinting through Wukong’s jungles, ducking and dodging between hordes of terrifying flora and fauna, you’ll face everything from gi-clad toads to nightmarish giant-headed infants. Unlike many of its brutally difficult FromSoftware-esque brethren, Wukong’s difficulty feels judged by experts. My ape-man avatar met a gruesome end more times than I’d like to admit, but I persisted. Eventually I defeated enough foes to unlock new abilities. Soon I was perched on a staff mid-attack, gaining the upper hand against the savage monsters of myth. I can flit through the forest like a stealthy cicada, summon flames with my sword, and eventually take down a werewolf the size of a truck roaring atop a crumbling temple.

“We feel a lot of pressure,” recalls one of Game Science’s co-founders, Ted (who Game Science declined to reveal his full name), through an interpreter. “This is our first time working on PC and console games, and we’re a new studio, so we’re really grateful for the players’ and the market’s openness towards us. Their enthusiasm encourages us. But the Chinese mindset tends to be risk-oriented, so when faced with such great encouragement, the best we can do is to do our best to meet players’ expectations… and communicate with them in a very sincere way.”

Unfortunately, when I talk about this, I rarely get any honest communication.
Report from IGN
The email was about alleged sexist comments made by multiple developers and people in leadership positions at Game Science. I offered Ted the opportunity to speak about the alleged misogynistic posts and whether or not he thought they were representative of Game Science’s values. However, I received a hasty “no comment” from the UK PR representative, followed after a long wait by a longer statement, also “no comment”, relayed through Ted’s translator. I was then told that Game Science’s US PR agency would follow up with a prepared statement later, which read, “Game Science is focused on demos at this time and will only answer questions about gameplay.”

The same thing happened to an IGN reporter.
Demo in LA
It’s disappointing that Game Science chose to invite journalists to talk and play the game last month, but refuses to answer questions. Perhaps there’s nothing reassuring to say. A generous interpretation of the situation would be that the inexperienced studio is afraid to say the wrong thing. But by staying silent, Game Science is also failing to distance itself (and the game) from a number of crude, derogatory and misogynistic comments directed at its employees and management.

Journey to the West is, of course, no stranger to the world of video games; from Ninja Theory’s 2010 Xbox 360 adaptation Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, written by Alex Garland and starring Andy Serkis, to the late Akira Toriyama’s world-conquering Dragon Ball, its mythology and ape world are ripe for gaming. Black Myth: Wukong’s stunning visuals, cinematic beauty and exhilarating sense of speed make it the best playable adaptation of the fable to date, but the uninhibited excitement I would otherwise feel is trampled by the elephant in the room.