A year after its Gamescom 2025 reveal teaser, Black Myth: Zhong Kui has finally shown gameplay - fifteen minutes of it, released by Game Science overnight. It is early footage, captured in-engine from a work-in-progress PC build at a 21:9 aspect ratio, and it answers the question everyone has been asking since the teaser: how different is this from Black Myth: Wukong?
The answer, on this evidence, is more different than the shared title suggested. Wukong's hero was a staff-wielding primate with a transformation gauge; Zhong Kui's is a human swordsman, and the combat has been rebuilt around that difference rather than reskinned into it.
A default parry, at last
The single biggest change is defensive. Zhong Kui has a parry and counterattack available from the start, plus a block that reduces damage - neither of which Wukong offered without digging into its skill tree. Time your input before an enemy's swing lands and you get the counter. For a studio whose first game was frequently described as an action title that would rather you dodged than engaged, adopting a standing parry is a real statement about how it wants fights to feel.
The skill layout looks different too. Four equippable techniques sit in the UI with no cooldown timers attached. Instead there appears to be a meter that fills as you land hits, parry and dodge, and sword techniques spend from it. That pushes the game toward aggression as a resource loop rather than a stylistic preference - you cannot turtle your way to your best abilities.
Elements you steal, spirits that stay
Two systems in the footage look like genuine additions rather than iterations. The first is elemental imbuing: Zhong Kui can draw fire or lightning out of the environment and channel it into his weapon, and - more interesting - absorb energy directly out of a boss's own attacks. That turns a boss's damage pattern into a supply line, which is the sort of mechanic that either makes a fight brilliant or trivial depending entirely on tuning.
The second is summoning, and it is a direct correction of Wukong's most-complained-about limitation. Where Wukong's spirit transformations were brief bursts, the summoned spirit here reportedly lingers for the whole encounter. Later on, Zhong Kui can transform into what he has summoned and use its abilities himself. A permanent companion changes the arithmetic of a boss fight far more than a ten-second super does.
The stranger corners
Around the combat, the trailer scatters things that do not obviously belong in an action RPG and are more welcome for it. Zhong Kui is shown riding large beasts, which implies traversal rather than a set-piece. There is a sequence built around playing Chinese classical instruments alongside skeletal musicians. And there is fishing with a wooden rod, which - in the trailer's most Game Science moment - appears capable of pulling up a boss.
All of it draws on the same source: Zhong Kui, the demon-slaying deity of Chinese folklore, who is a far more specific figure than the Monkey King and a much less internationally familiar one. Wukong had Journey to the West doing half the exposition work in every market. Zhong Kui does not, and the trailer's willingness to just show fifteen minutes of the thing rather than explain it is probably the right call.
No date, no store page
What Game Science has not provided is a release window. There is no Steam page and no Epic Games Store listing, which for a studio that sold tens of millions of copies of its debut is a conspicuous absence rather than an oversight - you do not open a store page until you are ready to be held to a date. Unreal Engine 5 is confirmed, PC is the platform this footage came from, and everything on screen carries a work-in-progress caveat.
Set against the year of silence that preceded it, fifteen minutes is a lot. Set against the expectations Wukong created, it is a first look at a game that is still some way out - and one that appears to be genuinely rethinking its own combat rather than shipping the sequel that would have been easiest to make.
