Black Myth: Wukong Beginner Tips Before You Start

GAMES
By James

Black Myth: Wukong is, as our review said, both confusing and spectacular. It’s an action-RPG soulslike that takes a lot of the usual genre beats – XP and skill trees, checkpoints that save your progress while also respawning enemies – while also giving them its own unique twist.

Us Black Myth: Wukong Beginners Guide helps you begin your journey (to the West) as the Destined One with tips from our first 15 hours with the game. We’ve got hints and advice on level layouts, the (confusing) crafting mechanic, fast travel, and getting your gear.

There isn’t really a gameplay loop in Black Myth: Wukong. You’ll travel from shrine checkpoint to shrine checkpoint, taking out enemy yaoguais (demons) along the way, but there isn’t much of a grind. Instead, you’ll be more focused on getting from one boss fight to the next – there are a lot of bosses and enemies that look like bosses.

This linearity also extends to your armor and weapons. You don’t unlock them so much as you reach a certain shrine and the crafting recipes for new gear unlock automatically (more on that below). The same goes for spells – you just get those after defeating certain bosses.

That being said, you don’t want to just run from one temple to another because…

You have to watch out for side paths

While your overall progression is fairly linear, the routes between shrine checkpoints do have branching paths that are almost always worth exploring, usually yielding at least one chest or even an optional boss fight.

Those boss fights also give you a lot of XP and usually some rare upgrade materials. If nothing else, you’ll find some ingredients. Those will be useful… eventually.

You can’t make medicine until chapter 2

As you play through the beginning of the game, you will find many ingredients, such as plants and mushrooms. Their descriptions will even say that they can be “used to make medicine”, but you will not be able to do anything with them.

And that’s because that mechanic isn’t unlocked until Chapter 2, several hours into the game.

Very early in Black Myth: Wukongyou will encounter an enemy called a Wandering Wight. The first time you encounter him, you cannot defeat him. (Well, it is possible(but that’s not going to happen.) The trick with that fight though is that the way forward is through that enemy. You just have to run past him.

That won’t work for most fights, but it’s an important lesson in how the game works: you become much more powerful and have more skills to draw on as you progress (linearly).

If you hit a tough enemy or boss, you can always come back later when you’re a bit stronger. Which brings us to…

Fast travel is weird without a map

You can (fast) travel from any shrine to any other shrine you’ve visited before. But there’s no map, so it’s a bit fiddly at first.

When you decide to travel, you will only be given a list of names of shrines and their region. However, the names are descriptive enough that it is not too difficult to determine where you are going.

As you progress Black Myth: Wukong and defeating bosses, you unlock new gear to craft at shrines. You only ever fight with one weapon — different versions of a staff — so those are easy enough to understand. The clothing — gear for your head, body, legs, and arms — is a little more interesting.

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