We gathered people to play the hottest game of the year. Here’s what they had to say about it.
Extreme fan culture can emerge around anything in China, whether music idols or Olympic athletes. But nowhere have the hopes and fears of devotees been more keenly concentrated than in video games, where the fate of an industry has seemingly been entrusted to one hero—Sun Wukong—in the form of the hottest video game of the year, Black Myth: Wukong.
The so-called “Monkey King” has been a cultural touchstone ever since he appeared in Wu Cheng’en’s (吴承恩) 16th-century novel Journey to the West. Sun Wukong played cheeky companion to a monk based on the historic Xuanzang on his pilgrimage to India in search of Buddhist scriptures, encountering “murderous Buddhists, perfidious Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas, scorpions),” as Julia Lovell put it in the foreword to her 2021 translation. Now, a darker take on this mythology, picking up with the Monkey King rejecting a position in the Celestial Court after his return from India.
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