Black Myth: Zhong Kui Gameplay Shows 15 Minutes of Combat

Game Science put out 15 minutes of Black Myth: Zhong Kui gameplay, the first stretch of the game anyone outside the studio has seen in motion. The video covers combat, the world around it, and the protagonist himself, the ghost-catching deity Zhong Kui, who in Chinese mythology moves between hell and earth. There is still no release date.

The clearest difference from Black Myth: Wukong is the number of enemies who are not bosses. Wukong put its money into set-piece duels and left the space between them thin, and Eurogamer's Sherif Saed, who played it, points at that gap as the thing the footage addresses. Groups of smaller enemies fill the road here, and the world looks busier than the one Wukong sent players through.

Animation carries much of the video. Blades tangle, bounce off each other and lock in long exchanges that read as extended parries rather than single blocks. That puts Zhong Kui nearer to Phantom Blade Zero, S-Game's martial arts action game, than to the staff-and-transformation rhythm Wukong built its fights around.

Just past the halfway mark comes a boss, a tall moth-like humanoid with shell-shaped wings crusted in barnacles and scales. The fight runs long. Zhong Kui summons a warrior companion partway through, then takes direct control of that companion to land a heavy burst of damage, which is the one mechanic in the video with no obvious equivalent in the first game.

Game Science has said it wants to keep the parts of Wukong players responded to while shaping the sequel around a different lead, and the studio attached a warning to the footage: the game is still in development, and what is in the video may not match what ships.

"Some of what we're exploring is still experimental."

— Game Science

I know the parry-heavy exchanges on display are the kind of precision combat I bounce off, and on that axis alone this sits closer to 007 First Light than to anything I would clear a month for. I think the crowd fights are the more interesting part of the video anyway: a world with things happening in it was the piece Wukong left out, and that costs a game more than a boss roster ever gains it.

The timing is odd. Zhong Kui was announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live in 2025 with a teaser that confirmed little beyond its existence, and Game Science promised a proper update within the year. Gamescom 2026 opens next week. The studio spent its news a week early instead of walking onto the biggest stage in the calendar with it.

Whatever Zhong Kui does next, it follows a game that reset expectations for Chinese development. Wukong sold 10m copies in four days and set the highest concurrent peak any single-player game has managed on Steam, taking a record Cyberpunk 2077 had held since 2020. Its Steam records put it above Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 on launch day, with a peak of 1,443,570 players. A Game of the Year nomination at the 2024 Game Awards followed, which it lost to Astro Bot.

The current number is harder to pin down. A report from the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China put sales above 30m, which would place Wukong ahead of Elden Ring's 30m shipped and within reach of Cyberpunk 2077's 35m. Game Science declined to confirm the figure when Eurogamer asked, repeating its 10m milestone and saying the game had done better than the studio expected in China and abroad.

Support for the first game has continued in the background. The January patch fixed a Super Resolution setting that had been dragging performance below where it should have been, corrected water and snow behaviour, and cleared a crash tied to Non-White's Spirit in the Hut of Immortality that had blocked progress for some players.

Zhong Kui is not a direct sequel. It runs on the same foundation of Chinese folklore and the same single-player action RPG shape, with a lead whose job in the myths is catching ghosts rather than a monkey king's escalation of forms. Game Science lists PC and major consoles, and nothing more specific than that.

The studio's reputation is a separate matter. An IGN report before Wukong's release collected accounts from women describing sexism and inappropriate remarks from senior staff, and co-founder Féng Jì has been linked to misogynistic comments posted online. Neither has slowed the games, and neither has been resolved by the studio in the two years since.

Phantom Blade Zero picked up over a million wishlists in its first 15 days of pre-orders, ships on 29 October for PC and PlayStation 5, and brings Donnie Yen in as creative consultant and character model. Its combat covers more than 30 primary weapons and 20 secondary ones, with difficulty options aimed at players outside the genre. Game Science has the bigger name and no date to defend it with.