Quite generally, video games sometimes follow a trend, a sort of "current fad" often initiated by a pioneering title with global success. We are of course thinking of the relatively recent era of battle royale, popularized by PUBG before literally exploding with Fortnite. Many creators have tried their hand at it with their own vision of the genre, and above all the dream of a success identical to Epic's. And yet, like battle royale, only a select few have survived. On the single-player side, recent years have also seen the emergence of a genre that we owe to From Software: the Souls-like. If their works were originally intended primarily for experienced players and fans of uncompromising difficulty, it is indeed Elden Ring, the game of the year 2022, which will have opened the genre to the general public. So much so that we now find "Souls" in countless productions, such as the latest Wuchang Fallen Feathers.
Everyone wants their piece of the pie with their own homemade recipe, or sometimes simply by taking all the FromSoft codes simply transposed into a more or less identical universe. The examples are legion and, unlike the BR, the critical and commercial successes are much more numerous. In 2024, one title particularly stood out for its Souls-style action-RPG adventure: Black Myth Wukong, from the Chinese studio Game Science. The Middle Kingdom has understood this well, a gigantic market is waiting to be tickled. With Wuchang Fallen Feathers, the developers at Leenzee have also understood this well and intend to dazzle us. Yet another soulless version or a truly original proposition? We had the opportunity to try the game during the Summer Game Fest, the opportunity to bring you a first element of an answer.
A mastered technique and a true identity?
The game therefore features Bai Wuchang at the very end of the reign of the Ming dynasty. A warrior whom we will follow on her journey through the Chinese lands of Shu, torn apart by war and plague. For the moment, we will have to be content with these few snippets of context; we will not know more. Wuchang is suffering from a mysterious illness that is spreading throughout the kingdom, manifesting itself in the form of feathers that are slowly taking over her being, the first visible signs of which appear on her arm. A gangrene that nevertheless has one advantage: that of granting its host supernatural abilities and powers.
This is how the demo we tried propels us into her universe, lost in the middle of a damp cave. Barely enough time to leave it does we discover a lush and green jungle in which buildings and other temples can be seen in the distance, shrouded in mist. The artistic direction is impressive, and we haven't even started playing yet, but we're already contemplating the panorama offered by the game, standing on the edge of a cliff. There is no doubt that Wuchang Fallen Feathers promises high-flying graphic design, provided, of course, that it knows how to renew its environments while giving them their own identity. No open world, but an imposing area teeming with details, skillfully playing with verticality and depth of field to immerse us. The soundscape contributes greatly to this sensation with ambient noises making us guess the presence of a whole life around us, mixed with the breath of the wind in the leaves.
As Souls requires, Wuchang offers at first glance several paths but also shortcuts that will have to be unlocked to progress more easily. Because you will die, and very often even, as the title promises to be demanding. Waypoints in the form of altars, equivalent to the grace sites of Elden Ring, fortunately dot the places. In a very classic way, they allow you to regenerate and rest, synonymous with the respawn of enemies. It is also through these that you can trade the souls gleaned on your path to develop a skill tree that is apparently substantial. It should also be noted that each weapon in the game has its own tree, for tailor-made gameplay.
A difference focusing on gameplay?
This is perhaps where Wuchang tries to stand out the most. Lively and dynamic, the game's gameplay focuses primarily on perfect dodges, illuminating our heroine's feathers blue when the timing is perfect, allowing for a powerful magical and visual counterattack. There's no countering unless you unlock the required skill on a suitable weapon (in our case, an imposing two-handed axe). The animations seemed a bit stiff to me, but I appreciated the range of moves and actions available, adapted to the types of opponents encountered. Soldiers with swords or heavy weapons, infantrymen sheltering behind a shield, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, each situation is resolved via a combo of appropriate keys, while having the possibility of switching on the fly between two equipped weapons. The much more imposing and monstrous bosses will also be there, we had the bitter experience of this from our first steps without the possibility of tryhard due to lack of time. As we can expect in a game of this genre, a death makes us lose all our runes that we can try to recover at the next spawn before forgetting them forever.
All this is completed by a madness gauge: Feathering. Your fights will allow you to collect a substance called “Red Mercury”, which can unleash the true capacity of your mutant status. Used at the right time, Feathering can turn critical situations to your advantage, but excessive use can also weaken you and make you vulnerable. A dosage that must be taken into account to avoid succumbing to the effects of an early mutation. Unfortunately, we were only able to skim over all these possibilities and gameplay peculiarities in less than an hour of play, punctuated here and there by deaths forcing us to start certain sections from scratch.
We await Wuchang Fallen Feathers… with desire and a few questions.
The game from Leenzee studio joins the very busy dance of Souls-like games with Wuchang, the new offering from China after the very good Black Myth Wukong. But will it be able to stand out in the middle of this jungle by offering a true experience with its own identity? That is where the whole question remains. If the demo we tried proved to us that on a technical level, Wuchang is capable of very beautiful things, it is in the depth of its universe and its gameplay that we expect to see more. Very similar in its construction to a From Software game from which it takes almost all the codes, the game tries to differentiate itself via its gameplay and its progression system based on a skill tree with many branches. Demanding and dynamic although a little rigid, Wuchang will have to be tested much more in depth on the balance of its handling during our final verdict, a point that we were not able to really appreciate in less than an hour of play.
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