I walked away from having played a ton of great upcoming games, from triple-A juggernauts like and , to smaller but no less awesome releases like Thank Goodness You’re Here and AK-xolotl. As ha🅰ppy as I was with all I got to see, there was one game that managed to evade my grasp entirely - the Journey to the West-inspired Soulslike, .
Ever since Black Myth: Wukong was first revealed, it’s managed to build up both a cult following and massive amounts of hype. I hadn’t initially been on the bandwagon, despite loving the source material (anything even🍸 distantly related to can’t be bad, after all) and having a lot of respect for the Soulslike genre.
It was unusual for me, who usually jumps aboard any hype train with reckless abandon, not to understand the hype for Wukong, but that all changed after the incredible Opening Night Live trailer. From the moment Wukong deflected bullets by spinning his staff around while looking like a total badass, I was hooked and finally saw what everyone was so excited abo🐲ut. Sindel’s brutal fatality might have made me wince beyond belief, but Black Myth: Wukong was easily one of the best parts of the sh꧋ow.
I walked away from Opening Night Live with Black Myth: Wukong having rocketed up my most anticipated games of 2024 list and the trailer’s incredible music doing a loop-de-ꦫloop around my brain. I was totally monkey-pilled and excited to see more of the game, whenever that fateful day might be.
Imagine my surprise the next day when, while blearily stumbling around the show floor and scoping out what was there before the big crowds co🥀uld put me off ever venturing past the press area, I saw that Black Myth: Wukong was not only playable at Gamescom, but had one of the biggest booths of the whole show, towering above the likes of Mortal Kombat 1 and Payday 3.
I was pumped to get the chance to play Wukong and go all in on my new hyper fixation and raced across the eerily quiet show floor expecting to waltz in, get my monkey goodness, and get on with my day. Tꦿhat’s not what happened. Despite the show not yet being open to the general public and my breakfast 🐻having barely settled in my stomach, there was already an hour-long queue that was growing by the second.
With appointments to keep and big gamer rizz to spread across Gamescom, I trudged away defe🦹ated and resolved to go back even earlier the next day to beat the rush and make sure I got some time with the show’s surprising superstar, which strangely didn’t have any presence or opportunities for press. You’ve read the title so you’ve hopefully figured out where this is going. The queue was somehow even bigger the 🔯next day, with signs indicating wait times between two to four hours before the sun had even risen.
At this point, it was clear I was probably never going to get to play Wukong at Gamescom, but that diꦇdn’t stop me from going back whenever I had a chance, hoping to get lucky and see the meagre hour-long queue I had once considered r𒁏idiculous. As the week went on, it became less about expecting to get in to play the game and more a morbid curiosity about how long the queues could possibly get, a question that was answered on Saturday when a sign outside the booth at 11 a.m. said: “capacity exceeded”.
Try as I might, I ended Gamescom 2023 without getting the chance to play its biggest game, which is a big shame, even if I’d only just started to show an interest in it. I still have no clue why Black Myth: Wukong was such a big deal, though. Maybe the epic Opening Night Live trailer resonated with others just as much as it did for me. Maybe the long queue times turned into something that pe🙈ople just had to see. Or maybe, just maybe, Gamescom, gamers, and the entire world are conspiring against me and I’m just not supposed to be happy or do anything I want, ever.
