I’m going to open with a clear message here. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is honestly one of the best games that I have played this year. I came into it a bit apprehensive, being a massive Dark Souls fan, and was wondering how this would hold up but… honestly, I have been blown away by the consistency of this title and have not been able to put it down since I received the code.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is set in the land of Shu, set around the time of the Ming Dynasty. It starts as a mysterious ailment, known as feathering, that has been affecting a number of the local people and animals in the area, has begun to get out of control. The affliction leads to the victim transforming into monstrous cannibals and gruesome twisted creatures — the main obstructions to your otherwise straightforward quest.
The very first thing that hits you when you boot it up is just how pretty everything looks. The Souls games, as a whole, are well known for having a reasonably interconnected world where you can — generally — see most areas before you even get there and Wuchang does exactly that, giving a massive sense of scale. You’ll adventure between wildly different areas — castles, waterfalls, valleys and areas engulfed in massive fires — all of which are visible well before you reach there, excitedly teasing the world before you get close.
When your story begins you are made aware that you are suffering with the illness that plagues the land, with your arm already covered in feathers, showing that it’s already taken a hold of you. But with great suffering comes great power: This is the source of your abilities, with great strength and magic at your disposal, with both channeled through the feathered arm.
The combat system is weapon based, but has a streamlined approach, with a number of weapon types available and then each of the different weapons slotting within those categories. It gives just enough variety to keep it interesting in the early stages, however more complexity comes later including letting you tweak certain moves to create a weapon/special move combo of your choosing and allowing you to equip two weapon types at once.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers does recommend you play with a controller when booting it through Steam, but the PC controls are actually perfectly fine to use on mouse and keyboard. The only issue I’ve had, and this may be because I’m using mouse and keyboard, is that the camera can — at times — be very jittery, especially when it catches terrain or a corner leading the game to whip it around and even lead to you changing directions completely. This has led to a few deaths for me.
Its death system is not quite as harsh as Dark Souls, instead letting you gather back your Red Mercury but only losing about ⅓ of the total amount on death, one of the first equipable items that you find actually reduces that even further.. An extra wrinkle is that, while you risk losing less currency, every time you die you gain madness, which culminates in a mini-boss demon appearing where you last died.
My first encounter with this demon would have been a tough fight had I not slipped on a log into what I thought at the time was very shallow water. This meant that I immediately died and came back to find the demon lady standing on the log and then she too slipped and immediately died. What comes around goes around, I guess.
One thing that I’ve found incredibly frustrating at times is the use of very, very small ledges to prevent progress or tease items. I completely understand that some of these are purely so that the routes work with shortcuts, but it has that Resident Evil problem where for us, as players, we feel as though we should be able to simply duck under a tall root or dip around the small opening. This and there’s also your classic Dark Souls traps like boulders, enemies that push you off a ledge and jars that explode.., some of these are incredibly easy to see, while others are deviously creative, which always makes for a nice surprise.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers’ levelling system is quite refreshing expanded the expected attribute leveling with a big expanding list of upgrades for your stats and weapons, however I have found that you need to make a commitment to a weapon type quite early on as you sacrifice better damage if you decide to split your leveling points across different weapons. Even with a way to respec it has made me stick mostly with one type of weapon type.
I do have to admit that I got quite heavily invested in the story, with the adventure slowly unwrapping layer by layer as the horrors get more twisted and the world becomes more distorted. At the same time, it is more beautiful with each locale. I’ve just gone through what I can only describe as blight town on steroids but the area that follows is just serene and pretty, so you really do bounce between complete horror and hellish environments to calm temples and flowing waterfalls (still filled to the brim with warped beasts) making each area distinct.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has been a great experience so far, and is one I plan on sticking with right up to the gritty end. I can’t get enough of its moody vibes, amazing bosses, beautiful environmental storytelling and memorable characters.
You can find Wuchang: Fallen Feathers on Steam, as well as on Playstation 5 and Xbox X/S.
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