Black Myth: Wukong – Comedy Trailer Shows Off Purposely Glitchy Gameplay and Lots of Cats

Much anticipated action-RPG Black Myth: Wukong has released a 13-minute new trailer – but don’t expect much in the way of new information, as it’s a short comedy film featuring some silly gameplay and a lot of cats in a motion capture studio.

Released to celebrate Chinese New Year, and the start of the Year of the Tiger, developer Game Science has released ‘An Alternate Reality of Game Science’, in which we see developers discussing the difficulties of using cats for motion capture, and then revealing an extremely broken boss battle based on that work. Eventually, we see the Game Science office shut down and then reopened as a restaurant.

The joke seems to be that Game Science actually did try using motion capture for cats at one point. In real-life, they moved onto other ideas but in this alternate reality, this is what would have happened if they’d stuck with the idea to the bitter end.

Given that last year’s Chinese New Year video showed off legitimate new footage, some may be disappointed by this more lighthearted approach, but the video ends with a short poem to appease fans:

“You came in hoping to see the game. We are working hard on the same.

Alas, a bit more patience, if you will. Well worth the wait, is the thrill.”

The second half of the trailer (from around 7:25) does include footage that could well be from the game’s Unreal Engine 5 upgrade, but the section features a tiger boss character that repeatedly teleports around the map, wields an unnaturally floating katana, and whose animations glitch out. The cutscene before that sequence looks a lot more legitimate, so we may well be seeing a tease of something from the final game, but Game Science definitely isn’t saying so for sure.

Thankfully, the real Black Myth: Wukong is looking a lot more impressive – we’ve seen lots of gameplay, broken down new details, and spoken to the debut developer making this incredibly popular breakout project.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.