The ancient mythological world depicted by Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a fascinating one. Set during the late Ming Period, an era of great sweeping change in China when ineffective leadership resulted in famine, rebellion, and war, the game is also imbued with mythological elements inspired by the amazing discoveries found in the Sanxingdui archaeological site. Some of these bronze relics featured mysterious half-bird half-human creatures, leading to the concept of ‘Feathering Disease’ that provides the basis for the game’s story. This horrific plague transforms those poor saps afflicted into hideous, mutated beasts, rampaging around the place and leaving chaos in their wake. That’s where the player steps in, cast as Bai Wuchang – a butt-kicking pirate – they must cut their way through hordes of demons to save the people of the land in this third-person action Soulslike.
There’s just one problem for Wuchang as she embarks on her quest: she’s gone and caught herself the Feathering Disease too. Thankfully, like a dose of man flu, it doesn’t seem that bad for her. Sure, Wuchang starts to get a bit feathery and her eyes turn red, but that’s about it. The disease seems to just vanish, only to turn up again later for reasons unknown. In fact, this is one of the main issues that I had in my time with Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, as I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In part, this is due to poor translation, the game failing to explain its core mechanics effectively, but it’s also due to many of those mechanics seemingly not being implemented fully, perhaps due to time or budget.
There’s a suggestion that the Feathering Disease will corrupt you, turn you into a mindless, murderous Big Bird, but that never comes to pass. Die and respawn a few times and the disease will disappear, your symptoms abating. Apparently, you deal more damage yet are more vulnerable when the disease is rampant in your body, yet I never noticed any tangible difference.
There are various items to collect that will ease your feathering, shrines to pray at to relieve your symptoms, but these are seemingly irrelevant, I never needed to use any of them, not once. More confusingly, the few survivors you meet don’t seem concerned in the slightest about your mutation, barely reacting to your glowing red evil eyes and feathery protrusions. It’s strange that so much fuss is made about Wuchang being afflicted by the Feathering Disease, so many mechanics and items devoted to managing it, and yet it’s so easily ignored.
What you are left with, without the intrigue of the Feathering Disease, is a bog-standard Soulslike. You wander around the maze-like environment, killing creatures, finding the bonfire-like shrines, and dying on numerous occasions to a big bad boss. Rinse and repeat. Combat, for the most part, is flat, uninspired, and oddly dull. This is mostly down to the enemies you face, which, despite intriguing designs, are made up of the same muddy brown textures as the environment around them. You face a handful of enemy types again and again, each using the same two or three attack combos at their disposal ad infinitum. The AI is dumb to a hilarious extent, enemies often failing to get through doorways, falling off cliffs to try to reach you, or getting trapped behind very small objects in an endless loop of walking-animation.
Wuchang can find a variety of weapons to use, but most of them are absolutely pants, with weird attack patterns that serve no discernible purpose. Indeed, I just stuck with the basic sword from beginning to end, with no real need to swap it out. Unlockable spells and special attacks are at Wuchang’s disposal, but the visuals that accompany their use are lacklustre and strangely understated, lacking the bombastic energy they would need to alleviate the combat tedium that soon sets in. Again, most of the specials are simply unnecessary and ineffective. The standard blink attack works the best and will serve you well enough without needing to even give the others a try.
Occasionally Wuchang: Fallen Feathers can be very pretty with wide-open vistas spreading far into the distance, but most of the time it insists you hang out in dreary caves and identikit villages. The level design is confused and unclear, not helped by samey visual assets being reused, leading to me getting lost. A lot. Not in the fun kind of lost that you feel when you are exploring a fascinatingly complex and mysterious virtual world, but where you just can’t find your way out of a teeny temple. More problematically, the game is borderline unplayable at times on PS5 due to gnarly lag and framerate drops in anything but Performance Mode, and even then, it still drags its heels on occasion.
Boss fights are by far the best part of the game. These hulking grotesque behemoths are much more interesting to fight than the multitudes of foe fodder that precedes them, with genuinely challenging attack patterns to overcome. Even here though, there are problems. All too often when bosses attack, they get distracted and attack the thin air around you because, well, they’ve been driven mad by the feathering disease I suppose? Or is it some naff AI rearing its unwanted head again?
Collison detection is questionable too, bosses causing damage despite missing you entirely. This is a problem throughout the game, with attacks rarely cancelling each other out, meaning both you and your foe lose health, even though you hit them first. The frustrating part is, they cause way more damage than you do.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is an intriguing ideal spoiled by poor implementation, with nearly every aspect of the game needing a thorough reworking. This is a game that required way more time in development before seeing the light of day.
