The tl;dr: this was so close to perfect, but probably needed another month or so to cook before getting released.

I beat Wuchang: Fallen Feathers last night after 60 or so hours of gameplay, and for the most part, I was really, really happy with it. Most of my gripes are technical, and the things this game does right, it does very right. This is a Soulslike through and through, which is currently my favorite kind of game, and it hits all the buttons: deep combat, wildly variant weapon builds, obscure quest lines, difficult boss combat, and an emphasis on exploration. The exploration is the best part; Wuchang may have the best interconnected world map I’ve ever played, and it’s incredibly rare that you’ll see a path fork off and one of them end a little bit later in a dead end with a treasure in it. Everything loops around and leaves you somewhere, and it was harder to keep a mental map going (note: this is a good thing) than I’ve seen in a game like this in a long time.

There’s three different major things that this game does that distinguish it from a run-of-the-mill Soulslike. First, what the call the Skyborn Might system. All of your spells and some of your combat abilities are based on how many stacks of Skyborn Might you have at any given time. You can have up to five, and spells will cost from one to all five stacks and weapon abilities generally cost between one and three. Skyborn Might is earned mostly by perfectly-timed dodges, although most weapons have at least one other way you can earn it and there are different items that can add to Skyborn Might as well. One that I kept equipped for most of the game automatically generated Skyborn Might on kills, which came in really handy. Skyborn Might deteriorates over time if you don’t use it, which was good and bad– it encourages you to use your abilities, on one hand, but on the other I felt like it deteriorated too fast, and I’d have liked some way to slow down that deterioration, whether it was a more permanent item or a consumable.

The second is the Madness system. Killing human enemies and dying both generate Madness, and killing nonhuman enemies and various items and locations can decrease it. Increasing your Madness has two major effects: it increases your damage noticeably the higher it is, and it at least supposedly increases how much damage you take, although I went through the whole game without ever feeling like that had caused a death. I never really even noticed it.

On top of that, if you die, you lose a percentage of your currency (Red Mercury as opposed to souls, or blood echoes, or whatever) and that percentage is based on how high your Madness is. If your Madness is less than 100% you can pick your resources up from wherever you died. If it’s at 100%, though? You’re gonna generate a Madness Demon when you go back to get it, and if that Madness Demon kills you, your shit is gone. On the other hand, if you kill the Madness Demon, you get a bunch of other stuff on top of your lost materials, and Madness Demons can be baited into attacking anything, so there are places where generating one on purpose (there are items that raise Madness as well) can be a sound strategic maneuver against an enemy that you can’t find a way to beat. This won’t work on bosses– you can’t generate demons inside a boss arena– but there are occasional more powerful red-eye enemies scattered around, and letting one kill me, generating a demon, then triggering her and running away to watch the two of them fight was fun.

The third is the upgrade system, which runs off of an upgrade tree. Each weapon style (Spear, Greatsword, Axe, Dual Blades, and Longsword, and I spent most of the game in Greatsword) has its own tree but you can go anywhere you want on the tree and you can respec any time at will. Weapon upgrades are also built into the skill tree, and the awesome thing is that 1) any weapon upgrade affects every weapon of that type, even if you get a new one later, and 2) you can respec your weapon upgrades just as easily as your own abilities. So unlike, say, Elden Ring, where if you make a change to your preferred weapon late in the game you’d better hope you have enough upgrade mats available to level that weapon up, if you had a +9 axe and you want to switch to greatsword your greatsword will automatically be +9. In fact, all five of the greatswords you’ve found will be +9, and if you find a sixth that’ll be +9 when you pick it up. In every other Soulslike I’ve played, just because you leveled up Longsword A doesn’t mean Longsword B is improved as well. This is a huge improvement.

The problem is the performance. This game, at least on Xbox (I picked it up here because it’s currently free on Game Pass) is very poorly optimized, and while you can lock the framerate at 60, you’re going to see constant blurriness and focus issues as the game struggles to keep up with itself. I played without the frame rate locked for a little while and the frame drops were so bad I had to switch back. This is on the Series X, mind you, which is supposed to be the beefy one; I can’t imagine what this would play like on the less powerful Series S. There are some balance issues– there’s a huge difficulty spike with a boss about a third of the way through the game, and the game really expects you to use a certain mechanic to beat that boss, only all weapon types don’t have access to that mechanic. As it turned out, I’d started with a Spear build, and the Spear build is the one least capable of managing this boss. I had to respec, and once I did I sailed past her. Now, again, the game encourages painless experimentation, and I could have switched back afterwards, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t object to the idea that certain bosses are weak to certain styles and stronger against others; that’s a staple of the genre– but “you need this type of ability to win here, and this weapon doesn’t have that at all” is a problem.

There’s a few other things; it’s way too easy to fall off of ledges, which is partially a skill issue, and until very recently the icon that shows where you dropped your resources was really hard to see against some level backgrounds and invisible if you were unfortunate enough to die in shallow water, but they’ve patched that problem out in the last couple of weeks. I know Soulslikes aren’t for everybody, and if they aren’t your thing you’ll want to stay away from this, but if they do, and especially if they do and you’re on Game Pass? Hooooooly shit. And it’s only $50 at full price, and it’s a good enough game that I’m considering picking it up for the PS5 anyway. Check it out.