Comfort meals. Everyone has a go-to dish they eat when they just need a shot of nostalgia or the proverbial warm hug – a bowl of soup, say, or a nice big packet of crisps. Or a tough-as-nails action-RPG that’ll have you lobbing threatening obscenities at the fictional monsters on your screen in the late hours of the night. Slight tangent there – I promise this isn’t an intro to a recipe blog. It’s namely because playing Wuchang: Fallen Feathers feels a lot like, you guessed it, eating your favourite comfort food, if your comfort food happens to be strict soulslikes. It’s great, sure. It’s also rarely going to offer you any real amount of surprise.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers reviewDeveloper: Leenzee GamesPublisher: 505 GamesPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 24th July on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S (Game Pass)
Let’s rewind first. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a soulslike made by Chinese startup developer Leenzee, outside the famed offices of FromSoftware – of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne fame – and by its very nature as a soulslike, there’s obviously some below-the-surface tension rumbling under. Wuchang is like Dark Souls, but how much like Dark Souls should it be? How much can it change and get away with? How much can it follow in the footsteps of the subgenre’s prognosticator without it feeling like a “we have a Dark Souls at home, honey” situation?
These are pretty much the same thoughts that ambushed my mind just as often as poisonous critters and maniacal enemies ambushed the titular Wuchang throughout my playthrough, because Fallen Feathers can be almost uncannily familiar even to anyone who’s sweated through only a couple games like Souls.
There’s stamina-based combat. There’s largely linear levels that loop over themselves as if the paths are trying to tie a shoelace made of grass and ground. There’s massive, sometimes massively difficult, sometimes optional, multi-phased boss fights. There’s shrines (bonfires) used to level up, heal, and revive most fallen baddies. There’s a twisted fantasy world in the throes of a near-apocalyptic event, this time set during the late Chinese Ming Dynasty, which does add cool visual twists to set it apart from the subgenre’s Berserk obsession.
Wuchang does mix up the formula in key ways that had me genuinely thrilled too. Wuchang – the amnesiac pirate you play as, not the game – suffers from a disease called Feathering that’s sweeping the entire empire. Others afflicted by it turn into mindless, violent, man-eating avian beasts or gruesome, fleshy monsters that look like their bodies have been popped inside out from their mouths.