Wuchang: Fallen Feathers review – A paper tiger

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers tells the story of Bai Wuchang, a pirate warrior who wakes, memories lost, into a Ming Dynasty China where a plague known as the Feathering turns those infected into monsters.

Showing symptoms herself, Wuchang sets off on a quest to regain her memories. It’s not exactly an inspired plot, but it does the job, and I will take any opportunity to explore historic China.

Big picture, the game follows a standard soulslike order of play: explore an area, beat all the baddies, kill a boss at the end of the area for a nice reward and to progress the story, repeat.

Wuchang’s bosses are its highlights. They typically manage to hit that sweet spot of being challenging but eminently beatable. Some of them play too passive for my liking, dodging and teleporting away often, and others can be cheesed a bit too easily, but overall, I enjoyed Wuchang’s bossing.

It’s a good job I did, too, because from the moment I picked up where my preview left off, Wuchang has proven to be a deeply frustrating experience.

There is one main reason why I found Wuchang to be so lacking, but it’s an issue that plagues almost every aspect of the game.

I will preface this by saying that I will be comparing it rather heavily to Dark Souls.

I know, I know. It’s 2025. Dark Souls comparisons were already trite and overplayed years ago, but I am doing it because Wuchang’s great issue is that it is exceptionally derivative.

There are aspects where it has taken inspiration from games like Dark Souls, such as one area which a developer confirmed to me was directly inspired by Blighttown, and you can tell.

But in other aspects, Wuchang has rather clearly lifted certain features directly from Dark Souls, and the wider FromSoft catalogue at large.

And while taking inspiration is not inherently a bad thing, Wuchang does so to such an extent that not only does it never truly develop an identity of its own, but I believe its developers have fundamentally misunderstood why Dark Souls is so beloved.

Leenzee appears to have read a few Reddit posts from the mid-2010s lauding how “Dark Souls is great because it’s so hard”, and in response, they’ve taken the annoying bits – the enemies, traps and mechanics that pop up very occasionally in other soulslikes – and have plastered them all across the game.

Many areas are littered with landmines that force you to look at the ground wherever you go – and heaven forbid you get into a fight and need to focus on something else.

Surprise attacks are constant, with enemies lurking around every other corner ready to pounce, or cannoneers waiting inside otherwise empty tents.

Enemies inflicting status effects are everywhere, and are often placed one after the other, forcing you to repeatedly change armour every minute to avoid being poisoned or corrupted or despaired to death.

On top of the mechanics themselves, the world is horrendous to explore. Levels wind around in tangled messes, with side paths often looping back in on themselves with you having spent an hour to clear them with nothing to show for it by way of rewards nor story progression, and with no map, it’s often just a case of trial and error until you find a path worth following.

I acknowledge how intensely whiny this sounds – I can already hear a chorus of ‘git gud’ ringing in my ears – but I promise you, however prevalent you think these mechanics are in Wuchang, it is far worse.

Soulslike games are, by their very nature, difficult games, but there’s a clear distinction between challenging and frustrating. A challenging game is one whose roadblocks are satisfying to overcome.

The frustration of Wuchang, by comparison, is that it needles you. Traps and surprise attacks in other soulslike games are the exception, not the rule. It’s a reminder, once in a while, to not let your guard down.

When they’re plastered all over the game, not only is it annoying, but it loses that raison d’être, too.

Each mine, surprise attack, status effect etc is not a mammoth challenge on its own and is therefore not satisfying to negate, creating level after level with an artificial difficulty.

Beating Malenia in Elden Ring is a rush. Avoiding a landmine is not. Mulitply that by the tens if not hundreds across an entire game and you have a recipe for irritation.

Every soulslike has one area that is a nightmare to traverse. A Blighttown or Caelid that elicits a “thank God that’s over” when you’re done with it.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a game made up of thank God that’s overs, and at the end of it, you don’t even get the kind of satisfying story or deep lore that make Blighttown and Caelid so beloved despite their challenge – Wuchang is hard for the sake of hard.

While that’s the main issue that torments Wuchang’s gameplay, the game’s insistence on lifting from other games also makes its core gameplay clunky and confusing.

There are so many mechanics. Weapon types, status effects, magic, Skyfall Might, benedictions, controlling your feathering level, controlling your madness level, and more.

The tragedy is that when Wuchang does focus on something new, it really works. Skyborn Might, a mechanic which gives you charges to spend on special attacks and magic upon perfect dodges, is a blast! It’s just a shame that it’s swamped by so much else that it never has the chance to shine.

Wuchang is a jack of all trades, master of none, and thanks to a terminal case of feature creep, it never develops any of these mechanics to their full potential.

Despite all this, I still feel like there is a good game buried somewhere among this quagmire. I truly believe that the team behind this game is talented, as evidenced by very brief flashes of brilliance, and that, had they been given the creative licence to make something entirely their own, they would have knocked it out of the park.

But, at least from my point of view as a player, it appears that they were not given that freedom, which is a shame.

Perhaps Wuchang would have been a hit 10 years ago, when soulslikes as a genre were still a burgeoning curiosity.

Soulslikes are no longer a niche, however. Beyond FromSoft, new iterative and inventive soullikes are constantly popping up from across both AAA and indie.

Lies of P, Nine Sols, Hollow Knight, Remnant, and Another Crab’s Treasure are just a few of the excellent, unique examples of modern soulslikes. This year alone, solo indie project FlyKnight has proven how versatile the genre can be.

Relative to peers like these, Wuchang is stale at best and simply not good at worst.

There are some players who will adore this game for how abrasive it is – I hope they love it as much as I wanted to – but for me, difficulty alone does not a good game make.

I had high hopes for Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, but this is a 2015 soulslike releasing in 2025. It’s a game that attempts to imitate the greats of the genre but doesn’t seem to understand what it is that makes them great, resulting in a game that is desperately lacking not only in identity, but in enjoyment.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers releases on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. We reviewed on PS5.

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