It’s a great time to be a fan of soulslikes. Between the fantastic The First Berserker: Khazan earlier in the year, the excellent Lies of P: Overture DLC last month, and the multiplayer/co-op focused Elden Ring: Nightreign, we have been eating well in 2025 – and you can add Wuchang: Fallen Feathers as yet another course in that meal. This debut game from developer Leenzee Games impressed me from the start with its exciting, fast-paced, and dynamic combat. It also has one of the best skill trees in the genre, along with intricate and interconnected level design that guides us through gorgeous vistas and grotesque sights in equal measure. That said, its difficulty is all over the place, with truly wild dips and spikes that go from a relative walk in the park, to “oh my god, when is it my turn to attack?!” levels of aggression in some of its later bosses. So while I’m left with a little whiplash after beating it, it’s still an easy strong recommendation for anybody who’s hungry for more.
In typical soulslike fashion, Wuchang expects you to do the heavy lifting when it comes to piecing together its story and lore – but it’s not handled quite as elegantly as a FromSoft game or something like Lies of P. I was actually on board for the intriguing opening, which shows our titular, mostly silent hero awaken in a cave to discover she has a disease that robs those afflicted of their memories and gradually turns them into hideous monsters. What starts as a personal journey to discover who she is and cure her affliction before she mutates into a nasty bird beast turns into a descent into dark fantasy as the mysteries of the disease, known as The Feathering, start to come to light and you do battle with those transfigured by its effects.
That was a good start, but by the end of its 45-hour campaign, I’d lost track of the many characters who pop up, say a few lines of dialogue, and then disappear for 10 or so hours until they pop up again in a completely new location. People kept referencing names that I’d never heard of before, making it impossible for me to follow the conversation. Lore fiends who enjoy digging into weapon and item descriptions for clues might get more out of the story than I did, but playing through it the same way I have many other games meant its big revelations largely fell flat.
A Game of Skills
Combat, though, had the flexibility and depth to carry me through to the end in style, with a ton of different offensive and defensive options at my disposal at all times. Where Wuchang sets itself apart from others that use the familiar stamina-fueled light and heavy attacks to get you from checkpoint to checkpoint is its huge focus on combining the skills and abilities that are tied to your weapons with Discipline skills you unlock on the absolutely massive skill tree. For instance, equipping the sword parry Discipline skill while using the Flamebringer Longsword weapon will let you build up the burn status ailment with its Infernal Firebrand Weapon Skill while also giving you a defensive counter option on top of that. Or you could pair that same weapon with something like Crescent Moon, which still gives you that same burn build ability, but also allows you to get in and then get out to avoid counter attacks all together while still being able to build Skybound Might with it’s built in evade. On top of that, you can swap between two weapons mid-fight, even mid-combo, which doubles your options.
It’s good that you have these extra options, too, because this is not a game where you can get by with just the basics, especially when it comes to the tougher fights. Powering your skills and spells hinges on generating a resource known as Skyborn Might, which is gained mostly by perfectly dodging enemy attacks at the last instant, but can also be gained in certain weapon-specific ways, such as landing the fourth hit of a light combo string with the Axe, the second hit of a light combo string with the Longsword, clashing weapons with the dual blades, or automatically over time simply by having the one-handed sword equipped.
I had a blast discovering ways to incorporate both Weapon and Discipline skills into combat to get around limitations like stamina, since using a Skyborn Might charge often gives you a powerful attack that doesn’t deplete your meter, or lets you blow through an enemy’s strong defense with a poise break-afflicting mist and take huge chunks out of their health in seconds. I felt like I usually had more interesting decisions to make with each level up than I do in most soulslikes when it came to defining my build.
A big part of that is how instead of just boosting your preferred stat and making numbers go up each time you get enough currency to level, Wuchang uses a progression system that resembles the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X and Salt and Sanctuary. It has six paths to go down and unlock progressively more powerful skills, with five being devoted to stat and weapon upgrades enhancing each of the different types of armaments, and the last one focusing more on more universal boons, like extra healing charges, general buffs for executing certain techniques, etc. The grid is absolutely gigantic, and even 20 or 30 hours into the 45-hour campaign I was still unlocking brand-new branches with new Discipline skills and tons more upgrades to choose from. That’s a lot, but thankfully respecs are free, allowing you the freedom to change up your entire build with zero cost or penalty, whether to simply try out a new weapon or alter your game plan against a challenging boss. It’s an excellent system that encourages experimentation while also rewarding you for having a clear idea of what kind of build you want to make.
There’s a fairly impressive amount of different types of enemies as well, with each area you visit packing plenty of new twisted creatures with a brand-new set of attacks and skills that you’ll need to learn how to adjust your build and your tactics to deal with. Everything in this game can be threatening: from the small hunchbacked dudes that go down in just one or two hits, but can sneak up on you with a hugely damaging grab, to the towering fiends that are almost like minibosses unto themselves. This variety kept the action fresh throughout the whole adventure and kept me tense whenever I would venture in a new area, since I never knew what to expect around the corner.
Bumpy Roads
For the first 10 or so hours, though, I didn’t have to do a ton of build tweaking to breeze through most of these fights. That wasn’t to say that it was a walk in the park, but I’ve played a lot of soulslikes in my day, and once I got the hang of dodging through the last hit of an enemy combo and charging up a heavy attack to instantly stagger them, I initially felt like I had figured Wuchang out.
The deaths that I did experience mostly came from an abundance of some cheap-feeling “gotcha” moments like: Tap to Reveal
To be fair, lots of soulslikes have moments like these, but in Wuchang it happens with such frequency that it felt like I was getting constantly pranked by the developers – and at a certain point that joke gets old.
Other than that, it was mostly smooth sailing until I came across a boss called Commander Honglan. She wasn’t so much a difficulty spike, because that implies at least some degree of an incline or ramp up, as she was like running into a brick wall. She took me about two hours to beat, and while I still came out on the other side of it having mostly enjoyed the intensity of the fight, Honglan serves as a non-spoilery encapsulation of what I don’t like about several of Wuchang’s later boss fights.
The biggest issue is that the punishment window for correctly and precisely dodging most of their attacks is super tight, which takes away from the satisfaction of actually being able to dodge a huge sequence of swings. Compare that to games like Sekiro or Khazan, where you’re damaging the boss’s posture bar every time you precisely block an attack, getting closer to being able to do a damaging critical hit once you completely drain it. There’s no such satisfying mid-fight progress here, because perfect dodges just give you Skyborn Might charges, which you still need to find an opening to be able to use. Wuchang does have a posture meter on enemies, but it only increases when you land hits and decreases after a time if you don’t, which makes it extremely difficult to get that reward for nuanced aggression when your opportunities to deal damage are so minimal and so fleeting. Not every boss fight after Honglan is like this, but the ones that are feel very drawn out to a degree that diminishes their fun.
The Dark Descent
The world all of these ups and downs take place in is rich with secrets to discover, interconnected paths that satisfyingly link entire sections of the map together, and tough optional challenges with appropriate rewards. I loved the gradual descent into dark fantasy – you begin in a very colorful and beautiful Chinese village that is just showing subtle signs of the terrible illness sweeping through its population, and then as you progress deeper underground and through areas that have been absolutely ravaged by The Feathering it starts to feel more and more like a horror game.
There are also some really cleverly put together sequences that create tension and chaos even without combat being involved. One example is a section where you start on a straightaway with an enemy at the end who builds up an instant-killing status affliction called Despair just by looking at you. To evade his gaze and get through, I had to make a mad dash past a bunch of enemies, climb up a ramp while avoiding poisonous drops from the ceiling, and navigate around constantly spawning tough monsters that were created by another out-of-reach foe. It’s a great example of strong enemy design meshing with clever level design to create an absolutely intense sprint through a dangerous environment.