WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers is a game that demands your patience, rewards your curiosity and tests your tolerance for tedium in equal measure. For about the first eight hours, I was fully on board. It’s a gorgeous world, rich in gothic rot and mystery, and I found myself wandering through it like I’d stumbled into a fever dream painted with brushstrokes from Sekiro and Bloodborne. That initial impression stuck with me, even as cracks started to form — cracks wide enough to fall into and not always be sure how to get back out.

It’s impossible not to be struck by the sheer craft of WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers environments. There’s a decaying beauty to the world that feels carefully considered in a way few Soulslikes manage. Moss-coated pagodas, corpse-strewn temples, misty ravines — there’s a gorgeous quality here, and the lighting can at times be awe-inspiring when it casts down through the pustular, corrupted landscapes.

But beauty isn’t the same as clarity, and as good as it looks, the game has a frustrating tendency to work against your sense of direction. Paths snake around themselves, doors loop back in ways that feel more confusing than clever, and enemy placements often punish curiosity rather than reward it. Turn a corner and you’ll often be punished by a spear-wielding enemy hiding just off-camera. It’s not the kind of difficulty that pushes you to learn; it’s the kind that makes you frustrated only to lose an hour of progress.

“WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers is a game that demands your patience, rewards your curiosity and tests your tolerance for tedium in equal measure.”

And yet, I kept going. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers’ opening hours offer just enough variety and spectacle to convince you the slog is going somewhere. The boss fights, initially anyway, are the star. Every encounter in the early hours feels like a set piece, like something the developers really wanted you to see in spectacular form. There’s a rhythm to these fights, a balance of elegance to their timing and animation, and taking down a grotesque horror with a sliver of health can feel like a real accomplishment.

But the further you go, the more that feeling erodes. Somewhere past the halfway point, the bosses stop feeling like fights you’re meant to learn and start feeling like tests of attrition. You’re not so much mastering patterns as digging through a bag of skills, trying to find the one that lets you cheese just enough chip damage to get through.

Luck begins to feel like a mechanic in WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers. You’re dodging and parrying, sure, but so many late-game encounters come down to whether you happened to build your character the right way — or whether you’re willing to dismantle that build entirely to brute-force your way through. It’s not about refining your understanding of mechanics. It’s about accepting that this fight wants a different version of you than the last one did. And that gets old.

The levelling system plays into that grind in a way that’s both interesting and aggravating. There’s real depth to the way you build WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers. You can spec into elemental effects, favour heavy weapons or lean into more evasive styles. It should be satisfying — and for a while, it is. But the problem is that the game keeps shifting the goalposts. What worked three hours ago might not work now, and unless you’re constantly retooling your build, sometimes drastically, you’ll hit walls that feel less like difficulty spikes and more like punishment for playing the game the wrong way. It’s the kind of mechanical rigidity that undercuts your sense of growth.

“It’s impossible not to be struck by the sheer craft of WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers environments.”

This extends to items as well, which are often cryptically described or misleading. I picked up a bamboo flute early in the game, its purpose allegedly being to call for assistance in certain battles. It sounded like a lifeline for when boss fights go awry, until I realized it only worked in one very specific arena. Why? Who knows. The game isn’t interested in telling you. There were a few items like this throughout that caused more confusion than anything else. A lot of Soulslikes trade in ambiguity as a form of storytelling. Here, it feels like an excuse.

And yet, I played for more than 50 hours. I pushed through the irritation and the tedium because at its core, WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers does offer something memorable. When the game hits its stride, when it stops undercutting its own best ideas, it feels thrilling and is a joy to play. There are moments that pull you into the world completely, where the art design, soundscape and combat come together into something so close to brilliance. But too often, those moments are interrupted by something that just doesn’t work, or makes it feel like the world doesn’t want the player to explore.

Enemy placement continues to be one of the biggest offenders. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers likes to play dirtier than simply hiding threats around blind corners, peppering narrow walkways with knockback-heavy foes and punishing vertical exploration with cheap deaths. It almost revels in how often it leaves you no choice but to face these odds. There’s a difference between challenging level design and adversarial design.

“WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers is a game full of potential, stunning art, dense atmosphere and flashes of real mechanical creativity.”

This often leans toward the latter, and not in a way that invites you to master the landscape and placement. It just slows you down, makes you less likely to experiment and less eager to explore. That’s a shame because the world begs to be explored and is, honestly, downright gorgeous at times. It’s a place worth seeing, if not always a place worth fighting through.

As the credits rolled, I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt relieved, not because the game had beaten me or because I’d finally bested it, but because I didn’t have to keep trying to find the version of myself the game wanted next. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers is a game full of potential, stunning art, dense atmosphere and flashes of real mechanical creativity. But it’s also a game that seems to lose confidence in itself the longer it goes on. It starts strong, staggers midway and limps over the finish line.

I wanted to love it. For a while, I almost did. But WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers doesn’t trust you to love it on your own terms. It demands you play it a very specific way — and it keeps moving the goalposts while you do. There’s something here worth experiencing, especially if you’ve got a high pain tolerance and a love of moody, decaying worlds. But be warned: this journey asks more of you than it gives back.