The Clam, the Paper Man, the Water Ghost, and the Man Who May Become The Ghost Hunter
Game Science has finally shown us what Black Myth: Zhong Kui actually is, or at least what it is beginning to become, and the fifteen-minute gameplay demonstration released on 20 August 2026 is frankly astonishing. This is the first substantial playable footage from the second Black Myth game: a long, strange procession involving an unnamed swordsman, an elderly traveller, a wooden raft, an overwhelming wall of water, human-shaped enemies, a man who becomes a sheet of yellow paper, hound-like things, long-haired ghosts, Daoist-looking combat iconography, a gigantic humanoid clam called Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn — 大蚌真君, a towering black-draped ghost who can apparently be summoned and inhabited, an extraordinary woman erupting from the water, skeleton musicians, malformed bodies, bound creatures, figures sitting in pots, mysterious ritual specialists, and finally the unmistakable red-bearded Zhong Kui riding his tiger. Game Science describes the footage as an early work-in-progress build running at 21:9 and specifically calls it our first look at “the protagonist” in combat and at fragments of the story. That wording is already interesting: they do not simply call the playable swordsman Zhong Kui. Art director Yang Qi has subsequently stressed that the area shown is essentially a test map, and even said the protagonist currently lacks dialogue because they have not finished selecting his voice actor. The newly updated official Q&A is almost comically resistant to explanations, saying that fan interpretations are already more elaborate than the development team's own present understanding of the project. So everything below needs a clear hierarchy: there are things the trailer unambiguously shows, things Chinese folklore gives us strong reasons to associate with those images, and theories which Game Science may deliberately encourage without having committed to them yet.
And yet I think the trailer already reveals something far more fundamental than plot. Game Science seems to have found the conceptual engine for its second mythology. Black Myth: Wukong drew much of its playable identity from the Monkey King's body: extension, agility, duplication, transformation, the staff, the extraordinary physical possibilities inherent in Sun Wukong himself. Zhong Kui appears to be approaching the supernatural from another direction entirely. Here the operative ideas are judgement, invocation, command, embodiment, paper, spirits and uncertain categories. What exactly is a ghost? When is a ghost an enemy? Can a ghost become a companion? Can a human become a ghost? Can a god appear as an old man? Can a man become paper? Can a monster carry an honorific normally associated with exalted beings? Can one spirit attack another? Can a dead thing sit under a flowering tree and play the erhu for pleasure? The original official text accompanying Zhong Kui already asked precisely these kinds of questions. Game Science's 2025 introduction begins with the idea that demons arise from the human heart and ends with Zhong Kui drawing his sword to distinguish the “clear” from the “turbid”; elsewhere the developers have said the central subject of the game will be life and death, deliberately choosing a theme that can function without the player having read a single foundational Chinese novel beforehand. Zhong Kui is uniquely suited to this because there is no single Journey to the West-equivalent text that owns him. He accumulated across ritual, popular religion, painting, theatre, storytelling, New Year imagery, Daoist practice and later fiction. Game Science therefore has centuries of overlapping Zhong Kui traditions rather than one authoritative narrative to adapt.
The First Mystery: Is the Swordsman Zhong Kui Before He Becomes Zhong Kui?
My current read is yes, quite possibly — and I think this is presently the strongest single theory — but it is absolutely not confirmed. More precisely, I suspect Game Science wants us to consider whether the playable swordsman is a mortal or pre-apotheosis Zhong Kui, before death turns him into the enormous red-bearded demon-queller shown riding the tiger at the end. The reason this theory has accelerated in China today is not simply that the game's title says Zhong Kui. The protagonist has a prominent injury or scar around the head, carries a long sword whose broad visual identity recalls the weapon associated with the fully formed Zhong Kui, and is deliberately presented separately from the monstrous Zhong Kui we see at the trailer's conclusion. Chinese players immediately connected that head wound to one of the most famous later versions of Zhong Kui's mortal story: the gifted but physically unattractive scholar succeeds in the examinations, is rejected or humiliated because of his appearance, and kills himself by striking his head against the palace architecture. CCTV's descriptions of the traditional opera Zhong Kui Marries His Sister preserve variants in which he “碰死” or “撞阶而死” — strikes himself against the palace gate or steps and dies — after the court refuses him because of his appearance. In other tellings he kills himself differently, which itself demonstrates how unstable the biography has always been. Today's Chinese discussion is therefore not inventing the scar theory from nothing: it is matching a conspicuous visual wound with one of the best-known narrative events in Zhong Kui's post-medieval biography.
There is another reason I find the theory persuasive: life and death is exactly the theme Game Science says it is pursuing, and Zhong Kui possesses an almost perfect character arc for dramatising the passage between them. He is one of those unusual supernatural figures whose identity depends on death. The scholar dies; the ghost becomes an officer, king, judge, general or demon-queller depending on the telling; the rejected man gains in the other world an authority denied to him by the human one. If Game Science wants to make life and death experientially comprehensible rather than merely discuss them in dialogue, letting us spend the first part of the game inside the mortal Zhong Kui before crossing the border ourselves would be extraordinarily elegant. The final tiger shot could consequently be a glimpse of where this scarred swordsman is going rather than proof that the swordsman and Zhong Kui must be separate people. The radical change in his appearance would also be thematically appropriate. Zhong Kui's famous frightening face is deeply intertwined with stories about ugliness, social judgement and his posthumous identity; a game about his becoming could literally make bodily transformation part of the tragedy. Chinese folklore never supplies Game Science with one mandatory sequence of events here, which gives the studio enormous latitude. CCTV's older survey of the tradition even notes that historically there may have been no single real Zhong Kui at all and discusses the theory that the name developed from zhongkui/zhongkui as an older exorcistic implement before the figure became increasingly personified.
The strongest alternative being discussed is Du Ping, Zhong Kui's friend and eventual brother-in-law in the enormously popular Zhong Kui Marries His Sister tradition. Du Ping finances or assists Zhong Kui on his examination journey, later gives him an honourable burial, and is rewarded after Zhong Kui becomes a supernatural authority when Zhong Kui returns with his ghostly entourage and marries his younger sister to him. This gives Du Ping an obvious reason to stand adjacent to Zhong Kui's story without being Zhong Kui himself, and fans understandably reach for him once the trailer shows the playable swordsman and the tiger-mounted Zhong Kui as separate images. But there are problems. The traditional Du Ping is defined primarily by generosity, friendship and filial/social virtue; he is not conventionally a demon-hunting swordsman with supernatural possession abilities. Game Science could reinvent him, certainly, but at present the playable character's sword, scar, centrality and potential death-transition strike me as a tighter configuration. There are also theories that he is an earthly vessel, disciple or partner of Zhong Kui rather than either man. Game Science has intentionally preserved all these options. Even Chinese same-day coverage is careful to report the mortal-Zhong-Kui, Du-Ping and “human vessel” ideas as speculation.
There is a wonderful additional possibility hidden in Zhong Kui scholarship itself: there may never have been one historical man waiting for Game Science to reproduce accurately. One long-standing antiquarian explanation treats “Zhong Kui” as the personification of an older exorcistic object or concept, while other traditions connect his development with ritual expulsion, door guardianship and demon-quelling imagery. The character gathered biography over time. By the Tang and Song periods we have the great dream story in which an enormous ghost destroys the smaller spirit troubling the emperor, followed by the celebrated image of Zhong Kui supposedly painted by Wu Daozi; later storytelling gives him examination injustice, suicide, Du Ping, a sister, ghost armies and adventures cataloguing the moral deformities of the human world. The Black Myth version therefore has an unusual licence: Game Science can create a human “origin” which feels ancient without pretending there has always been a single canonical one.
The Old Man, the Raft, the Wall of Water — and Why He Becomes Paper
The beginning might be my favourite part of the entire trailer because it instantly refuses to explain itself. The protagonist encounters an elderly man in a mountainous waterside region; the pair work together around a crude wooden raft; a huge surge of water overwhelms the scene; after the protagonist gets the old man settled and fights through the hostile group nearby, the old fellow eventually ceases being an elderly human body at all. He becomes a yellow sheet, talisman or paper image which escapes through the air, and the protagonist follows it. This sequence is confirmed in detailed Chinese recaps of the footage, while the unnamed man's performance has already been identified as using the facial/performance work of veteran Beijing People's Art Theatre actor Li Guangfu. His character has not been officially named.
The temptation will be to immediately declare him some named god — a local earth god, an immortal, Zhong Kui in disguise, a Daoist master — but there is nowhere near enough evidence yet. What is much safer, and much richer, is to recognise the cultural technology of the transformation. Chinese ritual traditions have a deep history of treating paper images as interfaces between visible human life and invisible beings. Shenma, jiama and zhima — divine images, “paper horses” and related printed ritual sheets — could represent gods, spirits, supernatural officials and their means of conveyance. The Daoist Culture Database describes such paper images as symbolic representations of divinities and records an old explanation in which the paper itself serves as a material support or locus upon which the divine being may depend. Museum and arts scholarship similarly describes paper-horse images as ritual carriers: figures are printed, invoked, displayed, burned or otherwise dispatched in acts linking the worshipper with divine and spirit domains. In other words, Game Science showing a seemingly flesh-and-blood old man suddenly resolving into yellow paper is drawing on a visual idea that Chinese audiences can read immediately: the body we were looking at may have been an emanation, effigy, temporary embodiment, ritual proxy or summoned presence, rather than an ordinary biological man.
The yellow material also naturally evokes fu and fulu, Daoist talismanic writing and diagrammatic forms associated in historical sources and popular practice with commanding, invoking, restricting or expelling spirits. I would not say the old man “is a Daoist talisman” as a factual identification, because we need to see the marks on the paper clearly before saying precisely what Game Science is quoting. But the trailer deliberately places paper metamorphosis inside a game whose user-interface symbols are already being compared by Chinese researchers and creators with components of Daoist talisman designs. A same-day analysis highlighted by GamerSky identifies forms resembling a fire-wheel design, the head and central structure of Sanqing talismans, and yunzhuan or “cloud-seal” forms. That reading is currently a fan/research comparison rather than a Game Science annotation, but the convergence is striking: the protagonist's powers, the old man's body and the visual interface all appear to be speaking related ritual languages.
Then there is the raft and the water itself. I would be very cautious about searching for one named myth to decode a raft, because in this case the broader structure is stronger than any premature identification. Shores, crossings, flooded ground and unstable boundaries are natural spaces for a game about life and death: land and water interpenetrate; solid ground gives way; apparent human beings become spirit-media; submerged entities later erupt into the fight. The sequence is almost a declaration that physical categories cannot be trusted. The old man is introduced as a mundane travelling companion, the sort of NPC one might escort through an action RPG, and then Game Science simply takes his body away from him. From that moment onward, every person in the footage deserves suspicion.
There is even an intriguing possibility that the water imagery connects indirectly to the clam boss itself. This is speculative, but it has a real mythological foundation. In ancient Chinese imagination the shèn (蜃) could be conceived as an enormous clam or related marine creature whose exhalations produced phantom buildings and cities over the sea — one of the traditional explanations behind haishi shenlou, the mirage. Shiji's Treatise on Celestial Offices includes the famous idea that “shèn vapour” beside the sea resembles towers, and later accounts elaborate the creature as an immense bivalve capable of generating deceptive visions. The game's boss is called Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn, literally something close to “Great Clam Perfected Lord,” rather than Shèn, so there is no basis for saying these are identical. But putting a giant supernatural clam into a waterside chapter already involving unstable appearances makes the old association worth holding in mind. If later material reveals illusions, false landscapes, dream architecture or deceptive manifestations around this creature, the shèn tradition will become much more significant. For now it is resonance, not identification.
The Human-Shaped Attackers and the New Sword Combat
Once the water sequence breaks, the protagonist fights a group of largely human-proportioned enemies wearing white coverings and broad-brimmed hats and wielding knives, hammers and spears. They are especially interesting because they prevent the trailer from establishing an easy “human hero versus obvious monsters” schema. Some look like men, some may be spirits, some may be members of a ritual or martial organisation, and Game Science gives us no labels. The current footage shows blocking or deflection, evasion, recovery, multiple attackers, sword-energy effects and the ability to set the blade alight from an external flame. The great mechanical separation from Wukong is obvious: the staff is gone, just as Game Science said it would be in its July interview, and the new protagonist is a dedicated swordsman. The developers had also suggested before this trailer that Zhong Kui could broaden the weapon vocabulary further, although the exact final arsenal remains unresolved.
The sword is particularly appropriate for Zhong Kui. Across painting, theatre and popular iconography he is frequently represented carrying or drawing a blade as the instrument of demonic judgement. Even when he is rendered comically — drunk, escorting his sister, surrounded by mischievous ghosts — the sword keeps him legible as the demon-queller. That connection makes the playable man's matching choice of weapon one more point in favour of the mortal-Zhong-Kui reading. If this were simply an unrelated wandering Daoist protagonist, Game Science has nevertheless chosen to make him fight using the object most immediately associated with the title deity.
Yet I think the more radical departure is occurring in the supernatural abilities surrounding the sword. Wukong gave us transformations because transformation belongs to Sun Wukong's mythology. This trailer suggests Zhong Kui may convert the old series idea into something closer to spirit jurisdiction. You encounter ghostly beings, summon them, fight beside them and perhaps enter them. The difference could eventually become one of the defining distinctions between the two games.
Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn: The Clam Man Is Much Stranger Than “Big Clam Boss”
The clam creature is the trailer's most completely demonstrated monster and probably the most immediately unforgettable new design. Its name shown in the fight is 大蚌真君 — Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn. Dà bàng is straightforwardly “great/large clam.” Zhēnjūn, however, is a far grander piece of language: “Perfected Lord” or “True Lord,” a religious honorific associated with revered transcendents and divinities. Game Science has therefore produced a revolting, low-crawling humanoid mollusc encrusted with shell and marine growth while giving him a title with spiritual dignity. Whether the name is comic self-aggrandisement, a sign that the creature really is some fallen or local numinous power, or a deliberate challenge to the player's assumptions about what counts as god and what counts as monster is unknown. The title alone makes him more interesting than an anonymous yaoguai.
Mechanically, his enormous paired shell functions as armour and as part of the encounter's evolving physical state. He charges and rolls, exposes vulnerable flesh when opening himself, and eventually loses or has part of that shell broken, pushing the fight into a second phase. Game Science has not confirmed a generalised monster-part destruction system, so the shell break should currently be treated as a property of this encounter rather than evidence that every large enemy will have severable components. The basic design is still revealing: the enemy is built around a natural biological defence, and overcoming him changes his silhouette rather than merely deleting a health-bar segment.
The deeper folklore connection is the giant-clam tradition mentioned above. Chinese thought contains an unexpectedly rich imaginative relationship between huge shellfish and illusion. The shèn becomes an explanation for impossible structures hovering beyond the coast; the creature sits between zoology and monstrosity, something apparently mundane enlarged into a source of ontological deception. Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn need not literally be the shèn for Game Science to be drawing from the same cultural reservoir. This is precisely how I hope they approach the entire bestiary: not turning a classical encyclopedia into a checklist, but absorbing older visual associations and generating creatures which feel like they could have grown out of Chinese storytelling themselves.
And this is where the title Zhēnjūn becomes delicious. Zhong Kui's world should contain bad humans, decent ghosts, fraudulent gods, legitimate local spirits, dangerous animals, supernatural bureaucrats and beings whose legal or cosmic status we do not yet understand. A clam calling itself a Perfected Lord might be ridiculous, sacred, corrupt, tragic or all four at once. The 2025 official verse already sets up this moral disorder by contrasting monsters and immortals as two faces and asking who possesses the authority to judge life and death. The clam is the first boss we have seen whose very name embodies that ambiguity. citeturn306843search5
The Wrapped, Black-Draped Companion — and the Mechanic I Think Defines the Game
The biggest gameplay revelation arrives once the clam's shell has been smashed. The protagonist calls forth a gigantic humanoid figure, substantially taller and heavier than himself, wrapped or draped in dark material. Chinese reports have been cautious and simply describe him as a mysterious tall man in a black covering. Game Science's own current character roundup material does not provide him a name. What happens next is far more useful than a name anyway: the entity remains in the battle and fights alongside the protagonist, and then the protagonist can shift directly into or through this being and attack using its body. Chinese coverage describes the mechanic with language equivalent to possession or body-shifting.
This immediately suggests a whole potential architecture for Zhong Kui. Imagine that the supernatural progression system is built around ghosts rather than conventional transformations. A defeated, judged, recruited, bound or otherwise acquired spirit could become a temporary ally; the player could then invoke that being beside the protagonist, and some spirits could additionally function as bodies the protagonist temporarily inhabits, supplying radically different ranges, masses, weapons and movesets. Game Science has shown only enough to establish that one summoned ghost-like companion has both collaborative and embodiment functions. A collectible ghost roster remains my extrapolation, not an announced system. But if that is where the mechanic goes, it would be superbly appropriate to Zhong Kui.
The reason is historical. Zhong Kui is frequently represented with ghosts, rather than eternally alone against them. The Zhong Kui Marries His Sister theatre tradition turns the ghost entourage into a procession of distinct personalities: productions include large ghosts, lamp ghosts, burden-carrying ghosts, umbrella ghosts, donkey-leading ghosts and other supernatural attendants. CCTV's preserved cast list for one production gives us exactly this kind of retinue. The Qing novel Zhan Gui Zhuan goes even further. There Zhong Kui is supplied with named assistants and three hundred yin soldiers, and the story's supernatural bureaucracy explicitly tells him that ghosts cannot all be treated identically: some are to be killed, some pacified, with judgement depending upon severity and circumstance. That is extraordinary material for a game system. Zhong Kui's power is not merely “I hit ghosts with sword.” It is authority over a society of ghosts.
That old novel also offers one of the most useful lenses through which to read Game Science's creature designs. Its “ghosts” include satirical personifications of human failings, habits and social types. They are a supernatural taxonomy of corrupted behaviour as much as a zoological bestiary. The king of the underworld effectively tells Zhong Kui that some of the hardest ghosts are difficult to prosecute precisely because their wrongdoing is habitual, social and morally slippery rather than a simple criminal offence. This sits beautifully beside Game Science's line that demons arise from the human heart. It makes me suspect the game's great question will eventually be what deserves the sword. A summoned monster fighting beside us is already evidence that “ghost” cannot simply equal “enemy.”
The wrapped companion may therefore be our first proof of the game's central mechanical idea: Zhong Kui's mythology becomes playable through relationships with spirits. You may kill them. You may command them. You may inhabit them. You may perhaps judge them. Some may already serve you. That is an extremely fertile replacement for Wukong's transformations.
The Woman in the Water
Then Game Science does something wonderfully strange. Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn attempts to flee towards what appears to be its refuge or nest and a woman suddenly erupts from the water, seizes it and violently beats it. Current Chinese coverage describes her only as a mysterious female ghost or water ghost; Game Science has not named her. GamerSky's same-day character inventory similarly labels her simply “神秘女” — mysterious woman.
There is an obvious general folklore association with shui gui, water ghosts, drowned spirits and other beings attached to rivers, pools and deaths by water, but I would resist assigning her a canonical water-spirit identity this early. Chinese supernatural literature has far too many female aquatic beings, drowned revenants, river spirits, dragon-associated women and local numina for “woman emerges from water” to lead automatically to one name. More interesting is what she does in the scene. She does not attack the protagonist. She intercepts another monster. We therefore see, within the very first gameplay demonstration, another breach in the simplistic division between player and monster. The supernatural world has its own alliances and grievances.
Some fans are already asking whether she might be Zhong Kui's sister, particularly because Du Ping and “Zhong Kui's brother-in-law” theories have circulated since the earlier New Year footage. I presently consider that identification weak. The traditional younger sister from Zhong Kui Marries His Sister is usually the living woman Zhong Kui returns to escort into marriage with Du Ping. She is not conventionally an aquatic revenant who bursts from a marsh to pummel shellfish. Game Science can of course rewrite the tradition, and the February 2026 in-engine special may eventually prove to have reused designs that become important in the actual game, but the studio explicitly positioned that celebratory short as separate from the final story. So “water woman = sister” is possible in the broadest sense, yet currently unsupported.
There is another interpretation I find more interesting: perhaps she demonstrates the same summon or adjudication system as the dark companion but in a more cinematic form. Maybe the protagonist has invoked her. Maybe she is a local spirit who hates Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn. Maybe she claims the boss after defeat. Maybe she belongs to an ecosystem in which supernatural beings have obligations and territories. The footage cuts before it settles the question.
Her emergence also transforms the preceding boss fight retrospectively. The protagonist did not simply travel to a boss arena and kill the large thing occupying it. He broke the clam's shell, drove it from the battlefield, and then something already present in the local supernatural world intercepted it. The environment contains agents. That is a promising direction for a game in which folklore can feel inhabited rather than arranged exclusively for combat.
The Creature Montage: What Is Actually There
Same-day Chinese coverage has done something very useful: GamerSky went through the trailer and assembled an image catalogue of the presently visible characters without pretending it knows their identities. Its labels amount to our best provisional register. Beyond the protagonist, mysterious old man, Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn and mysterious water woman, the footage contains the protagonist's summoned/possessed ghost, long-haired ghost creatures, a mysterious ghost-faced person, a grotesque person in a pot, an apparent boss-sized unknown being, a mysterious eyebrow-painting or face-painting figure, a bound ghost-creature, a mysterious Daoist who fights the protagonist, the fully realised Zhong Kui, and several categories of ordinary smaller enemies. That source explicitly warns that most identities are currently unknown.
This is precisely where I would caution against the inevitable online tendency to identify every unusual creature as “from the Classic of Mountains and Seas.” One Reddit reaction today already made that association, and visually I completely understand it: the bodies have the startling taxonomic strangeness people associate with Shanhaijing. But Chinese strange-creature culture is vastly larger than that one book. Game Science can pull from zhiguai tales, local cults, Daoist ritual images, Buddhist infernal imagery, exorcistic theatre, opera, New Year prints, ghost novels, paintings, oral traditions, occupational folklore, temple sculpture and wholly original invention. Black Myth: Wukong already demonstrated that Game Science enjoys discovering obscure textual and artistic fragments and then combining them into a new organism. Treating every deformed body as a direct classical-creature adaptation would reduce what is actually exciting about this design language.
The long-haired creatures seen after the paper-old-man sequence appear much closer to the broad visual language of revenants and wild spirits than to anything we can responsibly name today. The hound-like animals could be ordinary yaoguai, corrupted dogs, infernal beasts or simply an original enemy family. The ghost-faced person may draw on masks, ritual face painting or bodily supernatural mutation. Chinese nuo traditions alone contain an enormous vocabulary of exaggerated divine, demonic and exorcistic masks — including figures with fire-shaped brows, tusks, horns and other features designed to render supernatural type through the face — so “strange face = named monster” is a poor inference.
The person in the pot is immediately suggestive of punishment imagery, cooking, sacrifice and the grotesque domestic humour that Game Science clearly enjoys, but no current source gives the figure a mythological name. The bound creature is similarly tantalising: bondage could indicate punishment, capture, transport, restraint of dangerous spiritual power, or a creature literally using another body as part of itself. The half-human rider or partly human mount image in the montage that immediately jumps out in the footage currently has no reliable official identification that I can find. I would leave it unnamed rather than forcing it into a source text. Visually, one of Game Science's recurring pleasures is turning social relations into anatomy: carrying, riding, binding, eating and inhabiting other bodies become creature design. If this being is indeed one body bearing another, it might represent parasitism, punishment, hierarchy, symbiosis or simple grotesque locomotion. A later bestiary entry will probably transform what now looks like visual madness into some sad, comic or vicious little story.
The mysterious Daoist-looking opponent is particularly intriguing. If the playable man himself uses a sword and ritual powers, a second ritual specialist fighting him immediately opens the possibility of competing exorcists, sects or systems of supernatural authority. Zhong Kui's world should benefit enormously from human institutions trying to regulate the same territory as the ghosts. A supernatural game becomes much richer once “exorcist” ceases automatically to mean “good person.”
The Skeleton Band May Be the Most Revealing Image in the Trailer
Then there is the image I keep returning to: the protagonist calmly seated beneath a flowering old tree playing guqin, while three skeletons accompany him as an ensemble. According to the close breakdown circulating in Chinese coverage, the skeleton on the left wears a broad hat and plays erhu, another behind plays a flute, and the one on the right beats a drum. Petals fall around them. Nobody is being attacked. Nobody is screaming. They are making music.
This single image tells me more about Game Science's conception of the world than another ten bosses could. Death has not abolished personality. A skeleton can have an occupation, rhythm, social role and perhaps friendship. The afterlife is a community. Ghosts are capable of art. Zhong Kui's relationship with the dead can consequently contain companionship alongside violence. This is fully compatible with the old iconographic and theatrical Zhong Kui tradition, where his attendant ghosts are often comic, industrious, celebratory and domestic. Zhong Kui Marries His Sister literally sends them through the night carrying lamps, belongings, umbrellas and musical objects as part of a wedding procession. The demon-queller is surrounded by the beings he supposedly exists to “quell.”
That contradiction is central to Zhong Kui's charm. He himself is a ghost who hunts ghosts. He is frightening yet protective. He belongs to the underworld but guards human houses. He can be represented with savage violence, then appear in paintings drinking, travelling, marrying off his sister or surrounded by comic assistants. His monstrousness protects people from monstrosity. A game based upon him should therefore resist a clean human/monster split at every opportunity, and this trailer repeatedly does exactly that.
The Tiger Is Not a Random Mount
The ending finally gives us the figure everyone expected to control from the title announcement: the enormous red-bearded Zhong Kui riding a tiger. It is tempting to treat this simply as Game Science's trademark spectacular mount image, or even as evidence that we will eventually ride the tiger through the game. The latter is possible, but there is no official confirmation of a mount system, and Yang Qi's reminder that we have seen a test map should make us extremely cautious about extrapolating world structure from one montage.
The image itself, however, has real historical precedent. A surviving Ming-period painting traditionally titled Zhong Kui Riding a Tiger depicts Zhong Kui carrying his sword on the back of a tiger, looking towards bats whose presence also invokes auspicious symbolism through the fu / “fortune” homophone. The tiger-mounted Zhong Kui is therefore part of an existing visual tradition, and Game Science has chosen an image with historical ancestry rather than simply sticking their character on the coolest animal available.
The tiger is also perfectly suited to Zhong Kui's exorcistic persona. It is one of the great dangerous animals of Chinese visual culture and can itself carry protective, military and spirit-subduing meanings. Zhong Kui sitting above it converts ferocity into controlled authority. The 2025 announcement trailer already established this mature Zhong Kui and the tiger as the game's defining icon; the 2026 gameplay trailer now withholds him until the final instant after spending almost its entire running time with somebody else. That editorial choice is deliberate even if its exact narrative explanation is not yet fixed.
If the playable swordsman is mortal Zhong Kui, the final image is essentially prophecy: this is what he becomes after death. If the swordsman is Du Ping or another figure, it functions instead as the arrival of the being around whom his story will eventually orbit. If the protagonist is some earthly manifestation of Zhong Kui, the tiger image could be another state of the same consciousness. All three explanations remain alive.
My strongest bet is still the first. The head scar is difficult for me to dismiss, especially when paired with a narrative explicitly organised around life and death. There is something dramatically powerful about Game Science titling the game Black Myth: Zhong Kui and then showing us fifteen minutes of a man whom everybody insists does not look like Zhong Kui. The obvious answer may be: because he isn't Zhong Kui yet.
The Deeper Zhong Kui Tradition Game Science Can Use
What fascinates me about this project now is the sheer volume of cultural territory available to it. Black Myth: Wukongcould excavate endlessly within Journey to the West and its surrounding traditions, but it remained tethered to a massive literary gravitational centre. Zhong Kui gives Game Science something stranger. His mythology exists almost as a network. One branch is the emperor's dream and the grotesque ghost who destroys another ghost. One branch is the gifted scholar rejected because of his appearance. One is the suicide. One is the posthumous appointment. One is the loyal friendship with Du Ping. One is the wedding of the sister. One is the household protector printed and hung against evil. One is the sword-bearing figure in paintings. One is the tiger rider. One is the comic ghost procession. One is the satirical supernatural official of Zhan Gui Zhuan, travelling through human society and discovering that the worst “ghosts” are recognisable human behaviours. One is the historical possibility that the personal biography was itself built over a much older exorcistic name or symbol. Game Science can move through all of these without violating a single dominant source because no single source owns the whole man.
That Zhan Gui Zhuan connection deserves particular attention over the coming years because its moral structure is almost uncannily aligned with Game Science's announced text. In the novel, Zhong Kui is shown a catalogue of ghosts embodying forms of deceit, greed, shamelessness, pretension, drunkenness and other human failings. The supernatural bureaucracy explains that some are difficult to punish through ordinary legal logic because their wickedness is habitual and socially embedded. Zhong Kui is instructed to distinguish between those who should be destroyed and those who can be pacified. This is exactly the kind of material which could turn the phrase “distinguish the clear from the turbid” into game design. Imagine bosses where victory produces judgement rather than automatic execution; ghosts recruited after defeat; humans revealed as spiritually worse than monsters; local gods whose titles conceal corruption; innocent revenants trapped by ritual rules; supernatural officials who disagree over jurisdiction. Nothing in the current footage confirms those systems, but the underlying Zhong Kui literature offers Game Science a remarkable foundation for them.
The current footage already behaves as though moral taxonomy interests the team. An old man is apparently a piece of spirit paper. A “Perfected Lord” is a clam monstrosity. A gigantic ghost fights on our side. Another ghost's body becomes temporarily playable. A woman emerging from haunted water attacks our enemy. Skeletons form a band. Human-shaped ritual figures attack the hero. The titled demon-queller himself appears only at the end and is far more monstrous-looking than the man we have spent fifteen minutes controlling. Every category leaks into another.
A Provisional Bestiary After Fifteen Minutes
So, as of 20 August 2026, the safest complete reading of what Game Science has actually shown is this. We have the unnamed white-robed or pale-clothed swordsman protagonist, probably human at this point and possibly mortal Zhong Kui; the Li Guangfu-faced old man, apparently able to collapse into or reveal himself as a yellow ritual sheet; several groups of human-shaped armed enemies in pale cloaks and wide hats; hound-like supernatural beasts; long-haired ghostly creatures; the boss Dà Bàng Zhēnjūn, a gigantic humanoid clam whose shell breaks during combat; the protagonist's towering black-draped summon, which can fight independently and apparently become a temporary possessed body; the mysterious water woman/ghost who attacks the fleeing clam; the three skeleton musicians playing erhu, flute and drum; a ghost-faced humanoid; a grotesque person in a pot; at least one bound creature; a mysterious face- or eyebrow-painting figure; an unidentified large probable boss; a Daoist or ritual swordsman who appears to oppose the protagonist; the strange part-human rider/carrier configuration which remains unnamed; additional unclassified small yaoguai; and finally Zhong Kui himself riding the tiger. Anything more specific than those names currently begins moving from identification into theory. GamerSky's exhaustive same-day visual roundup uses almost exactly this cautious nomenclature because the official bestiary names simply have not been supplied yet.
And I love that we do not know. I hope Game Science resists explaining these things for a long time. Part of what made the earliest Black Myth: Wukong footage so electrifying was seeing beings which looked culturally specific before knowing their context. Zhong Kui has already gone further because its source field is considerably stranger. A monkey king brings expectations. Zhong Kui brings a profession, an image and a pile of contradictory stories. Behind him is effectively the entire Chinese ghost world.
What I Think the Trailer Is Telling Us About the Finished Game
My working theory after going through the footage, the Chinese same-day analysis, Game Science's current statements and the older Zhong Kui material is that Black Myth: Zhong Kui may eventually be structured around a human journey into supernatural jurisdiction. The scarred swordsman begins relatively mortal. He deals with apparitions whose physical reality is already unstable. He learns ritual abilities. He encounters and perhaps captures or binds spirits. Those spirits become allies and alternate bodies. The division between human, ghost, god and monster progressively collapses. Death is not a failure state in the story but an ontological threshold. At some point — perhaps early, perhaps halfway through — the protagonist dies or undergoes an equivalent crossing and becomes the fully realised Zhong Kui: grotesque, empowered, accompanied by ghosts and associated with the tiger. The game's announced “life and death” subject then becomes the actual arc of the playable body.
I would put mortal Zhong Kui ahead of Du Ping as the identity theory today, although only provisionally. The scar tied to the suicide tradition is the biggest clue; the sword is another; the shared visual weapon language between protagonist and mature Zhong Kui is another; the life/death theme is another; the deliberate withholding of the name “Zhong Kui” for the playable protagonist while presenting the iconic Zhong Kui separately is exactly the kind of misdirection an origin story would exploit. The chief reason for restraint is Game Science itself. The company is openly telling us that development is early, that this is effectively a test map with incomplete story slices, that fan interpretation is currently outrunning the project, and that even the voice cast is unfinished. The mystery may therefore contain genuine undecided space, not simply secrets sitting inside a completed script.
What looks far more solid is the design philosophy. Game Science has found a way to make Zhong Kui mechanically different from Wukong while preserving the Black Myth fascination with embodied myth. The staff has become the sword. Transformation appears to be mutating into invocation and possession. A bestiary derived from one famous novel is becoming a much broader ecology of Chinese strange tales and folk religion. Ghosts appear to have social lives rather than existing exclusively as combat targets. Daoist visual components are entering the interface. Paper is becoming supernatural matter. Boss bodies can physically change. Human enemies coexist with monsters. Musicians can already be dead. A clam can be a “Perfected Lord.” Zhong Kui can sit on a tiger while looking more demonic than half the entities he exists to destroy.
The tiger itself feels like the final seal on the whole fifteen minutes. We begin with an ordinary-looking man helping an ordinary-looking old man move a raft. By the time the montage finishes, ordinary humanity has almost ceased to exist as a stable category. The old man is paper. The landscape contains ghosts. The swordsman's powers reach into other bodies. The clam has a divine title. The woman in the water belongs to some unknown supernatural order. Skeletons have music. Bound and hybrid bodies move through the world according to rules we cannot yet read. Then Zhong Kui appears: enormous, red-bearded, sword-bearing, riding the tiger in an image with centuries of visual precedent. He is simultaneously human memory, ghost, god, official, monster and protector.
That is why this trailer has impressed me so much. Game Science could have made the obvious sequel: another extraordinarily expensive Chinese myth action game with a famous hero, spectacular bosses and a different weapon. Instead, the first playable footage suggests they are reaching for a stranger question. Who gets to decide which thing is the monster? Zhong Kui is perhaps China's perfect protagonist for asking it. He dies because humans judge his outward appearance, then becomes the supernatural authority charged with judging beings whose appearances are themselves horrifying. He is a ghost assigned to deal with ghosts. He resembles the things ordinary people fear and becomes the image they hang on their doors for protection. The ancient stories make him both victim and judge.
And if the scarred swordsman truly is Zhong Kui before all of that happens, Game Science may have found an extraordinary way into the myth: let us meet the man first, let us cross the boundary with him, and only then let us become the thing riding the tiger.
I can keep tracking Chinese-language frame analysis and official comments as people identify the unnamed montage creatures.