Black Myth Wukong's benchmarking tool lets you test your rig's capacity for monkeying around

Are you a prospective buyer of Black Myth Wukong and would like to see if your PC qualifies for uninterrupted monkeying around? Wowee, would you look at that! There’s a BMW (no, not the German multinational manufacturer of vehicles) benchmarking tool out now that lets you preview how the game would run on your hardware.

The benchmarking tool is free, only available on Steam, and separate from the game itself, clocking in at just under an 8GB download. As with most other benchmarking tools, it’ll play a bunch of in-game sequences and evaluate how your PC copes with them in real time. And you can tinker with the graphics options, so you can also see whether you’re able to run the game on minimum or recommended specs before its launch on 20th August.

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It’s worth noting that “test results may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance at the time of the game’s release”, according to the devs. They also say that the tool’s benchmarking results are tracked, meaning they’ll be used to better identify “potential compatibility issues before the game’s launch”.

You can find the game’s minimum and recommended specs at the bottom of the Steam page, and they honestly aren’t too bad. That’s obviously with the caveat that I am not Mr. Hardware, aka our delightful James.

I actually spent some time with the game a little while back and thought it was a pleasantly surprising Soulslike, with real flourishes of cinema. Although I did question how it would evolve overtime, I really did appreciate the more linear exploration. “Wukong’s forests, with their bamboo groves and undulating tracks, felt laid out in a way you’d expect from a real life walk, lending its relative linearity a strange sort of authenticity,” I said. “A sense that you were exploring carefully selected portions of a space, where the wider world was at once there and just beyond reach at the same time – again, I think some of the best video game worlds are those you can’t explore.”

If Wukong itself is appealing, many of its creators have a reputation for sexist comments and behaviour, both in public on social media and allegedly within the studio, as reported by IGN last November. Game Science have yet to acknowledge IGN’s reporting, and they refused to talk to me about it during the preview event above.