From Cultural Perception to Meaning Co-Creation: Analyzing Overseas Players' Cultural Perception Pathways in Black Myth: Wukong

As a burgeoning medium for global cultural dissemination, video games possess both narrative and immersive affordances. Yet, their actual impact on cross-cultural communication remains underexplored. This study focuses on Black Myth: Wukong, China's first AAA video game, and analyzes 18,916 English-language reviews from the Steam platform using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and GoEmotions sentiment analysis. From the perspective of players, the research uncovers three major findings: (1) Players’ perception centers on combat design and gameplay difficulty, where high-challenge mechanics enhance immersion and enable cultural engagement; (2) Chinese cultural elements elicit both aesthetic admiration and interpretive confusion, revealing a psychological tension between curiosity and alienation; (3) Through social interaction and user-generated content, players actively participate in cultural negotiation and meaning co-creation, thereby fostering intercultural identification. This study offers a player-centered perspective on the complexities of cultural transmission via Chinese “Souls-like” games, providing both theoretical insight and empirical support for the internationalization of Chinese digital games.