The global reception of Black Myth: Wukong highlights the potential and tension in the export of Chinese cultural heritage to international gamers. This study fills the gap in current literature as it dissects in-game semiotics based on individual design components, including characters, narratives, and environmental elements, and adopts a more holistic approach to media studies that connects interactive games with traditional journalism. The research methods include visual coding of twenty central game elements, comparative mapping of five questlines with Journey to the West, and thematic coding of over fifty Western media reviews. Results indicate that the game has successfully compressed Chinese culture into a globally accessible product, but numerous cultural nuances in the original work, such as the moral complexities of the characters and the hidden religious messages, also risked being misinterpreted or neglected. Western media framing also, inadvertently or not, exacerbates this one-sided interpretation by emphasizing the visual experience over the philosophical depths of the game, which oversimplifies it into a far more combat-oriented, Westernized version than originally intended. These results inform the understanding of transcultural media flows and are a basis for more culturally sensitive design strategies that balance accessibility with the preservation of symbolic richness.
Xi Chen (2025) studied this question.