Black Myth: Wukong has officially blown the doors off Steam, both by racking up massive player counts and receiving “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews from players. (For the record, we really liked it too.)
But just because a game is great doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to improve it. The moment it launched, modders began monkeying around with the monkey game’s innards, and one mod has quickly risen to the top of the popularity pile—because it adds a map.
Simply called Simple Map, the mod gives you a big ol’ map of the world, lets you open it fullscreen, change the camera view, zoom in and out, and scroll around. You can also tap a key to display nearby resources, and naturally your own location is shown with an icon as well.
Full disclosure: I haven’t played Black Myth: Wukong yet, or even watched someone else play it on a stream, so I can’t really say if it’s a game that cries out for a map or not. The mod has over 30,000 downloads, so “maybe” is about the only conclusion I can come to. In the interest of due diligence, however, I asked my coworkers who have played it whether or not a map is something that would benefit the game. Here’s what they said.
Wesley “Wes” Fenlon: “Not having a map has definitely left me wondering if I’ve missed any significant side paths—even in the first stage, it’s quite easy to skip over one of the first bosses (and major power-ups) you’re supposed to get if you’re in a hurry. The environments are very pretty, but not very interesting to navigate more than once because there’s very little to actually interact with. That’s discouraged me from going back and running through them multiple times without having a map to orient myself with.”
Tyler “Tyler Colp” Colp: “A map would only be nice if it could help you track sidequests or secrets to return to because this game does have a bit of the souls thing where NPCs move around and you have to find them. Otherwise, you don’t really need a map to get through each area because the paths don’t fork in that many directions and you aren’t getting sidetracked by some cave like in Elden Ring. I think a map might help people who are terrible at finding where, say, the next boss is, but I don’t think it would make the game considerably better or anything.”
There you have it. And in case you’re wondering, the reason Tyler “Tyler Colp” Colp’s nickname is “Tyler Colp” is because we have two Tylers at PC Gamer so we have to refer to them by their full names.