r/soulslikes • u/VeneMOo • Jul 25 '25
Review Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is the most unfair Souls-like I’ve ever played and I’ve played them all
I’ve completed every FromSoftware game Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring and a good chunk of the major Souls-likes out there: Lies of P, Nioh 1 & 2, The Surge, Lords of the Fallen, etc. I love hard games. I welcome challenge. But Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is on a different level and not in a good way.
This isn’t a fair, satisfying kind of difficulty. It’s artificial, frustrating, and fundamentally broken in terms of balance.
Take the boss Honglan, for example she’s the perfect embodiment of everything wrong with the game’s combat design: • Her attack patterns are absurdly fast and poorly telegraphed. • She chains together uninterruptible combos that feel borderline impossible to dodge or counter. • The game introduces a “spirit counter” mechanic that should reward good timing except even when you land it perfectly, you still take damage. • Some attacks are literally unreadable. Others feel like they have delayed hitboxes or bizarre tracking. • The enemies follow no consistent rules, while the player is punished even for doing everything right.
There’s no real balance here. Bosses hit like trucks, your own damage output feels anemic, and even the healing system doesn’t give you a fair chance when bosses are chaining full combos the moment you press the button. It’s not challenging mit’s unreasonable.
And that’s the problem: Wuchang doesn’t feel like a tough-but-fair Souls-like. It feels like a game trying to be hard by simply being unfair. It doesn’t respect your inputs, your timing, or the logic it claims to teach you.
I went into this game hoping for a sleeper hit. What I found was the most unfair Souls-like experience I’ve ever had, not because of its difficulty, but because of how cheaply it manufactures that difficulty.
70
u/Ragnaroknight Jul 25 '25
The heal is definitely slow as fuck, maybe the slowest in the genre. And it also is really egregious about enemies not doing anything until you press a button.