Sun Wukong Game: Four Ways to Play the Monkey King

3 October 2026

If you are looking for a Sun Wukong game, there are four good ways to play with the Monkey King today. You can fight your way through the mountains and temples of Chinese myth with a staff in your hands in Black Myth: Wukong, the action RPG built on Journey to the West. You can play a Monkey reimagined for a ruined future America in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. You can play a lighter, funnier Great Sage in Monkey King: Hero Is Back, the game of the animated film. Or you can open the novel all of them borrow from and walk the road to the West as a character of your own, with a narrator that has read the book and answers whatever you type. Which one fits depends on whether you want the boss fights, a new story wearing the old names, a family-friendly brawler, or the pilgrimage itself with you somewhere on it.

This guide goes through all four, says who each one suits, and ends with how to try the last one tonight without buying anything.

What people want from a Monkey King game

Journey to the West is a long, strange, funny book, and people come to it for different things. Most searches for a Sun Wukong game want one of these:

• The powers. A staff that grows or shrinks at a word, seventy-two transformations, a somersault that carries him across the sky, and a hair he can pluck to make copies of himself.
• The fights. A monkey born from a stone who took on the armies of Heaven and won, and then spent a whole pilgrimage beating demons who wanted to eat his master.
• The company. Tripitaka the gentle monk, Pigsy the greedy and lazy, Sandy the quiet one, and the dragon who became a horse, bickering their way across the world.
• The novel as written. The rebellion in Heaven, five hundred years under a mountain, the long road west and its endless trials, told with jokes, poems and a Buddhist sense that every trouble teaches something.

Each option below leans hard toward one or two of these. The table shows where each one lands.

The four options side by side

The claims about the three published games below are as of October 2026, read from each game’s Steam store page.

Black Myth: Wukong, the big one

Black Myth: Wukong comes from the Chinese studio Game Science and reached Steam on 19 August 2024. For most people typing this search, it is the game they mean. Its store page puts the source plainly:

“The story is based on Journey to the West, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.”

You play the Destined One, setting out through landscapes drawn from the novel to uncover what lies behind the legend of the Great Sage. The fighting is the heart of it. The store page promises staff techniques plus “spells, transformations, and magic vessels” that you combine into your own style, and the book’s famous parade of demons and monsters turns up as a long line of bosses. Between fights, it digs into those enemies too: the page says you will uncover “the stories behind a variety of characters”, and what drove each of them.

Pick it if you love demanding, beautiful action games, and the thing you want from the Monkey King is to feel a staff in your hands against a mountain demon.

It is weaker for players who want to talk, scheme or wander. It is a hard combat game first, the story is the developers’, and your choices are mostly made with a weapon.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, the retelling

ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West comes from Ninja Theory, and its Premium Edition was published on Steam by Bandai Namco on 24 October 2013. It moves the story 150 years into a ruined future America. Monkey is a strong, brutish loner. Trip is a young woman who escapes a slave ship and fits him with a headband that binds his life to hers, a clear echo of the band Tripitaka uses to keep Sun Wukong obedient in the novel. The store page describes it as:

“A post-apocalyptic retelling of the classic 400-year old novel Journey to the West co-written by famed novelist and screenwriter, Alex Garland.”

It plays as a mix of combat, climbing and getting Trip through danger, and its cutscenes were co-directed by Andy Serkis, who also plays Monkey. The Premium Edition includes the “Pigsy’s Perfect 10” add-on, so the pilgrim with the appetite gets his turn too.

Pick it if you enjoy a story-led action game and like seeing an old tale moved somewhere new. The relationship between Monkey and Trip carries it.

It is weaker for anyone who wants the novel’s gods, demons and old China. The names and the shape of the journey are borrowed, and everything else is a new world.

Monkey King: Hero Is Back, the lighter take

MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK was released on Steam on 16 October 2019, published by Oasis Games. It adapts the 2015 Chinese animated film of the same name: Sun Wukong, newly freed after 500 years of imprisonment, travels with Liuer, a young boy who looks up to him. The store page says it adds “new episodes not portrayed in the original film” and promises:

“Players will explore 10 completely different levels full of fast-paced action, lush environments full of secrets and and epic boss battles”

It is kung fu action with combos, comic finishers and a magic staff, and it is much gentler in tone than Black Myth.

Pick it if you want a cheerful, quick-moving Monkey King, or something to play with a younger fan of the character.

It is weaker for readers of the novel. It follows the film’s story, and it is a short linear action game with no room to make choices of your own.

Playing inside Journey to the West as your own character

The fourth way skips the controller and starts from the book. Journey to the West is a sixteenth century Chinese novel, usually attributed to Wu Cheng’en, in 100 chapters. It follows the monk Tripitaka on his pilgrimage to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by three disciples who are all working off old sins: Sun Wukong, Pigsy and Sandy. The first chapters belong entirely to the Monkey King: his birth from a stone, his kingdom on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and the havoc he raises in Heaven before the Buddha traps him under a mountain.

In English, the complete novel is Anthony C. Yu’s four-volume translation, and there are shorter versions too, from Arthur Waley’s famous abridgement Monkey to Julia Lovell’s Monkey King: Journey to the West. These are modern translations, so you would play from a copy you own. Project Gutenberg carries the Chinese original, 西遊記, free and in the public domain in the USA, if you read Chinese.

Now imagine the book from the inside. You are a junior official in the Jade Emperor’s stables on the day a monkey turns up as the new keeper of the heavenly horses, with no idea how low the post really is. You are a servant in a rich farmer’s house where a pig-faced son-in-law has moved in and will not leave. You are a demon’s lieutenant who has heard that eating the Tang monk’s flesh grants eternal life, and who has doubts about the plan. The pilgrims are where the book puts them, the demons and gods are the book’s, and you decide whose side you are on.

This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a copy of a book you own, as a .txt or .epub file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world (characters, factions, places, items and events) before your first scene. Then you play as a character you create, typing what you do, while a game master narrates each turn grounded in that atlas. Your run remembers what you have done across turns and reloads, so the demon you tricked in the first hour still remembers it in the third. The site does not supply the book file, so you use your own copy.

If you would like a taste of martial China before you pick up the book, there is a ready-made world, Blade of the Azure River, about a disgraced swordswoman who returns to the rivers and lakes to settle an old debt of blood. It is an original wuxia story with no monkeys in it, but it is a quick test of whether typed play suits you.

Pick it if what you want is to be inside the novel as yourself, on the road west among gods, monsters and four very odd pilgrims, making choices the book never offered its minor characters.

It is weaker for players who want action on screen. It is a written story, read and typed, and it plays alone.

For other classics played the same way, see the guides to a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, a Greek mythology game and a Norse mythology game. For the wider field, see solo role playing games and text-based RPG games.

What it takes to start each one

With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all, and signing up adds 50 free credits. Turning a book into a world costs credits, and you are shown the exact price before anything is spent. The free credits cover the opening of a long book like this one, and you are told how far they reach before the narrator starts reading. The current plans and credit packs are on the pricing page.

How to start a Sun Wukong game tonight

If walking the road west sounds like your kind of game, this is the whole path from nothing to your first scene.

1. Try it with no account. Open one of the ready-made worlds and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
2. Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password.
3. Get the book ready. Have your copy of Journey to the West as a .txt or .epub file. The opening chapters, where the Monkey King rises and falls, make a fine first world on their own.
4. Upload it. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play, and you are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent.
5. Make your character. A Taoist hermit who taught a clever monkey a little too much, a heavenly soldier sent to bring the rebel in, a merchant whose caravan keeps losing travellers on a certain mountain pass.
6. Type what you do. Then see how Heaven, Earth and the Monkey King answer.

When one of the other three is the better choice

Pick by the evening you want. Hard, spectacular boss fights with a staff in your hands: Black Myth: Wukong. A cinematic story that moves the legend to a ruined future: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. A light, funny Monkey King to play in short bursts: Monkey King: Hero Is Back. Each gives you the Great Sage in a shape a book cannot.

Play inside the novel when the thing you want is the story itself: to stand at the gate of Heaven as a monkey walks in uninvited, decide whether he is a menace or the only honest creature in the palace, and find out what you would do on the long road west.