Wuchang: Fallen Feathers made me grapple with the parry vs. dodge conundrum

The trend of the last decade is alive and well: Soulslikes are still all the rage. Even among the limited selection of demos at Summer Game Fest 2025, I saw numerous games that were either Souls down to their toes or took some degree of inspiration from them. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a self-described Soulslike action RPG, does feel very familiar in those ways, but it's also trying a few things different that could ultimately make or break its chances.

I got to play about an hour of Wuchang, essentially starting from the beginning. I saw scattered specs of its influences: the intro area immediately gave me Zelda: Breath of the Wild vibes, with an overlook of the land and a title sequence segueing into a climb down towards my first hub area. After a little bit of exposition, I was essentially left to wander and find my way through a dangerous land, trying to figure out just what was going on.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a bit of historical fiction, set in the Shu kingdom of western China during the late Ming Dynasty but infused with fantasy and the supernatural. The Ornithropy disease is plaguing the land, spawning monsters everywhere. The player character, Wuchang, is an amnesiac pirate warrior afflicted with the Feathering, and must figure out both who she is and how to fix her feathery new problem in the process.

This entails a lot of monsters and fighting. There's a dodge button, light and heavy attacks, and you can freely swap between two weapons. There are also two weapon techniques, tied to individual weapons, mapped to the left shoulder buttons on a controller (LB and LT, or L1 and L2). At two-per-weapon and a decent spread of them, even within weapon classes like swords, spears, and axes, that's a lot of different potential moves. These are metered by Wuchang's big draw: the Skyborn Might system.

Fallen Feathers prioritizes the dodge seemingly above all else. When you successfully execute a well-timed dodge, Wuchang powers up and gets a pip of avian energy, allowing her to unleash one of her weapon techniques. (You can still use weapon techniques without them, they just won't be as powerful.) You can also expend some meter to Quick Draw, which switches from your held weapon to your sheathed one and unleashes a special move in the process.

Dodge, unleash, repeat. The vision for Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, as I see it, is to make a well-executed battle with an enemy feel as smooth as a choreographed dance, with the two fighters swinging around and moving gracefully. When it does work, it's excellent. The first time I parlayed a perfect dodge into a big swing with my sword I was thrilled. It seems like developer Leenzee's goal is to reward execution, precision, and timing.

While this will sound like other action games, Wuchang's systems feel designed to essentially turn those fights into dazzling spectacles, both to watch and play.

In that respect, it's a great system. But in the moments where you're not gracefully dodging and moving, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers can also feel a bit narrow in what it asks of you. The flip side of Wuchang's dodge-centric system is that parrying and blocking are present, but less emphasized. Both are there through weapon techniques, which means you'll still need to engage with the feathered system to maximize their potential.

In the course of an hour, I hit some high highs and low lows. Absolutely reading a bosses' moves and responding in kind, shaving huge chunks off his life bar in the process? High.

Struggling to solve how to use those same moves in a trap-laden area? Low.

These persist through most Soulslike games, but with Wuchang, I did feel like I was being guided towards a specific playstyle. I didn't get to see much magic or other alternatives to the flowing dance of close melee combat that feels like the beating heart of the game. And those sorts of options are often what help people fall in love with Souls games.

The other lingering question I have is the story. Style-wise I enjoy the world and grim alt-fiction Leenzee is going for here. The feathering effect is evocative, and there are some cool effects when you drop too many souls and have to fight a demon to reclaim them (which is also a really neat mechanic). The character writing didn't really do much for me though. Only a few designs for the various NPCs stuck with me, and they didn't have too much to say or offer in terms of world-building, save the creepy guy who put me in a demon-dream. He ruled.

But otherwise, I didn't find too much to grab onto when it came to building up the history and mysteries of the world around me.

After tussling with several bosses and exploring a good chunk of the opening area, I'm left a bit torn on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. I really like seeing studios put their own spin on the genre, especially in a setting distinct from the dozens upon dozens of samey dark fantasy games.

Wuchang seems intent to do something just a little different within a familiar space. We'll see if it works out next month.