Conclusion

Black Myth: Wukong is a flashy action RPG with tons of style, a smorgasbord of challenging bosses, a bigger-than-life story, and impressive visuals. While it is super demanding, the game features confined, some would even say cozy, levels, which is nice to see in this day and age when open-world is synonymous with AAA games.

Overall, the performance is quite rough on the Deck, so I recommend the Ally as the handheld of choice for this game. It not only has the oomph to run the game at a stable 40 FPS, even 60 FPS with Frame Generation. This is a welcome surprise that allows you to enjoy the game at a stable 60 FPS on ASUS' gaming handheld at 900p resolution and some settings set higher than "Low," which is great to see.

Aside from not being able to go past 30 FPS without Frame Generation, the Steam Deck also suffers from serious stutters that sometimes turn into proper, multi-second freezes. You will encounter stuttering on the Ally, as well, but it will be much less pronounced and nowhere close to as annoying as on the Steam Deck. Black Myth: Wukong doesn't support the 16:10 aspect ratio, meaning you will have to play with black borders even if you select the 1280x800 resolution in settings. This is a small nitpick, but it's still something developers could address in a future patch.

Another issue that affects both handheld devices, PCs along with the PS5, is the oversharpened image, which begs for a future update that will hopefully introduce a sharpening slider. This hurts the image quality on handhelds because they're limited to FSR, XeSS, and TSR, which all exhibit very noticeable upscaling artifacts both when moving and standing still.
In addition, the game also changes the "Super Resolution" slider automatically, without notifying the user in any way, when switching between different output resolutions.

When it comes to the three upscaler options available to Steam Deck and ROG Ally owners, FSR is surprisingly the most stable and best-looking of the bunch, but even FSR suffers from various upscaling-related artifacts.

The game includes the shader compilation step when you first launch it, and curiously the shader compilation is performed much faster on the Deck than on Ally. In fact, it took much less time on my Deck than even on my desktop PC, which, admittedly, is powered by the now relatively dated Ryzen 5600X.

As for the controls, Black Myth: Wukong plays well with the inbuilt Steam Deck and ROG Ally controls, and I didn't encounter any control-related issues while testing the game.

At the end of the day, Black Myth: Wukong is an enjoyable action RPG that's fun to play. While many reviewers call it a Soulslike, my two cents is that the game isn't a Soulslike, although it has some Soulslike elements (challenging bosses and the checkpoint system for instance). I had been playing it for about three, three and a half hours in preparation for this performance review and I can say that I'll return to it after wrapping up this piece. That said, I'll stream the game from my PC to my ROG Ally because the game is extremely demanding, and I can use DLSS on the PC, which offers a superior image quality.