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Overview
On February 10, 2026, Game Science released a six-minute in-engine video for Black Myth: Zhong Kui celebrating the Chinese New Year (Year of the Horse). This was the studio's sixth annual themed video release and the first in-engine footage from the Zhong Kui project. It hit nearly 5 million views across platforms within five hours. Approaching 4 million on Bilibili alone and 1 million on Weibo.
Scene-by-scene breakdown
The video opens with two servants whispering, using the term "Great King." The camera reveals two massive attendants with swords. A woman (the chef) and her clumsy supernatural assistants then begin preparing an elaborate meal.
The ingredients are decidedly not ordinary. The video shows:
A dragon-headed fish sliced cleanly in half
A giant oyster split open to reveal a man inside
A piece of meat with blinking eyes, carefully diced
A sleeping demon baby with herbs growing out of its head: the herbs harvested from its body
A giant grasshopper being chopped up
A giant bulb split open to unearth a creature within
Various monster fish spirits and tree spirits
Some creatures are ingredients; others actively assist in the cooking. The ingredients are assembled into an elaborate hot pot or stew. A little ghost provides comic relief with dialect-style lines ("Brother-'el-elp me'ere!") suggesting Zhong Kui's world has a street-wise charm.
The tone shifts darker toward the end. A hooded figure is led into a shadowy room and served the completed stew. The hood is lifted, revealing only the briefest glimpse of a human-looking chin before the video cuts to black. The figure's identity is deliberately left ambiguous.
Connection to mythology
Game Science labeled the video as "non-canon and for entertainment purposes only." But the cooking imagery resonates with the legend of Meng Po's Soup: the Five Flavored Soup served to souls in the Chinese underworld before reincarnation to erase their memories. Feng Ji called it "a Zhong Kui experiment on the tip of the tongue" and hinted that "future gameplay may combine monster hunting with cooking."
Technical showcase
The video demonstrated the game's Unreal Engine 5 capabilities:
Detailed fluid and liquid simulation (water, broth, sauces)
Dense particle effects (dust clouds, chopped vegetable debris, steam)
Complex creature animations with varied body types
Material variety, metal cookware, organic ingredients, fabric, stone
Dynamic firelight and shadow casting
Reception
The video was covered by Kotaku, Gematsu, GamesRadar, Push Square, and others. GamesRadar's headline: "Black Myth: Wukong devs are literally 'cooking' in non-canon teaser." Most coverage focused on the visual quality and the implicit promise about eventual graphical fidelity. Fans debated whether the cooking sequences hinted at gameplay mechanics or were purely stylistic.