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11 Overview
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33 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.
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55 Art director Yang Qi later shared production notes alongside the video's artwork. The team worked long days to finish the short just before Little New Year, and Yang Qi said that, although it was completed in a rush, making it brought the team entirely new insights. The short was produced with Unreal Engine 5 and Photoshop.
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77 Scene-By-Scene Breakdown
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99 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.
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1212 The ingredients are decidedly not ordinary. The video shows:
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1414 A dragon-headed fish sliced cleanly in halfA giant oyster split open to reveal a man insideA piece of meat with blinking eyes, carefully dicedA sleeping demon baby with herbs growing out of its head: the herbs harvested from its bodyA giant grasshopper being chopped upA giant bulb split open to unearth a creature withinVarious monster fish spirits and tree spirits
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1616 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.
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1818 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.
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2020 Connection to mythology
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2222 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."
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2525 Technical Show
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27-The video demonstrated the game's Unreal Engine 5 capabilities:
27+The video demonstrated the engine's real-time rendering capabilities (see Unreal Engine 5 for what has and has not been confirmed about the engine itself):
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3030 Detailed fluid and liquid simulation (water, broth, sauces)Dense particle effects (dust clouds, chopped vegetable debris, steam)Complex creature animations with varied body typesMaterial variety, metal cookware, organic ingredients, fabric, stoneDynamic firelight and shadow casting
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3232 Reception
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3434 Coverage focused on the visual quality of the in-engine demo and the implicit promise about eventual graphical fidelity. Fans debated whether the cooking sequences hinted at gameplay mechanics or were purely stylistic.