Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Review - A Hardcore Soulslike That's Worth the Bruises

I’ve spent the last 45 hours working my way through Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and I can honestly say it’s one of the most interesting Soulslikes I’ve played this year. Coming off the heels of The First Berserker: Khazan, the Lies of P: Overture DLC, and Elden Ring: Nightreign, I already had high expectations for the genre in 2025. What I found in Wuchang was something that didn’t reinvent the formula but certainly twisted it enough to keep me fully invested and occasionally frustrated, in all the right ways. 

You play as Bai Wuchang, a pirate warrior who wakes up alone in a dark cave, with no memory of who she is or how she got there. Right away, it’s clear something’s wrong, that her body is already showing signs of an illness called The Feathering, and the disease is downright horrifying: victims grow ghostly feathers from their skin, lose their memories piece by piece, and eventually transform into monstrous, bird-like creatures. It’s not a slow fade either; every step Wuchang takes is shadowed by the knowledge that she’s running out of time. There’s no cure, no known salvation, and this journey becomes both a desperate fight for her survival and an attempt to discover the truth behind this plague tearing through the land.

This setup pulled me in immediately. I liked the tension it created, the sense that every step forward was part of a race against time. It’s clear that the developers at Leenzee wanted players to work for the lore. Characters come and go with little explanation. Some vanish for over ten hours and then reappear with no context in entirely new locations. Conversations reference names and events I hadn’t encountered, which left me occasionally confused and detached. That said, the worldbuilding is there if you’re willing to dig into weapon descriptions, item text, and subtle environmental clues. Personally, I didn’t get as much out of the story’s later beats as I wanted to. The mystery of The Feathering remained interesting, but the delivery lost cohesion as the campaign went on.

Fortunately, what carried me through, even when the narrative lost its grip, was the combat. I can’t overstate how well-designed the action is. Wuchang takes the stamina-based core of Souls combat and layers it with a system that feels entirely its own. The most defining mechanic is Skyborn Might, a resource that powers your most powerful attacks and magic. In contrast to traditional mana, you don’t regenerate it passively or drink it back from a flask. Instead, you earn it through risk, by dodging enemy attacks with perfect timing or landing specific hits tied to your weapon class. For instance, the fourth light attack with the Axe grants a charge, while the second light attack with the Longsword does the same. Dual blades earn it by clashing with enemies, and the one-handed sword can build it over time simply by being equipped.

Once you’ve built up Skyborn Might, you can use it to activate devastating weapon skills or elemental spells like burning slashes, ice flurries, or status-inflicting strikes that can bypass an enemy’s guard or rip through their posture. I found myself constantly tweaking my playstyle to build Skyborn efficiently. Sometimes, I’d take more risks just to get a charge in the middle of a fight, because the payoff, delivering a poise-breaking mist that chunked through half a miniboss’s health, was absolutely worth it.

What I loved most was how much room Wuchang gives you to mess around with your build. You’ve got two types of skills to play with: Weapon Skills, which are tied to the weapon itself, and Discipline Skills, which are equipped separately and offer utility like parrying, quick evasion, or additional damage. You can equip two weapons and swap between them mid-combat, even during combos, which adds a crazy amount of tactical depth. For example, I ran with the Flamebringer Longsword for a while and paired it with Crescent Moon, which let me dodge in and out quickly while still applying burn. Later, I swapped to the same sword but added the sword parry Discipline, turning it into a defensive counter tool that still dished out fire damage. That kind of mid-combat adaptability felt amazing.

Even the progression system impressed me. The skill tree is absolutely huge, kinda like the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X or the one in Salt and Sanctuary, with six different paths to dig into. Five of them are tied to specific weapon types, and the sixth is full of general upgrades, like extra healing uses or buffs that boost your overall play. What really blew my mind was that even 30 hours in, I was still unlocking new sections of the tree and finding fresh abilities I hadn’t touched yet. 

And respecs are completely free in Wuchang—no rare items, no progression gates, no arbitrary limitations. You can rework your entire build anytime, as often as you want, with zero penalty. I started out dual-wielding quick blades, shifted to a slow but devastating great axe, and eventually found a groove with a magic-infused one-hander. At no point did the game punish me for switching things up. If anything, it felt like it was designed to encourage experimentation. That kind of flexibility gave me the confidence to tackle tough encounters from different angles, knowing I wasn’t locked into a single playstyle or stuck with a bad build from hours earlier.

As for the enemies, there’s a lot of variety across the board. One second, you're dealing with these creepy little hunchbacked things that go down fast but will wreck you if they catch you off guard, and the next, you're up against these giant beasts that totally feel like minibosses, even though they’re not. Every new area throws in fresh enemy types with different moves, so I couldn’t just rely on the same approach the whole time. I had to constantly tweak my gear and skills to keep up, which really helped keep the whole 45-hour run from ever feeling repetitive.

The environments also deserve a shoutout as they’re seriously impressive. The game takes you through all kinds of places: thick forests, snowy temples on mountaintops, creepy mines, rotting villages, and these twisted, plague-covered ruins that honestly gave me the chills. And the lighting is unreal. Every zone had its vibe. One underground area was bathed in this eerie blue glow that made everything feel cold and lifeless, and then you’d hit a castle drenched in deep red light like it was on fire or cursed or something. It was wild. I actually found myself stopping mid-run just to take it all in, which isn’t something I usually do in a game that’s constantly trying to kill me.

Still, I ran into difficulty issues later in the game. For about the first 10 hours, the challenge felt fair and manageable. As someone with plenty of Soulslike experience, I was able to learn enemy patterns and capitalize on dodging the final hit of a combo to stagger foes with heavy attacks. But then I ran headfirst into Commander Honglan. She wasn’t so much a gradual difficulty increase as a total spike. Her attacks came in long, unpredictable chains, and the windows to punish her were tiny. It took me around two hours to finally bring her down. And while I respect how intense and focused that fight was, it was the beginning of a stretch where boss encounters started to feel uneven. Some fights gave you room to be aggressive and rewarded precision, while others barely gave you any room to breathe at all.

Part of that frustration comes from the game’s posture system. Different from games like Sekiro, where perfect deflections weaken the enemy’s stance, Wuchang’s system only progresses when you land attacks. The posture meter also decays over time if you don’t stay aggressive, and that makes it super hard to maintain pressure when bosses are already limiting your attack windows. Perfect dodges give you Skyborn Might, which is awesome in theory, but if you don’t get a real window to use those abilities, it kind of feels like you’re nailing the mechanics and still not getting much out of it. It puts you in this weird spot where you’re doing everything right, dodging perfectly, staying in the fight, but not really seeing any payoff, and that can make some of those tougher fights feel more frustrating than satisfying.

Even with some of the game’s rough spots, it still manages to pull off some really clever ideas, and one that totally stuck with me was the Despair sequence. It drops you into this long corridor with an enemy way down at the end who doesn’t even have to touch you; just locking eyes with him starts building up a death status effect. It really is brutal. I had to full-on sprint past enemies, climb this narrow ramp while dodging poison dripping from the ceiling, and weave around mobs that were spawning in real time, all while making sure I wasn’t caught in that deadly line of sight. It was tense, chaotic, and honestly, one of the coolest moments in the game. It showed how Wuchang doesn’t always need a boss fight to create real pressure—the level design alone can crank the stress all the way up when it wants to.

Another mechanic that kept me on my toes was Madness. Every time you die, your Madness meter increases. When it fills, you don’t simply lose your resources; you have to fight a dark mirror version of Wuchang in order to get them back. She’s fast, brutal, and if you’re already frustrated from dying, facing her is like pouring salt in the wound. But there’s a tradeoff. The more Madness you accumulate, the more damage you deal. You also gain access to unique items by sacrificing mental stability. So you’re constantly weighing whether to risk more Madness for better rewards or play it safe and miss out.

There are also Benediction mods that you can attach to weapons for effects like healing after a kill, and Acupuncture needles that provide active buffs, such as increasing spell power or status effect potency. Between that, the open-ended skill tree, and the ease of respeccing, Wuchang constantly gave me ways to tinker, optimize, and find new angles of approach.

By the time I reached the end of my journey, Wuchang had definitely left its mark on me. Yes, some bosses could’ve been better balanced. Yes, the hit reaction system is underwhelming—enemies, especially smaller ones, often didn’t flinch when I thought they should have. And yes, some of the human faces looked strange and stiff. But when I look at the full package, how dynamic the combat is, how gorgeous the environments are, and how much control the game gives you over your character’s growth, I think Leenzee Games has something genuinely special here.