Sun Wukong: Equal to Heaven

A granite peak splits open and a small monkey with gold eyes looks up. The light from his eyes reaches all the way to Heaven's throne hall, and the Court enters his classification as unknown.

You are that monkey, small, curious and happy, in the years before the seal. Play with the monkeys on the mountain and find the Water Curtain Cave, sail a raft of dead wood to a teacher who speaks from behind a screen, and climb into a Court of Heaven that runs on registers and ranks. Chancellor Yuan designs your posts. Lady Tianmu keeps the Peach Garden and watches you eat. The Court gives you a jade-green robe too big for you, a black cap askew, a badge with nothing on it, and later a gold seal on a red cord.

Hold to look, and whatever answers to your nature rather than your rank turns gold: the pillar in the treasury, the horses in the stables, the Underworld clerk's brush, a peach. What answers only to rank stays grey ink and will not move. Each place is a small puzzle of gold and grey, solved by curiosity, not force. Take, ask, tend, eat, and change into one of four small disguises, a moth, a peach stone, a rolled scroll or a lamp flame, to slip past a check unseen. Your staff is a needle behind your ear, and it grows only as a tool: a bridge, a lever, a measure.

Every notable thing you do lands as a paper slip in the Court's register, in the Court's voice, starting with the Dragon King's complaint about "an unregistered entity of unknown classification". The File is the whole interface: no bars, no markers, only what Heaven thinks of you, accurate and wrong at once. Gates trimmed in gold read your title, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and let you through; plain ones read your rank, administrative staff, non-peerage, and stop you.

Then the Court sends twelve divisions in three waves, and nothing in Heaven can hurt you. There is no health, no attack button and no defeat: weapons pass through the place where you were, and the place is warm. Run, leap, ride the cloud and vault on the staff. Break through walls and roofs and the File counts every damage report; hold back and the formations scatter and withdraw. The chapter ends only when you hold still and stop yourself. In a courtyard, a door stands open two inches, and a young scribe is watching.

Eight chapters run from the stone and the mountain to the stables, the title, the Havoc and a wager at the edge of the world that ends with a gold seal on warm red stone: about four to six hours, single-player, with no combat, no bosses and no bars. The gods and rulers of Heaven are not drawn: they are a light on a ceiling, a letter, empty high chairs, a voice behind a screen. At the end, the File lays your damage reports, up to sixty-three, beside the Court's summary: order was restored.

Based on The Comprehensive Account by Chisato Funabashi, a novel that retells Journey to the West from the Court's archive. The game is built on its first part: his size and gold eyes, the stables, the title and the rank, the peaches, and the choice to stop. Where the novel is silent, it follows the classic tale.

Sun Wukong: Equal to Heaven is a complete game design for PC. Development has not started. A mobile version may follow.