Black Myth: Zhong Kui Chinese New Year Short, Revisited — Did the Ghost Kitchen Tease a Boss?
On February 10, 2026 — one week ahead of Chinese New Year (February 17), welcoming the Year of the Horse — Game Science released six minutes of in-engine Black Myth: Zhong Kui footage that contained no fighting, no dialogue, and no Zhong Kui: a slow, wordless, darkly funny film about ghosts running a kitchen. Fans were charmed and confused in equal measure. After the August gameplay demo, it looks a lot less like a joke and a lot more like a stealth preview. Watch it first:
Official upload from the Black Myth channel (the color-corrected version). Released February 10, 2026.
What it is — and what it was never claimed to be
The short follows a troupe of little ghosts preparing an elaborate New Year's meal in a shadowy courtyard kitchen — chopping, stoking, tasting, panicking — rendered entirely in the game engine. There's no combat and not a word of dialogue; the whole thing plays like a folktale told by firelight. It topped Bilibili's hot search within hours.
Crucially, Game Science flagged it at release as a holiday special unrelated to the actual plot. CEO Feng Ji was blunter on Weibo, joking that the short had “no controls, no combat, no gameplay, no Zhong Kui — because none of that was made yet.” Honesty as marketing: very on-brand for this studio.
What it quietly showed us
Rewatched after the August 2026 gameplay demo, three details read very differently now:
- Talisman fire. The kitchen ghosts light their stoves with burning paper talismans. Cute set dressing in February; in August, paper talismans (符箓) turned out to be a core combat verb — the swordsman slaps them onto enemies for area-of-effect damage. The short was the first public look at the system's iconography.
- Ghosts as a workforce. The whole premise — minor ghosts laboring under an unseen master — matches the demo's signature mechanic, in which the protagonist summons a little ghost companion and can even possess it. Chinese commentators had already theorized the kitchen crew as exactly that: subdued ghosts pressed into service by the Demon Queller.
- The clam. A clam spirit appears among the kitchen crew — and the gameplay demo's full boss fight is against “True Lord Giant Clam,” a multi-phase mollusk monster. Whether it's literally the same character is unconfirmed, but the family resemblance is hard to unsee. The “non-canon” short may have quietly teased a boss.
Why it mattered
Strategically, the short did two jobs. It kept the game visible in the long gap between reveal and gameplay — the “at least one substantial update a year” rhythm the studio later described to press — and it flexed a different muscle than Wukong ever did: tone. Where Wukong's marketing ran on majesty and menace, this was intimate, funny, and domestic — a ghost story told at ground level, by the ghosts. Combined with the demo's marsh of humans and spirits intermingling, it sketches a game interested in the everyday life of the underworld, not just its bosses.
For the full video history, see the trailers page; for the folklore behind the ghost-king premise, read who Zhong Kui is; for what the short's teases became in actual gameplay, the demo breakdown has it frame by frame.
Published August 20, 2026 as part of our launch-day archive, revisited in light of the first gameplay demo.
Sources & further reading
- Official “Chinese New Year Special” in-engine short — Black Myth (Game Science), February 10, 2026. The six-minute holiday video this retrospective analyzes.
- Black Myth: Zhong Kui Chinese New Year 2026 trailer — Gematsu, February 2026. Release-day report noting Game Science's non-canon disclaimer and recapping announced platforms.
- Demo-day roundup tying the New Year short to the gameplay reveal (Chinese) — 36kr via NetEase, August 2026. Retrospective context linking the short's kitchen crew and clam spirit to the demo.
- Hong Kong 2026 general holidays list — GovHK, 2026. Confirms Lunar New Year's Day fell on February 17, 2026.
