Cognitive Deconstruction of the Mise-en-abyme Structure in 3A Games — A Case Study of Black Myth: Wukong

Abstract

Black Myth: Wukong takes the single outbound pilgrimage route of Journey to the West and splits it into six mirror worlds the player can re-enter at will. The mise-en-abyme is quietly changing what 3A games mean by immersion. My evidence comes from one complete playthrough, read alongside the entry texts of the in-game Journal, the cutscenes, and player reviews on Steam. On that basis I examine how nesting works across physical space, narrative time and the symbolic system. Nesting buys the game more meaning and a stronger sense of identification, though the bill for both arrives later. It also loads the player with a cognitive burden that keeps growing. In chapters such as Guanyin Temple, Yellow Wind Ridge and the Flaming Mountains, what the player meets is not one puzzle awaiting a solution but several explanations that sit side by side and contradict one another. Immersion, it seems, is less a one-way sensory plunge than an experience that keeps swinging between entering and pulling back. I therefore treat the mise-en-abyme as double-edged. It is a device for producing meaning and, in the same motion, a mechanism that keeps telling the player, “you are inside a fiction.”