We’ve seen a lot about Namco Bandai’s upcoming Action game, Enslaved: Journey to the West including a slew of videos, screens and information. So to see it in reality was a treat.
Enslaved, in development at Ninja Theory and to be published by Namco Bandai, is based on a very old Chinese myth about the Monkey King (or Monkey God often. Most recently seen in The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan). Monkey, the character in the game, is based off of the main character in the series of myths who always has a headband, a magical staff and a flying cloud he rides (read more at Wikipedia).

In the game they ’futurized’ aspects of the myth by turning them into an energy staff and a power disc that Monkey can ride and a control headband (straight out of the myth). That’s just one of the great little twists on the myth that they’ve put into the game. Monkey travels with his companion, Trip, who sort of enslaved him into helping her escape from a slave ship. They’re tied together now so that if Trip dies, so does Monkey, providing him enough motivation to help her as well as keep her safe. Other characters from the myth make appearances include Pig, or Pigsy (seen during our demo).

In the demo we saw they showed us Chapter 11 which was obviously some time into the game. When asked how long the gameplay would be they said, "much longer than Heavenly Sword and a bigger experience but not through continued repetition of game elements and gameplay."

What they meant by that second part was there are levels which are mostly shooting and combat, some which are chase scenes, boss battles and exploration puzzles. This helps break up the repetition of the same action just in a different location. The boss battle we saw against Rhino requires more than just a run and gun mentality as Monkey was vastly underpowered in regards to Rhino. So he needed a little help from a friend. I won’t spoil it for you.