Unruly Heroes
Released in 2019 by France's Magic Design Studios, this 2D hand-drawn platformer follows the four protagonists of Journey to the West and earned an Annie Award for Best Character Animation in a Video Game.
Unruly Heroes is a 2D side-scrolling action-platformer developed by Magic Design Studios in Montpellier, France. It launched on Switch, Xbox One, and PC on January 23, 2019, followed by a PS4 release in October, and was later ported to iOS and Android. As many of the studio's core members are former Ubisoft developers from the Rayman series, the art style maintains the hand-drawn watercolor texture of Rayman Legends. While the game uses Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West as its framework, it adopts a light comedy approach: the sacred Buddhist Scrolls have been torn into eight pieces by demons and scattered across the mortal realm. Players control four characters—Sun Wukong, Tang Sanzang, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing—switching between them at any time across 29 levels. Each character possesses unique skills: Wukong has a double jump and mid-air dash, Sanzang uses prayer beads for long-range attacks, Bajie transforms into a bat to glide, and Wujing utilizes a heavy shield bash. Solving the puzzles within the levels often requires the coordinated rotation of all four characters. The game supports up to four-player local and online cooperative play, and includes a PvP arena. Unruly Heroes won "Best Character Animation in a Video Game" at the 47th Annie Awards and was nominated for "Best Newcomer Work" at the French Pégases Awards, and is regarded as one of the most sincere tributes to classical Chinese themes by a European independent studio.