Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, PlayStation Pro, Amiga Action, Mega Action, ST Action, GQ, Loaded, and the The Mirror. He has also hosted panels at retro-gaming conventions and can regularly be found guesting on gaming podcasts and Twitch shows. Believing that the reader deserves actually to enjoy what they are reading is a big part of Paul’s ethos when it comes to gaming journalism, elevating the sites he works on above the norm.
The Scroll of Taiwu is the Chinese RPG that refuses to make you the hero
By Paul McNally
The Scroll of Taiwu has finally arrived in 1.0 with English support, opening up one of China’s most fascinating indie RPGs to a much wider audience.
Developed by ConchShip Games, The Scroll of Taiwu is an open-world Wuxia sandbox RPG set in a mythological version of ancient China. That undersells it slightly, because this is not simply another martial arts adventure with a big map and lots of quests. It is part life sim, part roguelike, part village management game, part generational drama, and part sprawling systems-driven RPG.
At its core, The Scroll of Taiwu is built around the idea that the player is not the centre of the universe. You begin as a chosen warrior destined to fight a great evil, but you are also responsible for managing a village, learning martial arts, building relationships, crafting, studying classical texts, and surviving inside a living jianghu that continues with or without you.
Speaking to The Escapist, ConchShip Games founder Qiezi summed up the appeal neatly: “The player is not the centre of the universe — they are one life within it, and the story that emerges from that humility is what keeps players returning for thousands of hours.”
That design philosophy is what makes The Scroll of Taiwu so unusual. Each playthrough can feature between 5,000 and 10,000 procedurally generated NPCs, all with their own personalities, relationships, grudges, ambitions, and timelines. Characters age, become ill, fall in love, make enemies, and die. A rival can become family. A grudge can outlive its original owner. Your own destiny can even be passed to another character, meaning the story does not necessarily end when one protagonist does.
The game is also enormous. Its martial arts system includes more than 700 skills, while the full script reportedly contains around 4.5 million Chinese characters. The new 1.0 release adds improved tutorials, a revised UI, and the Taiwupedia, a knowledge system designed to help players understand the game’s intimidating complexity without sanding away the depth that made it a cult hit in China.
That English localisation is a major step. The Scroll of Taiwu is deeply rooted in Wuxia, Chinese mythology, classical literature, traditional crafts, and martial philosophy, which makes translation a cultural challenge as much as a linguistic one.
For players willing to meet it halfway, though, The Scroll of Taiwu looks like one of the most distinctive RPGs to reach English-speaking audiences in some time. It is dense, demanding, and proudly strange, and you can try it out now on Steam.
