What is kungfupunk? The kung fu punk style of Phantom Blade Zero

What does kungfupunk mean?

The clearest official definition is spoken in the State of Play gameplay deep dive that PlayStation broadcast in August 2026. Over an aerial view of a lakeside town, the subtitles read:

The Steam page, written by S-GAME, lists the parts: “Martial arts, cold steel, mechanical prosthetics, crumbling industrial ruins, traditional Chinese aesthetics, and modern rock music. Together, they create the dark, unmistakable aesthetic of kungfupunk.” The sentence before it reads: “The golden age of wuxia cinema collides with punk fantasy in Phantom Blade Zero.”

Earlier in the same broadcast, Donnie Yen, introduced on screen as the game’s Creative Consultant, says: “Phantom Blade Zero embraces both imaginations and distinct cultural elements to create a new aesthetic we call ‘Kungfupunk’.”

The word also covers how the fights are staged. S-GAME’s official site says the Year of the Snake boss fight used motion capture from several martial artists, directed by veteran action choreographers, “to deliver what we’ll call a ‘kungfupunk’ experience — rooted in tradition, expressed through something eerie yet novel.”

Who coined kungfupunk?

The name was introduced by Soulframe Liang, founder of S-GAME and the game’s creator and director. The earliest official use we found is his announcement post on the PlayStation Blog of 24 May 2023. Under a heading “Kungfupunk”, the post, written in the studio’s “we”, says the game adds “a heavy dose of punk spirit, alongside with stylish visuals. We call this overall art direction ‘Kungfupunk’.”

In the same post he describes the game’s universe, the Phantom World, as a place where you will find “Chinese Kungfu, intricate machines reminiscent of steampunk, arts of the occult, and intriguing stuff that doesn’t quite fit into any of these categories.”

A Chinese preview credits the idea to him by name: a Zhihu Games writer’s six-hour preview, reposted on gcores in 2026, calls kungfupunk a style that blends traditional Chinese wuxia and kung fu culture with modern pop elements, and says it is Liang Qiwei’s original concept (our translation; Liang Qiwei is the Chinese form of his name).

In English interviews Liang says it in three words. To RPG Site in December 2025: “The style we are creating for Phantom Blade Zero is called Kung fu punk, where we incorporate our traditional Kung fu and Chinese culture with modern fashion elements, like steampunk, cyberpunk, some fashion elements”.

We found no source that dates the word before 2023.

What does kungfupunk mix together?

Each ingredient below is named by S-GAME or by Liang. Nothing is added from our own reading.

In a 2024 interview with Gamersky, Liang explains the idea in Chinese: on the art side, kungfupunk takes traditional Chinese aesthetics apart and mixes them with modern or pop elements, the way Jay Chou’s songs, Chinese street-fashion brands or designer toys do. He adds that it should run through the whole game, not only the visuals: the way the story is told, the characters and the underlying setting. His example is Sha-Chi and Sha-Chi body modification, where very cool mechanical armour bursts out of the human body (our translation).

What does kungfupunk look like in the game?

The official images show the mix directly. Each caption describes only what is visible in the frame.

Previews describe the same blend in the buildings. The Zhihu Games writer, standing below a tower in the preview build, describes carved beams, painted rafters and upturned eaves of Chinese pavilions fused with steel frames, chimneys, tangled pipes and hot boilers (our translation).

The same preview calls music the other half of kungfupunk: traditional Chinese instruments mixed with psychedelic electronic sounds, by a composer who has scored the series since Rainblood (our translation).

English previews sum it up in their own words. DualShockers calls kungfupunk “essentially a stylized reinterpretation of Wuxia, a classic genre of Chinese martial arts fantasy, infused with a dark, industrial steampunk aesthetic.”

Kungfupunk vs wuxia, xianxia, steampunk and cyberpunk

The middle column gives a standard definition of each word. The right column gives only what S-GAME’s own texts say about the word in connection with Phantom Blade Zero.

Our reading of the table, not a source’s: in S-GAME’s wording the machines are steam-age machinery and prosthetics, not computers, and the base is wuxia rather than xianxia.

Is kungfupunk a genre?

S-GAME uses it for the look and feel, not as the game’s genre. For the genre, the sources give other labels:

• The Steam page lists the genre as Action and RPG.
• The PlayStation Blog of August 2026, signed by Liang, calls it a “dark wuxia action game”.
• Liang told PC Gamer the studio wants “to create a new subgenre [within] the RPG or action game: a kung fu action game.”
• A June 2025 letter from Liang, quoted by Push Square, asks: “Maybe it could create a new identity that is Wuxia Action Games?”

Whether the game counts as a soulslike is a separate question, answered on Is Phantom Blade Zero a soulslike?

What is not yet known