I play Black Myth: Wukong, and I am not good at action games. The Meishan fight had my hands shaking and my forearm aching, and it took me a great many attempts. Precisely because I spent so long staring at that model, two design choices have stayed with me: why the dog is black, and why Erlang Shen wears a crown but no cap.
What follows is a player's subjective reading, not a scholarly conclusion. Take it as one opinion.
1. The jet-black Howling Celestial Dog
In the game the dog is black from nose to tail, marked with gold striping, with gold eyes to match. It shows up in two places: in the prologue, as an enemy during the tutorial stretch, and in the hidden Meishan area, as support during the Erlang Shen fight - while he is committed to an attack, the dog lunges in from the side and takes a bite out of you.
In the surviving traditional imagery, though, the dog at Erlang's side is usually a pale Chinese sighthound: long-limbed, deeply tucked at the waist, moving like a coursing hound. The register is aristocratic, not ferocious. Game Science cannot have missed those images while doing their research, so why not copy them? A few possibilities occur to me.
a. This is its combat form, not its resting form. The lean, elegant sighthound is what the animal looks like walking home beside its master. In the game the dog is in a hostile posture from beginning to end. A hound about to launch itself at your throat and a hound standing at heel should not look alike. The two images do not contradict each other; they are different moments.
b. Wrathful manifestation. Buddhism, and esoteric Buddhism in particular, has an entire iconographic tradition of wrathful forms: protectors and deities take on appearances utterly unlike their peaceful ones when subduing demons - dark blue-black coloration, glaring eyes, bared fangs, hair standing on end. Yamantaka, the wrathful manifestation of Manjushri, and Mahakala both work this way. A dog that appears only in its demon-subduing combat form and appears black fits that logic exactly.
c. Black dogs ward off evil. Chinese folk belief has long held that a black dog guards a house against malign influences. And in the game's setup, the figure the Destined One inherits from - Sun Wukong - is a rebel against the celestial order, once "the foremost demon under heaven." Erlang and his dog stand on the side that maintains that order, so a jet-black hound at his feet carries the symbolism of demon-quelling on its own.
d. And one reason that is purely visual. Whether it is the cloud-wrapped sky of the prologue or the snowfield of Meishan, the background the dog appears against is white. Erlang himself is a white robe over dark iron armour - already a black-and-white composition. As an attacker that cuts into a fight without warning, the dog has to let the player read where it came from and where it is going in half a second. On snow, there is almost no colour other than black that does that job. It is the least romantic reason and probably the most operative one.
So the game's version of the dog does lose the aristocratic quality of the old paintings. But it was designed as a weapon, not as part of a retinue.
2. Erlang Shen, crowned but uncapped
The second choice concerns his head. In the game his hair is bound up under a finely worked gold crown - and that is all. In the old books, Erlang wears something over it.
A Ming-dynasty illustrated encyclopedia carries the entry under the name "three-peak cap", and notes explicitly that it is also called the Erlang cap. A soft black cap with three points rising from it; the shape is unmistakable:
The entry adds that the thing "came out of the lanes and alleys, and nobody can say where the design began" - a popular form whose origins were already lost to the people recording it. In the surviving handscroll of Erlang searching the mountains for demons, the cap stays firmly on his head even mid-battle.
Wearing it is about more than decoration. It rests on the Confucian conviction that outward bearing is evidence of inward cultivation. In the Analects, when Confucius explains what it means to be "imposing without being fierce," the first item is: "The gentleman sets his robe and cap straight, keeps his gaze dignified, and is grave enough that people look on him with awe - is this not imposing without being fierce?" The Zuo Zhuan records the death of Zilu in the disorder at Wei: an attacker cut the strings of his cap, and his answer was "a gentleman may die, but his cap does not come off." He retied the strings and then died. And the famous line attributed to Emperor Taizong of Tang opens on exactly this point - "with bronze as a mirror one can set one's cap straight; with history as a mirror one can know the rise and fall of states; with people as a mirror one can understand gain and loss." The cap comes first, before dynasties and before self-knowledge.
So a deity with rank and standing would, in traditional imagery, be fully crowned and capped.
Why did the game take the cap off?
First, a point worth making: the team knew about it. The three-peak crown exists in the game as an obtainable treasure item, which means the question "what should be on Erlang's head" was one they handled deliberately.
My reading is that removing the cap removes weight from the "observes the rites" side of the character.
Erlang in Journey to the West was never obedient to begin with. Chapter six describes him as too proud to acknowledge his celestial relatives, living apart at Guanjiang, and states plainly that he answers a call to arms but not a summons to court. He is a figure who stands inside the system from the very first source text without ever fully bowing to it.
Black Myth pushes that further. He sympathises with Wukong's rejection of the celestial order, and quietly acts on that sympathy - the long game the plot turns on is partly his doing. When the player beats him at Meishan, what he hands over is the Mind root, one of the Great Sage's six roots. Which is to say he has spent years holding on to the most dangerous piece of a wanted rebel.
A keeper of order who is hiding contraband for a rebel cannot be a man with his cap on straight. His bare head and Wukong's discarded headband are two ways of writing the same gesture.
Two more practical reasons. First, the Erlang of the old handscroll utterly outmatches the demons he is hunting, and the cap conveys a commander's composure; the Erlang of the game is facing Wukong, an equal, and later a Destined One who has trained his way to something close to the Great Sage. That is not a situation that permits composure - full armour and bound hair are the right read. Second, the three-peak silhouette reads visually as a Daoist priest, a mid-ranking Song officer, or a Ming imperial guard, none of which suits the loose, sharp war-god the game built. He is already elegant enough; a cap to underline it would be redundant.
Every image has reasons behind how it settled into its final form. So do the changes. All of the above is my own irresponsible reading, and I would be glad to hear from anyone else who loves this game.
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