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Title and Naming
September 12, 2026 at 03:00 PM
Initial version (2026-09-12)
Of Peaks and Tides carries three official titles, one for each language the studio publishes in, and they do not say the same thing as one another. The Chinese title is 山外山, the English title is Of Peaks and Tides, and the Japanese title is ヤマソト (Yamasoto). None of the three is a translation of another, and the studio's chief technology officer has explained on the record why the English one is not.
Language | Title | Reading and sense |
|---|---|---|
Simplified Chinese | 山外山 | Shanwai Shan, mountains beyond mountains |
English | Of Peaks and Tides | Not a translation of the Chinese title; a deliberately poetic construction |
Japanese | ヤマソト | Yamasoto; drops the sea and points instead at the world beyond the mountain ranges |
The game draws its beasts and its cosmology from 山海经, the early Chinese compendium usually rendered in English as the Classic of Mountains and Seas. In an interview published in September 2025 the chief technology officer said the team deliberately avoided that literal rendering and chose something more poetic, and that Of Peaks and Tides is the result. The English title keeps the mountain-and-sea pairing of the source phrase without translating either half of it.
The Japanese title takes a different route again. ヤマソト drops the sea entirely and instead conveys the sense of the world that lies beyond the mountain ranges, which puts it closer to the Chinese 山外山 than the English title is. All three names point at the same idea from different angles rather than at three different ideas.
山外山 reads as Shanwai Shan and means mountains beyond mountains. It is also the studio's community handle in Chinese: the official Chinese accounts are registered under the name 山外山游戏, and the Simplified Chinese storefront text points players to them directly.
Name | Type |
|---|---|
CyancookGames | English studio name; see CyancookGames |
青庖游戏 (Qingpao Youxi) | Chinese studio brand, styled Cyan Cook Games on Steam |
上海青庖网络科技有限公司 | Registered legal entity in Shanghai, rendered in English as Shanghai Qingpao Network Technology Co., Ltd. |
肺鱼计划 (Lungfish Project) | Internal codename of the prototype, named in a 2024 development log video |
小灵 (Little Spirit) | The studio community mascot; the Chinese and English names are pinned to each other across two versions of the same announcement |
Several of the game's proper nouns exist in more than one language, and the pairs are worth keeping straight, because the Chinese and English texts are written separately rather than translated from one another. Aligning the two storefront descriptions paragraph by paragraph is what pins most of the pairs below.
English | Chinese or Japanese | Note |
|---|---|---|
エバーランド (Japanese) | The realm. Appears in English press material, on official creature cards, and untranslated in the Japanese release text. Absent from the storefront copy in both English and Chinese as of 2026-09-12, which is an observation about those two surfaces rather than evidence against the term. | |
Lushland | 苍梧 (Cangwu) | The starting region, pinned by aligning the English and Chinese storefront paragraphs. |
The Ascent | 天通 (Tiantong) | The shattered pre-war structure that still stands over the ruins. |
先祖的遗民 | The Chinese storefront renders the same sentence as the remnant people of the forebears rather than as a proper name. | |
No published English name | 诸夏 (Zhuxia), written 諸夏 in the Japanese release | The continent. Used in Chinese marketing copy and carried untranslated into the Japanese release text. No English rendering exists as of 2026-09-12, so it should not be invented. |
No published English name | 神弃之地 | The god-forsaken land, from the official Chinese synopsis. |
No published English name | 部落遗迹 | The tribal ruins the player wakes among, from the official Chinese synopsis. |
No published English name | 远古记忆 | The ancient memory that guides the player, from the official Chinese synopsis. |
The studio tags the game SOC on its own Chinese channels, short for Survival Open-world Crafting. The English storefront describes it as an open-world survival crafting game; the Chinese storefront calls it a 高交互开放世界生存制作游戏, a high-interaction open-world survival crafting game, and states Unreal Engine 5 on the storefront itself, which the English text does not.
