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Public Demos and Events
August 6, 2026 at 09:16 PM
Created page covering the three public show appearances and the contents of each demo build
Separately from its closed tests, Rewinding Cadence has been put in players' hands at three public shows. Each one used a different build and a different footprint, and together they are the only route by which people outside a test pool have played the game at all. This page tracks those appearances and what each build actually contained.
Show | Dates | Footprint | Build content |
|---|---|---|---|
BilibiliWorld 2025 | July 2025, through July 13 | Full dedicated booth, Hall 3, stand 3A20 | First public playable build. Fate Dice dialogue branch demo plus the Daphne combat dungeon. |
BilibiliWorld 2026 | July 10 to 12, 2026 | No standalone booth. Playable at partner hardware vendors' demo stations | Main-story slice, side-story vignettes, and combat. |
ChinaJoy 2026 | July 31 to August 3, 2026 | Playable on a partner platform's stand | Single open-world region, tag-team combat, boss fights, and repeatable challenge dungeons. |
The first show appearance was also the game's first playable build of any kind, roughly a month after the reveal trailer. The studio took a full booth in Hall 3 and built it out around two things: a dungeon and a statue.
The build itself was a purpose-made convention package. Its two showcase systems were the Fate Dice branching-dialogue system, where each roll visibly pushed the scene down a different path, and the Daphne combat dungeon. A timed speedrun challenge on the dungeon ran in a fixed window each afternoon, with merchandise for finishers.
The booth build-out was unusually literal about the game's world. A several-metre Daphne sculpture served as the landmark, with its own daily interaction window. Beside it the studio recreated a flower shop from Loren out of thousands of artificial stems, a vine-wrapped arch, and warm lighting. Elsewhere on the stand it rebuilt the game's maid café at one-to-one scale, and ran cosplay performances in it that recreated scenes from the trailers.
One reveal happened at the show and nowhere else first: a cosplayer performed a character in Chinese-style dress that had not been announced online, making the booth the character's actual debut. Merchandise handed out for following and pre-registering included a bag themed on the spirit Anata.
A year later the game returned to the same show in a much smaller footprint. The studio announced the plan the evening before the show opened, and the arrangement was notable for what it was not: there was no standalone Rewinding Cadence booth. The game was instead playable across the demo stations of partner hardware vendors, including AMD, Lenovo's Legion line, and ROG.
The build on those stations covered three things: a main-story slice, side-story vignettes, and combat. That is a broader content spread than the 2025 package, which had been a dialogue demo bolted to a boss fight, and it lines up with the game having run a full closed beta in the intervening spring.
The most recent appearance was at the industry's largest Chinese trade show, held at the end of July and the start of August 2026. The game was playable on a partner platform's stand rather than a Saroasis Studios stand, alongside that platform's wider lineup.
The demo drew queues out of proportion to its placement. The stand it sat on is normally one of the quieter parts of the floor, and by several accounts people who had wandered over specifically to avoid crowds ended up joining the line after watching others play.
What the build contained is the most useful part of the appearance, because it is the first look at the game since the spring test:
Three-character tag-team combat, matching the party structure seen in the spring test build.
A consolidated quick-time input: parries, finishers on staggered enemies, and blade-clash power struggles were all mapped to one key rather than to separate prompts.
Spirit summons gated behind a filling gauge, with the buff applied on summon changing depending on which spirit is brought.
Ultimates that trigger alongside a spirit and run a follow-up input unique to each character.
Card-based gear rather than a set-bonus system.
Boss fights using ground-targeted area attacks and boss-side spirit summons.
Repeatable challenge dungeons that reset on a timer.
One open-world region, traversed on foot with wall-climbing and on a summoned board mount.
Hands-on impressions were positive on combat and character rendering and more reserved on the open world, which was described as a single dark region without much to distinguish one part of it from another, and on tag-combo depth, where switch-in attacks existed but their effects were hard to read. Slight input lag on dodges was noted as an early-development artefact. See combat and traversal for how these findings sit against the rest of the published record.
Show builds are cut down for a queue. They are made to be finished in the time a person will stand at a station, which means content is removed, systems are simplified, and features present elsewhere may simply be switched off. Two concrete examples from this game:
The ChinaJoy build had no gliding, and movement above ground level was handled by wall-climbing and a summoned board. The spring test build did have the board's gliding behaviour, and the studio's own description of the traversal device covers ground, water, and air. The demo's omission is a cut, not a system that was removed from the game.
The 2025 build's dungeon-and-dialogue split was a showcase structure, not a description of how the game is organised.
Anything a demo build shows should be dated to that build. See closed beta for the same rule applied to the test builds, and dev roadmap for where each of these shows sits in the overall timeline.
