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Anubis
August 23, 2026 at 01:02 PM
Created the Anubis boss page covering the Egyptian wing arena, the multi-stage structure with a mid-fight checkpoint, the aerial second form, and the sand and ground-slam attack patterns
Anubis is a boss encounter in Tides of Annihilation. The fight closes out the exploration section of the hands-on demo that Eclipse Glow Games ran in Chengdu on 15 and 16 August 2026, and it takes place in the Egyptian wing of the Great Russell Museum, the in-game stand-in for the British Museum. It is the point where the level stops behaving like a museum: the exhibit hall gives way to shifting sand, and the scale of what has happened to London becomes clear.
Beating Anubis is what opens the demo up beyond the building itself. Everything the player learns during the museum crawl, the telegraph colours, the knight rotation, the traversal abilities, is tested here in one place before the demo hands over its later boss fights.
Element | What the August 2026 build showed |
|---|---|
Arena | The Egyptian wing of the Great Russell Museum, which reshapes itself into sand and open desert space as the fight runs |
Placement | The closing fight of the demo's exploration section, ahead of the demo's dedicated boss battles |
Structure | Multi-stage, with a mid-fight checkpoint. Dying after reaching the second stage restarts the player at that stage rather than at the beginning |
Second form | Aerial and tentacled, bombarding the arena from the sky with ranged attacks |
Signature threat | Wide ground slams flagged with a yellow flash that cannot be dodged, only jumped over |
Terrain control | Sand vortexes, sand walls and barriers that reshape the battlefield and cut off ground routes |
Adds | Summoned priests that pressure Gwendolyn while the boss controls space |
Reward | Clearing the fight ends the exploration section and moves the demo on |
The Great Russell Museum is organised by wing, and each wing changes the art, the enemies and the music around it. The Egyptian section is the one that ends in this fight. Before reaching the boss room the player works through sphinx riddles and other themed puzzles, using the summoned knights as tools rather than as weapons: one knight fires an arrow line across a gap, another breaks a wall or lifts a heavy object into position. The Anubis arena is where that toolkit stops being optional.
The museum itself was described by the developers as a hub that leads to different worlds, and the Egyptian wing is the first of those the demo lets the player finish. Note that this is the current name for the building. Official material from February 2025 called the same location the Britannia Museum, so older coverage uses that name for what is now the Great Russell Museum.
Hands-on accounts of the August build do not agree on a clean phase count, so this page does not assert one. What is consistent is that the fight is multi-stage and that it has a checkpoint partway through: a player who dies after reaching the second stage restarts at the second stage rather than replaying the opening. That is unusual enough to be worth flagging, because it sets expectations for how the rest of the game handles boss deaths, and because it makes the fight far less punishing than its length suggests.
The second form is the one people remember. Anubis takes to the air, sprouts tentacle-like limbs, and shifts to bombarding the arena from above, which forces the player off the ground game they have been drilling for the whole museum section.
Anubis mixes two vocabularies. Some attacks are god-scale magic that reshape the arena: sand vortexes that pull the player in, walls of sand that cut off retreat lines, and barriers that can only be crossed with a dash. Others are ordinary knightly slashes and combos, delivered close in, which keeps the fight legible to anyone who has been reading telegraphs in the museum's smaller encounters.
The telegraph colours are the same ones the demo teaches earlier: red attacks must be countered, and yellow attacks must be jumped or double-jumped rather than dodged. Anubis leans hard on the yellow ones. Repeated wide ground slams with a yellow flash cannot be rolled through at all, which is what pushes players toward a knight with strong aerial performance in the primary slot. Summoned priests add chip pressure between the boss's own strings, so the fight rewards a loadout that can clear adds quickly and still hold up in the air.
The demo let players carry four of five available knights, split into two pairs of one primary and one secondary, swappable at any point in a combo. Against Anubis the wind knight, Gaheris, was the common pick because his kit raises air performance and the boss forces the player upward so often. Palamedes was useful for stripping poise so that other knights could punish, and Kay's slowdown effect bought openings during the boss's longer strings. See Dual Frontline Battle System and Spectral Knights for how those slots work.
Anubis is a real figure from ancient Egyptian funerary religion: a jackal-headed god associated with embalming, with the protection of graves, and with guiding the dead through judgement, including the weighing of the heart against the feather of truth. The game borrows the name and the silhouette, and it places the fight in an Egyptian exhibit, but none of that mythology has been confirmed as in-game lore. Treat it as the source of the imagery, not as a description of who this character is in the story, in the same way the game's Arthurian names are starting points rather than retellings. See Arthurian Legend in Tides of Annihilation for the studio's stated position on adapting rather than copying.
The Chengdu build ran as a tutorial taught by Guan Yu, an exploration section through the museum ending with Anubis, and then a set of boss fights including Mordred and the optional Geraint. Anubis is therefore the first real test in the build rather than its climax, which belongs to Mordred.
The same build is the one going to gamescom, where the game is scheduled to be playable from 26 to 30 August 2026. See Platforms and Release for the event schedule.
