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11 The Chengdu Playtest was the first offline hands-on event for Tides of Annihilation, and the first time anyone outside Eclipse Glow Games was able to play the game. It ran over three days in August 2026 in Chengdu, where the studio is based: a press and creator day on Friday 14 August, followed by public sessions on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 August. The build shown there is the same one scheduled to travel to gamescom 2026 later in the month, which makes the event the origin of nearly everything currently known about how the game actually plays.
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33 Schedule
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55 WhenSessionDetail15 to 23 July 2026RegistrationOpened at 11:00 on 15 July and closed at 23:59 on 23 July, through the official site and the studio's official channels. Entry was tied to real-name registration and was not transferable.24 to 29 July 2026QualificationSuccessful applicants were notified by email and text message, and had 48 hours to confirm they would attend. Selected players received an invitation written in character, addressing them as a knight.Friday 14 August 2026Press and creator sessionsTwo hours per attendee, split into 90 minutes of play followed by 30 minutes of recording.Saturday 15 August 2026Public sessions and official livestreamPublic play began; the studio ran an official livestream of the event from 12:00 the same day.Sunday 16 August 2026Public sessionsThe second and final public day.
66 The event was on-site only. The studio stated plainly in its announcement that there was no online component and no remote way to take part.
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88 The Venue
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1010 Sessions were held in a live performance hall in the East Suburb Memory arts district in Chengdu, a converted industrial complex in the east of the city. The studio dressed the space rather than simply renting it: the entrance was flanked by knights in bespoke armour, made for the event rather than bought off the shelf, and the hall inside was built out as a stained glass library with the demo stations ringed around it, under a lighting rig several attendees thought unusually elaborate for a playtest. The demo machines ran high-end current-generation PC hardware.
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1212 The public event was run at what the studio called thousand-player scale, with roughly an hour of play per person. Attendance was not only domestic: press and creators covering the event reported that close to half of the guests were from outside China.
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1414 What Was in the Build
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1616 The studio's own description of the package, given before the event, was one standalone level together with two strong-enemy challenges. Public attendees chose one of two routes for their hour, either an exploration route or a boss challenge route, a split the studio advertised through a local metaphor by matching the two routes to the clear and spicy halves of a divided hotpot.
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1818 Press attendees, with two hours instead of one, saw more of it. Their sessions covered a fairly complete main-line exploration route in three parts, containing two story boss fights, plus three boss challenges that could be played separately from it.
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2020 The level itself is the Great Russell Museum, the game's stand-in for the British Museum, which sits on Great Russell Street in London. It works as a hub onto several worlds, with Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese wings that each change the enemies, the environment art and even the instruments in the music. Parts of the Chinese wing were visibly present but blocked off for the demo. The tutorial is taught by Guan Yu, presented as Gwendolyn's master, which is less incongruous in context than it sounds: the museum's premise is a collision of cultures, and the game draws on more than the Arthurian corpus.
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2222 SectionWhat it containedTutorialBasic attacks, charged attacks and knight use, taught by Guan Yu in the museum's Chinese wingMain exploration routeA run through the Great Russell Museum in three parts, with puzzles themed to each wingStory boss fightsAnubis at the end of the Egyptian wing, and Mordred closing out the levelOptional boss fightsGeraint in the Japanese wing, reported as the hardest fight in the build, plus a further optional boss in a free-roam desert area named by a single hands-on accountNot includedColossal Knights, which attendees were told exist but were not available to try
2323 Systems the Playtest Confirmed
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2525 The event settled several questions that had been open since the game's reveal. The Dual Frontline Battle System was shown working with a pool of five knights, four of them equipped at once as two primary and two secondary slots, swappable at any point in a fight including mid-combo. The five were Bedivere, Gaheris, Gawain, Kay and Palamedes, the first time any part of the roster had been named with roles attached. Knight abilities also served as the traversal and puzzle toolkit outside combat.
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2727 QuestionWhat the build showedKnight loadoutFive in the pool, four equipped, two primary and two secondary, swapped freely. See Spectral Knights.DifficultyMultiple options, with a standard tier and a hardest tier attested. See Skill Tree and Progression.WeaponsOnly the sword, in several equippable variants with their own affixes. See Weapon Types.DefenceRed flashes require a parry, yellow flashes require a jump or dodge, and a third consecutive dodge carries a recovery penalty. See Combat.CheckpointsRest points that refill healing flasks, respawn enemies, allow equipment and knight changes, and act as fast travelProgressionExperience earned from battles, no stamina bar, no visible stat growth, and a capped set of badge slots that define a build
2828 The studio said in July 2026 that the incoming English voice for Gwendolyn was already recording for this demo build, and capture from the event carries English dialogue, so her performance is very likely what players heard here. The studio has not confirmed that, has not named the performer, and has said the name will be revealed at gamescom.
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3030 Reception
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3232 Coverage coming out of the event was strongly positive, and the praise clustered tightly around the same things. Combat feel and spectacle drew the most consistent compliments, with several creators reaching for stylish-action comparisons rather than Soulslike ones. Presentation and cinematography drew nearly as many, as did the sheer production value: more than one attendee remarked that the game looked expensive in a way that domestic single-player releases had not often looked before. Accessibility came up repeatedly too, with the tuning judged forgiving enough that newcomers could produce impressive-looking combos without fighting the controls.
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3434 The criticisms were also consistent. The most common by far was that the session was too short, with several attendees unable to finish the map inside their allotted time. The tutorial was judged thin, leaving players unsure what tools they had. Gwendolyn's running speed was called slow, and her second jump was described as short on horizontal distance. The execution and stagger implementation drew the most technically specific complaint: time-stopping an enemy does not pause its stagger gauge recovery, and executions snap both fighters onto a single axis without a transition animation. Puzzles were considered not yet interesting enough. One attendee found parry and jump prompts inconsistently timed and sometimes washed out by visual effects; another, playing the same build, reported no such problem. Frame drops were noted on first entering the larger maps at maximum settings, which attendees attributed to the build being pre-release.
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3636 The Facial Rendering Discussion
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3838 The single most widely discussed complaint after the event was that Gwendolyn's face looked different from earlier promotional material, with players describing her features as softened. The studio addressed it on 18 August. Its position is that the character model was not changed and has been the same since the game was first shown, that the earlier promotional footage was also rendered in real time, and that the difference comes from work on lighting and facial rendering rather than from a redesign. The producer conceded that the playtest build may have been put together in a hurry and said facial presentation under lighting would be optimised further. He did not describe the face as having been altered.
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4040 Footage From the Event
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4242 Press attendees could record only the last 30 minutes of their two-hour session, which is why individual creator videos from the event stop well short of the full level. Longer compilations appeared afterwards, some running past 40 minutes and a few past an hour. Some coverage described this footage as coming from the gamescom demo. That is a mislabel of timing rather than of content: the footage is from the Chengdu build, which is the same build the studio is taking to gamescom.
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4444 Before and After
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4646 This was not the first time the game had been put in front of outside players, but it was the first time it was done publicly. Attendees who had also taken part in a closed test at the end of 2025 described the August build as a marked improvement, and at least one creator had by then played four separate builds over two years.
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4848 The same build travels next to gamescom 2026, which runs from 26 to 30 August at Koelnmesse, where the studio has a stand in Hall 6 at booth B-050. That showing is the game's first playtest outside China and its first in Europe, and unlike Chengdu it is described by the studio as a demo of branching paths with different exploration and combat experiences. The first story trailer is scheduled to be shown during Opening Night Live on 25 August, the evening before the show floor opens. See Platforms and Release for the wider release picture.