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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.

Schedule

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.

The Venue

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.

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.

What Was in the Build

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.

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.

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.

Systems the Playtest Confirmed

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.

The recast English voice for Gwendolyn was also heard publicly for the first time in this build. The studio has not named the performer, and has said the name will be revealed at gamescom.

Reception

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.

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.

The Facial Rendering Discussion

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.

Footage From the Event

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.

Before and After

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.

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.