Tides of Annihilation is a fantasy action-adventure game developed and published by Eclipse Glow Games, an independent Chinese studio based in Chengdu. The team is drawn from studios across Asia and Europe, with experience the developers themselves trace to Sega and Ubisoft and credits on action and open-world franchises including Yakuza, For Honor and Assassin's Creed. The studio is backed by Tencent. This is Eclipse Glow's debut title, built on Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen technology. It is a single-player, buy-to-play release: a one-time purchase, with no announced live-service or microtransaction layer. The studio states this in its own Chinese-language material.
The game took its first award at gamescom 2026, winning Most Epic on 28 August 2026 after a five-day public playtest in Cologne. It was separately nominated for Best Sony PlayStation Game, which it did not win. No release date has been announced.
Premise
London has been torn apart by an invasion from another realm, which the studio calls the Outworld invasion. The protagonist, Gwendolyn, is the lone survivor of the cataclysm. She discovers a mysterious gray fog that lets her summon spectral forms of the Knights of the Round Table. Her mission: find scattered Grail Shards to save her sister, restore the shattered world, and take revenge on the demi-gods of Avalon responsible for the destruction.
Two Realms
The game takes place across two interconnected settings:
Modern London where familiar landmarks have been scarred and twisted by the supernatural invasion
Avalon, the mystical island of Arthurian legend, home to Morgan le Fay's eight sisters
Core Gameplay
Combat is fast and stylish, inspired by Devil May Cry rather than Souls-like games. The signature mechanic is the Dual Frontline Battle System, which lets players summon and command Spectral Knights in real time. Store copy describes a roster of over ten legendary knights. Other features include:
More than 30 boss fights, each with unique abilities and dimension-shifting arenas, a figure the developers gave in 2024 and have not restated since
Colossal Knights that serve as both explorable environments and boss encounters
Four weapon types, of which the developers have named swords, fists and bows; the fourth has never been disclosed
Multiple difficulty options rather than a fixed Souls-like challenge
More than 30 hours of gameplay on average, also from the 2024 interview and hedged there as subject to change
A deliberately light RPG layer: see Skill Tree and Progression, with levels and skill trees that stop short of a full action RPG
The developers declined to restate either the boss count or the game length when asked again on 2 September 2026, saying both are still in development. That is a refusal to update the 2024 figures rather than a withdrawal of them. See Platforms and Release.
Players new to the game can start with Getting Started.
Arthurian Cast
The game deliberately highlights lesser-known figures from Arthurian legend alongside the familiar names. Gwendolyn was originally voiced by Jennifer English, known for Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate 3. Mordred is voiced by Aliona Baranova, also from Baldur's Gate 3. English told the studio in June 2026 that she could not continue in the part, and the studio announced the change on 18 July 2026, citing her health. She remains with the project, credited as its voice-over director in English-language statements and described in Chinese-language ones as an advisor working with her successor.
The part was recast, and on 25 August 2026 the studio introduced Angela Sant'Albano as the new English voice at the "Beneath the Veil" premiere. She had already been recording before that: the studio said in July 2026 that the incoming actress was working on the demo build, and English-language dialogue is audible in capture from the Chengdu sessions of 15 and 16 August 2026, so what players heard there was in all likelihood her performance. The studio has said it is not asking her to reproduce the previous reading of the part. The first story trailer also introduced Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.
Platforms and Release
Tides of Annihilation is planned for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Pro, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store. All platforms are intended to launch together. No release date has been announced: every storefront still reads coming soon or to be determined, and the 2026 window traces to an early-development interview in which the studio itself called it tentative and subject to change. Eleven languages are supported. English and Simplified Chinese carry interface text and full audio; French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese are subtitle-only. See Platforms and Release for the full picture.
Combat Highlights
The combat draws from the character-action lineage of Devil May Cry and similar genre entries, rather than the slower-paced soulslike school. There is no gear power curve to grind: hands-on players reported no visible stat growth, and weapons, armour and badges change what a build does rather than how large its numbers are. The studio's own playtest recruitment material stated that the build offers multiple difficulty options, and hands-on accounts describe a standard setting and a considerably harder one. Neither the selection screen nor the full effect of any single setting has been published. Ary Chen has described the aim as balancing accessibility with depth, and has said plainly that the game is not a Soulslike.
On top of the Dual Frontline Battle System, the game layers in Partnered State merges, Mirror Space Folded Realm arena shifts, and large-scale set pieces against the Colossal Knights that wander Greater London. Pre-release footage emphasizes aerial juggles, mid-combo summons, and elemental imbuing as the core toolkit. See Combat for the full breakdown.
World Structure
The campaign moves between two interlinked spaces: the fallen London on the mortal side and the dreamlike Avalon on the other. The two realms are presented as having folded together during the invasion, so several locations exist in both states at once and traversal between them is a core part of the campaign rather than a backdrop.
The August 2026 demo build is set in the Great Russell Museum, an in-game analogue of the British Museum. Its Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese wings each drive their own environment art and enemy design, which is how the game reaches past the Arthurian corpus for some of its cast and imagery. The hub article Arthurian Legend in Tides of Annihilation explains how Eclipse Glow Games reshaped the mythology for this setting; the studio has said it is not copying the legend one to one and will have its own interpretation and narrative.
Confirmed Cast
Character | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Gwendolyn | Playable protagonist | Originally voiced by Jennifer English, who stepped away from the performance in 2026. Angela Sant'Albano took over the English voice, announced on 25 August 2026. Lone survivor of the invasion of London. |
Companion | Shape-shifting partner who appears as a bird, a young girl, and Gwendolyn's sword. | |
Antagonist | Voiced by Aliona Baranova. Reimagined as an armored female demi-god. Closes the museum level in the August 2026 demo build. | |
Antagonist | One of the eight sisters of Avalon, featured boss of the Break the Mirror trailer. | |
Antagonist | Optional samurai-styled boss inside the museum level, and the endpoint of one branch of the gamescom demo. | |
Spectral Knight ally | Spear-wielding lightning knight; first confirmed roster member and a former rival of Gwendolyn. | |
Spectral Knight ally | Fills either the main or the support slot with a different kit in each; breaks walls and shifts heavy objects outside combat. |
Event Timeline
The events that framed the game's first public showing in August 2026 have all now happened.
Date | Event | Status |
|---|---|---|
14 August 2026 | Press and creator sessions in Chengdu, two hours each | Held |
15 to 16 August 2026 | Public offline playtest in Chengdu, thousand-player scale, with an official livestream on the first day | Held |
25 August 2026 | First story trailer at gamescom Opening Night Live | Held |
26 to 30 August 2026 | gamescom show floor, Hall 6 booth B-050 in the Koelnmesse, the studio's first global playtest | Held |
28 August 2026 | Won Most Epic at the gamescom awards; also a nominee for Best Sony PlayStation Game, which it did not win | Held |
Chengdu and gamescom
The studio announced on 15 July 2026 that Tides of Annihilation would be publicly playable at gamescom in Cologne. The demo was at Hall 6, booth B-050 in the Koelnmesse, and the studio described it as its first global playtest. The gamescom build was an extended, hands-on demo with branching paths that led to two different boss fights, against Mordred and against Geraint, plus key environments and set-piece moments. Press and content creators could also book private sessions with the development team at the show. Alongside the announcement the studio published a short video, Beyond the Tides: Road to gamescom 2026, and opened applications for a Creator Club program for streamers and video makers.
An earlier, domestic hands-on ran in Chengdu ahead of it. Press and creators played on 14 August, and the public sessions followed on 15 and 16 August for roughly a thousand players, accompanied by an official livestream. Those were the first times anyone outside the studio played the game. On 22 August the studio said the reveal at Opening Night Live would be the first story trailer, under the line that beneath the throne the embers still burn. It premiered on the 25th as "Beneath the Veil", the show floor opened the next day, and the game won Most Epic on the 28th. Four independent hands-on previews followed between 26 August and 11 September, and on 7 September the studio published a commemorative video thanking the players who had turned out in both cities. The Great Russell Museum demo, and everything currently known about how the game plays, comes from those two events.