Platforms and Release

Tides of Annihilation is planned for release on PlayStation 5 (with enhancements on PlayStation 5 Pro), Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Eclipse Glow Games has said all platforms are intended to launch together. It is a single-player, buy-to-play title: a one-time purchase rather than a free-to-play or gacha release. The studio states this in its own Chinese-language material in three separate places, including the official site footer and the description attached to its playtest announcement video.

Release Window

No release date has been announced. Every storefront the game is listed on still reads as undated: the Steam page says coming soon, the PlayStation Store says the release date is to be determined, the Epic listing says coming soon, and the Xbox entry shows no date at all. This was verified against raw store data on 23 August 2026.

The 2026 window itself is weaker than it looks. It comes from a single developer Q&A in which the studio described a tentative launch window of 2026 and said in the same breath that the project was in early development and that everything was subject to change. The interview behind that answer was conducted in 2024. No first-party source has narrowed or reaffirmed the window since, and no month or quarter has ever been given.

Reports attributed to a single industry leaker have pointed to a fall 2026 window, roughly September to October. That claim has stood unconfirmed for over a year, no outlet with direct studio access has adopted it, and it should be treated as an unverified rumour until the studio states a date. The nearest thing to a fresh signal is Ary Chen's remark in August 2026 that the voice transition was carefully managed and the project remains on schedule, which rules out a delay but does not narrow a window that was never set.

There are no editions, no preorders and no price on any of the four storefronts. All of them offer a wishlist button and nothing more.

August 2026 Event Timeline

Three events bracket the game's first public showing. The Chengdu dates have passed; the Cologne dates have not.

One date trap is worth recording, because Chinese-language headlines carry it. Coverage there dates the trailer to 26 August because it converts to 02:00 Beijing time. Opening Night Live itself is on the evening of 25 August in the show's own timezone. The show floor opens the following day.

First Hands-On Announcement

On 27 May 2026 the studio announced that the game would hold its first-ever hands-on event in summer 2026. Alongside it, it detailed a technical collaboration with engineers from Unreal Engine and NVIDIA aimed at keeping performance and stability solid across every platform as the game pushes a high visual ceiling. That release also carried the studio's own label for the game's look and combat, Neo-Medieval, and named the engine and rendering staff involved. See Unreal Engine 5.

On 15 July 2026 the studio set out the whole schedule: an offline hands-on in Chengdu on 15 and 16 August, a trailer at gamescom Opening Night Live on 25 August, and the game's first global playtest on the gamescom show floor in Cologne from 26 to 30 August.

Chengdu Hands-On, 14 to 16 August

The first offline hands-on was a domestic event in Chengdu, the studio's home city, held at the East Suburb Memory arts district. Recruitment ran from 15 July to 23 July, with qualification notices sent out between 24 and 29 July and a 48-hour window to confirm. Entry was real-name registered: places were tied to the individual and could not be transferred or resold. The studio described the public sessions as a thousand-player event, with each qualifying player getting roughly an hour of hands-on time and choosing one of two routes, an exploration route or a boss challenge route.

Press and content creators played a day earlier, on Friday 14 August. Those sessions ran two hours each, split into 90 minutes of play followed by 30 minutes of recording, which is why creator videos from the event cluster around the half-hour mark. The studio never announced the press day publicly; it is attested by attendees themselves.

The studio's own pre-event description of what it had built was one standalone level and two powerful-enemy challenges. The press build ran wider than that: a main-line exploration route in three parts containing two story boss fights, plus three boss challenges that could be taken separately.

The recruitment video that went out with the announcement leaned on Chengdu itself to describe the build. The team compared the action to the choreography of Sichuan opera, the two demo routes to the clear and spicy broths of a divided hotpot, and the business of assembling and timing combos to a game of mahjong. On the day, the venue gate was flanked by costumed knights in bespoke armour and opened into a stained-glass library ringed with demo stations.

What the Chengdu Build Showed

An official livestream ran from midday on the first day, and attending players and creators recorded their own capture. Together those put a long stretch of the demo build in front of the public for the first time, and extended runs of the session remain the most complete look at the game so far. Note that this is the Chengdu build, not gamescom footage; it is the same build going to Cologne, but it was played eleven days before the show floor opens.

The level at the centre of the demo is the Great Russell Museum, an in-game analogue of the British Museum, and the route passes through its Egyptian and Chinese galleries. Three boss encounters were seen, out of the five present in the build. A jackal-headed boss in the Egyptian wing was identified by attendees as Anubis, a name the studio has not used in any English-language release. Mordred closes the museum level and yields a Grail Shard. Geraint, a samurai-styled optional boss, was widely described as the hardest fight in the build.

Several systems that had only been described in interviews were visible in play. The build carried multiple difficulty options rather than one fixed setting, matching the studio's own recruitment copy, with a standard setting and a hardest setting that hands-on players found genuinely demanding. It gave Gwendolyn defensive options beyond evasion, with red telegraphs calling for a parry and yellow ones for a jump, and it broke the route up with environmental puzzle sections between fights. Five Spectral Knights appeared in the demo pool, four equipped at a time as two main-and-support pairs and swappable during combat. Players described the control scheme as demanding, built on layered input combinations rather than short single-button strings. First impressions of the Combat, the exploration and the art direction were broadly positive.

gamescom 2026

The first global playtest is at gamescom 2026 in Cologne, 26 to 30 August, at Hall 6, booth B-050 in the Koelnmesse. The build on show is an extended, hands-on demo, and the studio has said it is a deeper look than anything shown in a trailer. Alongside the announcement the studio released a video, Beyond the Tides: Road to gamescom 2026, and opened applications for a Creator Club program for streamers and video makers.

The demo is built around branching paths that split into different exploration and combat experiences, so a single session does not cover all of it. Each branch ends at a boss: Mordred on one path and Geraint on the other. Attendees also move through key environments and set-piece moments rather than a single arena. Press and creators can book private sessions with the development team at the booth.

Two announcements sit around the show. On 22 August the studio said the reveal at Opening Night Live on 25 August is the first story trailer, trailed with the line that beneath the throne the embers still burn. Separately, a studio representative has said that the name of the actress who has taken over as the English voice of Gwendolyn will be revealed at gamescom. The studio said in July 2026 that the incoming actress was already recording for the demo build, and English dialogue is audible in capture from Chengdu, so it is very likely her performance that attendees heard. The studio has not confirmed that and has not named her. See Jennifer English for the recast timeline.

A third appearance sits alongside those two. The studio has confirmed the game for the Future Games Show broadcast taking place during the event, where it is presenting behind the scenes development footage rather than a gameplay slice.

Storefront Listings

The game has live wishlist pages on all four storefronts it is announced for: Steam, the Epic Games Store, the Xbox store, and the PlayStation Store. None of them carries an edition, a preorder or a price.

• Steam lists the game as single-player with full controller support, Steam Input API support, DualSense controller support and Family Sharing. Its media set is nine screenshots and one trailer, and its store website field is still empty.

• The PlayStation Store entry lists the game as announced with the release date to be determined, and records it as a single-player title with offline play enabled and vibration and trigger effects required.

• The Epic listing files the game under Action, Action-Adventure and RPG, with controller support and single-player.

• The Xbox listing confirms Series X|S optimisation. Xbox Play Anywhere is described by the studio as a feature the game will support in the future, not as a shipped one.

The publisher of record differs by storefront. Steam, Xbox and Epic list Eclipse Glow Games; the PlayStation Store lists the studio's registered corporate entity in Chengdu. Both refer to the same company. The copyright line across the listings reads 2025, Eclipse Glow Games.

Age Ratings

The storefronts do not agree on a rating yet, because these are pre-certification self-assessments on different boards' scales. No single rating should be quoted for the game.

Announcement Timeline

Platform Features

Languages and Titles

The Steam store page lists English and Simplified Chinese, both with full audio. On 19 August 2026 the studio announced that Brazilian Portuguese will also be supported at launch, alongside the languages already announced; the store's own language field had not been updated to reflect that as of 23 August 2026, which is routine lag rather than a contradiction. No other language has been announced.

System Requirements

The only published PC requirement so far is a minimum of 16 GB of RAM. The operating system, processor, graphics card, and storage requirements are all still listed as to be determined. One hands-on report identified the demo machines in Chengdu as running GeForce RTX 5080 hardware, which is a note about that event's rigs rather than a recommended specification.

Post-Launch

Reports circulating online have suggested that an expansion and a co-op mode are in development, but Eclipse Glow Games has not announced any post-launch content. Both claims come from the same single leaker as the fall 2026 window, and the co-op claim included a promise that the studio would announce it during 2025, which never happened. Every first-party description of the game and every 2026 hands-on account describes a single-player title. Ary Chen's line about wanting a single-player game that carries a multiplayer feel is a description of fighting alongside summoned knights, not a multiplayer mode.

Game Scope

In interviews the developers have described the full game as offering more than 30 hours of play with more than 30 boss fights, and have characterised the RPG layer as light: levels and skill trees that stop short of an action RPG or a Soulslike. In 2026 the producer added a caveat, saying the studio is not yet ready to state how much content the final build will carry. It is a premium, single-player release; no microtransactions or live-service systems have been announced.