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.

One further wrinkle appeared after gamescom. A hands-on piece published in September 2026 closed by stating flatly that the game has no release window at all, which sits against the studio's own tentative 2026. The studio's statement is the primary one and stands; the disagreement is recorded rather than reconciled, and the practical position is unchanged either way, because no date exists.

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

The events that bracketed the game's first public showing have all now happened. The Chengdu sessions ran in mid-August and the Cologne dates closed on 30 August. The show also produced the studio's first award. See Gamescom 2026 for the week in full.

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 was at gamescom 2026 in Cologne, from 26 to 30 August, at Hall 6, booth B-050 in the Koelnmesse. The build on show was an extended, hands-on demo, and the studio described it as a deeper look than anything shown in a trailer. Alongside the July announcement it 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 was built around branching paths that split into different exploration and combat experiences, so a single session did not cover all of it. Each branch ended at a boss: Mordred on one path and Geraint on the other. Attendees also moved through key environments and set-piece moments rather than a single arena, and press and creators could book private sessions with the development team at the booth. Hands-on accounts put a public session at roughly an hour.

Two announcements sat around the show. On 22 August the studio said the reveal at Opening Night Live on 25 August would be the first story trailer, trailed with the line that beneath the throne the embers still burn. It premiered on the 25th under the title "Beneath the Veil". Separately, the actress who has taken over as the English voice of Gwendolyn is Angela Sant'Albano, named on 25 August 2026. 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, although the studio has never said so directly. See Jennifer English for the recast timeline.

A third appearance sat alongside those two. The studio appeared on the Future Games Show broadcast during the event on 26 August, presenting a deep-dive segment of about five minutes built around an interview rather than a plain gameplay slice.

The show closed with the studio's first award. Tides of Annihilation won Most Epic at the gamescom award ceremony on 28 August 2026, and was separately a nominee for Best Sony PlayStation Game, a category it did not win. Those are two different outcomes in two different categories and should not be read as two wins. The organiser's final list places the game in those two categories and no others.

The demo stations ran GeForce RTX 5080 hardware, which the studio said would be the first public showing of the game with NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation enabled. Displays at the stand came from TCL, with further hardware from Razer, PlayStation and Xbox. On 7 September the studio published a commemorative video thanking attendees and partners, in an English version and a Chinese version whose partner credits differ from one another.

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.

The PlayStation 5 store page itself went live on 8 September 2026, later than the other three. Its description is the studio's own and sets out three pillars: saving a shattered London on the edge of annihilation, gathering the power of the knights and assembling your own order from the dozen or more legendary figures the journey introduces, and meeting the Colossal Knights that wander the world, which the copy describes as mountain-high figures you fight, climb and enter to explore the palaces hidden inside them. It confirms the buy-to-play, PC-and-console framing the studio has used elsewhere.

Age Ratings

The storefronts show three different things because they sit at three stages of one process, not because the boards disagree. The Xbox listing carries ratings issued through the International Age Rating Coalition, whose single publisher-completed questionnaire generates a rating for each participating board at once. The PlayStation listing shows a rating applied for and not yet issued. Steam applies no age gate, and the entries in its own data are storefront-generated self-assessments rather than board decisions. An age rating issued this way is real and binding for digital storefronts, but it comes from a developer questionnaire rather than a board reviewing a finished build, so it can still change before launch.

The Xbox catalogue record was edited on 27 August 2026, during the show, and now carries a full eleven-system block generated from the single questionnaire. The PlayStation listing on the same day still showed a rating applied for and not yet issued, which is the propagation pattern this process produces rather than a disagreement between boards.

Announcement Timeline

Platform Features

There are no plans for any other platform. Asked directly on 2 September 2026 whether a Nintendo Switch 2 version might follow, Ary Chen said the studio has no plans for it at present and would decide later depending on how things develop. That is not a refusal on technical grounds and it is not a commitment either way.

Languages and Titles

The Steam store page lists English and Simplified Chinese with interface text, full audio and subtitles, and nine further languages with subtitles only: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. Eleven in total. The studio published that list on 25 August 2026, having announced Brazilian Portuguese separately six days earlier and then folded it into the wider set. The split matters more than the headline number: only the original two languages are dubbed, and the other nine carry no interface localisation either. One caution for anyone checking this against the storefront: on 27 August 2026 the store page showed all eleven while the storefront's own data feed still returned just the first two, which is caching lag on one surface rather than a change of plan.

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, and the studio confirmed the same card for the gamescom stations, which it said would be the first public showing of the game with NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation enabled. Displays at the stand were supplied by TCL, with further hardware from Razer, PlayStation and Xbox. All of that describes the show rigs, not 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

Two figures for the size of the game have circulated since the reveal: more than 30 hours of play, and more than 30 boss fights, alongside a description of the RPG layer as light, with levels and skill trees that stop short of an action RPG or a Soulslike. All three come from the same source, a developer question-and-answer session conducted in 2024, where the studio hedged them at the time as early and subject to change. They have not been restated since.

On 2 September 2026 Ary Chen was asked for both numbers again and declined to give either, saying he could not put an exact figure on the boss count because bosses are still in development, and could not give a length because development is still running and the plan is still being tuned. That is a refusal to restate, not a retraction. The 2024 answers remain the only figures the studio has ever given, they are recorded here with their date, and they should be treated as old rather than as wrong. If the studio publishes a newer figure it replaces these. It remains a premium, single-player release with no announced microtransactions or live-service systems.