Among all the appointments, interviews and carefully timed meetings filling my Gamescom 2026 schedule, Tides of Annihilation was something refreshingly simple: sit down and play.
Eclipse Glow Games brought the game directly into the consumer area of Gamescom, so I was playing essentially the same public demo as everyone else queuing at the booth. No guided presentation, no developer sitting beside me explaining what I was supposed to notice — just a decent chunk of the game and a limited amount of time to survive it.
And, credit where it is due, somebody had thoughtfully provided both controller and keyboard-and-mouse setups. For an experienced PC gamer, my choice was obvious. I know, I know: this is exactly the sort of third-person action game many people will insist should be played with a controller. The important takeaway? Tides of Annihilation plays perfectly comfortably that way. Even its rather elaborate knight-assisted combos were surprisingly manageable — but we will get back to those.
Before that, we need to talk about why Arthurian knights are running around a destroyed version of modern London in the first place.
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Arthurian Knights in a Broken London
Tides of Annihilation is the debut title from Eclipse Glow Games, a Chengdu-based studio with more than 150 developers. The studio itself may be new, but its team is not exactly starting from level one. Its developers have previously worked on franchises including Yakuza, For Honor, Assassin’s Creed, Persona and Prince of Persia.
Their first game takes Arthurian legend, throws it into modern London and then appears to give the whole city a fairly serious reality problem.
You play as Gwendolyn (melee mage?!), travelling through a London torn apart by an invasion from another realm. Modern streets, historical landmarks and Avalon have all been mixed together into one enormous fantasy disaster zone. She is not fighting alone, either. A major part of the combat revolves around summoning legendary spectral knights, with more than ten planned for the full game. Each knight brings different abilities, attacks and combinations, effectively letting you build your own little Arthurian combat squad around Gwendolyn. Or, depending on how things go, a very dramatic ghostly gang.
The London part immediately worked on me.
I had been in the city only around two months before Gamescom, so seeing recognisable architecture and streets twisted into this strange fantasy version produced several little “wait, I know that place” moments. The Great Russell Museum area in particular is not exactly hiding its inspiration. If you have visited the British Museum, you will probably recognise the basic idea — although the game puts it on several doses of fantasy steroids.
Since this was purely a hands-on appointment rather than an interview, there was no official developer Q&A attached to it. That did not entirely stop me While waiting for my turn, I switched on Lieutenant Columbo mode and started carefully asking the people around the booth a few questions here and there.
One particularly interesting detail concerns the museum itself. Its Egyptian, Chinese and other cultural areas are not simply there because somebody decided Arthurian mythology needed Anubis. The invasion has broken reality in a much more literal sense, turning historical spaces and artefacts into strange pocket worlds. That gives Eclipse Glow Games an excuse to move well beyond medieval Britain without abandoning the London setting entirely. Makes sense! It is a useful setup, because the game can jump from familiar streets to Egyptian gods, Chinese legends and other wildly different ideas while still making you think, “Yes, apparently this is still London.”
And it also explains why, a little later, I found myself staring at a very large Anubis-like creature that seemed rather determined to ruin my afternoon.
When Every Fight Tries to Look Like a Boss Fight
The first thing that struck me once I actually started fighting was how much spectacle Tides of Annihilation throws into even fairly ordinary encounters. “Epic” has been beaten almost to death as a gaming adjective, but it is difficult to avoid here. Between the effects, Gwendolyn’s own attacks and spectral knights suddenly materialising to extend a combo or deliver a finishing blow, even clearing some regular trash mobs from a corridor can look like the closing thirty seconds of somebody else’s boss fight.
Importantly, there seemed to be enough variety underneath all that visual noise to stop combat from immediately becoming repetitive. During my relatively short demo I did not notice myself constantly falling back into exactly the same attack pattern. Gwendolyn’s movements flowed together nicely, while bringing knights into the sequence added another layer to what was already a rather busy combat system. With only two predefined knights available in the demo, I obviously could not experiment with the full system, but their appearances felt integrated into the fight rather than like separate special attacks bolted onto it.
This was also where my keyboard-and-mouse experiment became more interesting. With attacks, dodges and knight abilities all competing for attention, I expected the controls to become uncomfortable once the game started asking for longer combinations. They never really did. There is certainly some muscle memory to build, and I suspect a controller will remain the natural choice for many players, but nothing I encountered made keyboard and mouse feel like an afterthought.
The same knights occasionally had jobs outside combat, opening routes or helping Gwendolyn pass particular obstacles. This was probably the least convincing part of the demo for me. The solutions were quite linear and straightforward, sometimes giving me the impression that a puzzle existed mainly because the game needed to remind me that the knights can do things outside combat. Do not expect Zelda-style shrine flexibility from what I played. Then again, this was one small slice with two predefined knights; a system built around more than ten of them has plenty of room to potentially become more interesting later. We’ll see!
Anubis Had Other Plans
The demo eventually put me in front of an Anubis-like boss, and this was where the combat system had a chance to stretch its legs properly. I will avoid going too deeply into the encounter because discovering what a boss does is half of the fun, but he had a sizeable arsenal of attacks and was generally polite enough to telegraph what he intended to do before attempting to flatten me with it.
What caught me out was how much the encounter evolved. There were several distinct stages, and more than once I reached that satisfying point where my brain had already started celebrating because I thought I had figured him out. Then the fight escalated and he produced another trick. The result was a boss battle that kept changing its rhythm rather than simply adding a larger health bar to the same sequence of attacks.
There are QTE elements mixed into all of this, which normally earns an immediate groan from me, but they did not bother me much here. More importantly, Tides of Annihilation offers several difficulty settings. That matters for a game which visually sits close enough to the modern Souls-like family that some players may immediately assume they need a doctorate in dodge timing before being allowed to see the story. Based on my demo, that does not appear to be the intention. If combat difficulty is not why you are here, there should be room to lower it and concentrate on the world, spectacle and narrative instead.
For what it is worth, I managed to finish the demo and beat the boss without dying once. One of the booth representatives, who had apparently been watching me play, complimented both my performance and how quickly I had got through the encounter. Naturally, I accepted this praise with all the dignity expected from an experienced action-game veteran while carefully avoiding mentioning that I am much more at home with space simulators and spreadsheets than Dark Souls.
My wife was playing nearby and approached the same demo rather differently, spending considerably more time poking around the scenery instead of rushing towards the next fight. Consequently, she did not manage to finish Anubis before our session ended. Between the two of us, though, it was actually a useful little demonstration of what the game was offering: I spent my time testing how far I could push the combat, while she was much more interested in the strange version of London surrounding it.
Outside My Usual Genre, Straight Onto My Wishlist
That distinction matters because I am not really the obvious audience for Tides of Annihilation. I have never played Dark Souls. I have not played Elden Ring either. Yes, I can already hear some of you typing. Difficult third-person action games simply tend to sit outside my usual gaming territory, and Gamescom is particularly good at reminding me just how firmly my natural habitat consists of spaceships, simulations and suspiciously complicated interfaces.
Yet Tides of Annihilation got my attention. Part of that came from the combat spectacle, but the setting probably did even more work. A fractured modern London filled with Arthurian knights, warped museums and pieces of other histories gives Eclipse Glow Games considerable freedom to build wildly different environments without making the whole thing feel like a random collection of fantasy levels. The short demo showed enough of that idea to make me curious about where else they intend to take it.
There are things I would like to see developed further, particularly the relatively straightforward environmental use of the knights, and a Gamescom demo is obviously far too small a sample to judge how well the combat variety will survive over an entire game. Still, this is exactly what I want from a hands-on appointment: I arrived curious, played something outside my normal comfort zone, and left wanting to play more. Tides of Annihilation went onto my wishlist.
The game is currently in active development for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation and Xbox, with no official release date announced yet. Buuu!
A final thanks goes to ICO Partners, and especially Maria, for inviting us and coordinating the Gamescom session. Without that invitation I might have walked straight past a game from a genre I rarely play, which would have been a shame. Apparently I am an Anubis-slaying action-game prodigy now, and it took Tides of Annihilation to reveal it.
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