Tides of Annihilation Chengdu Trip Leads Press to Tianfu Hooot Anime Mall – GamesReviews.com
Tides of Annihilation Chengdu Trip Leads Press to Tianfu Hooot Anime Mall
Author:News DeskCategory:News, Date: 24th August, 2026
A wave of international games press flew to Chengdu this month for hands-on previews of Eclipse Glow Games’ upcoming PS5 exclusive Tides of Annihilation — and at least one visiting journalist used his downtime to explore the city’s sprawling anime and manga retail scene. Push Square editor Sammy Barker, who was flown out on a trip funded by the Chinese studio, documented a side trip to Tianfu Hooot, an eight-storey mall dedicated almost entirely to anime, manga and gacha-game merchandise near the city’s central Tianfu Square.
The excursion offers a rare, if small, window into how Western outlets are increasingly treating trips to cover China’s booming triple-A game industry as an opportunity to report on the country’s wider otaku retail culture as well.
Eclipse Glow Games Flew Multiple Outlets to Chengdu for Tides of Annihilation
Push Square was not alone in Chengdu. Game Informer’s Wesley LeBlanc reported that he recently traveled to Chengdu, China, to bear witness to another Chinese studio breaching into the larger triple-A gaming market, this time at the hands of newcomer studio Eclipse Glow Games, spending roughly two hours with the game’s Gwendolyn campaign. Insider Gaming’s coverage independently confirms the same setting, with its writer noting they sat down in Chengdu to play two hours of Tides of Annihilation and interviewed director Ary Chen on site.
Push Square’s own preview carried a standard disclosure making clear the nature of the trip, noting this preview was written based on a paid trip to Chengdu, with Eclipse Glow Games footing the bill. Game Informer separately described Eclipse Glow as a Tencent-backed studio formed just two years ago whose developers previously worked on series including Assassin’s Creed, Persona, For Honor and Like a Dragon. Barker, writing about his time exploring the city afterward, framed the whole trip as riding on the coattails of China’s recent run of breakout action games, suggesting Tides of Annihilation looks like it’s going to build on the success of Black Myth: Wukong and become another big domestic hit.
Read also:Black Myth: Zhong Kui Trailer Drops as Wukong Gets Rare 30% Discount
Inside Tianfu Hooot’s Eight Floors of Anime and Gacha Merch
Once his hands-on obligations with Tides of Annihilation wrapped up, Barker headed to the mall he’d researched before the trip, writing that he found Tianfu Hooot (not a typo), sitting right on the edge of Tianfu Square. According to his account, the complex is connected to the Tianfu subway station, so ultimately encompasses an underground mall filled with food vendors and small little retail stores, before opening up into roughly eight floors of anime merch, with some chain stores and many independent retailers.
Barker’s report matches independent travel documentation of the same building, which is more formally listed as sitting inside the Tianfu Red Shopping Center complex adjoining Tianfu Square. He also noted that weekend crowds skewed heavily toward cosplaying teenagers browsing for badges, plushies and art books — a scene that lines up with how the mall is generally described by regular visitors and travel bloggers documenting Chengdu’s “second dimension” retail culture.
Animate’s 2024 Chengdu Store Signals a Bigger Anime Retail Push
The mall’s pull for global anime and manga retail isn’t recent. Japanese specialty chain Animate confirmed on its official corporate site that it expanded its presence in China with the opening of Animate Chengdu on November 8, 2024, located in the Tianfu Red Mall near Tianfu Square Station, carrying a wide range of character goods, art books, and anime-related merchandise. Animate itself describes the wider complex as a mall specializing in anime, comic, and game-related products, located along “Tianfu Square” in the heart of Chengdu, corroborating the scale of retail space Barker described walking through floor by floor.
That store’s launch marked Animate’s fifth location in mainland China, following outlets in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, underlining how quickly Sichuan’s capital has become a stop on the country’s anime retail map rather than a one-off curiosity for visiting press.
What It Signals for PS5 Owners Watching China’s Action-Game Boom
For PlayStation owners in New Zealand and Australia already tracking Black Myth: Wukong’s crossover success, the Tides of Annihilation press junket is another data point in Chinese studios courting global PS5 audiences with London-set, Arthurian-flavoured spectacle rather than domestic mythology alone. Game Informer’s preview noted the title is telling what it thinks is a more global story, set in the recognizable tourist destination of London, a deliberate pivot from the historical Chinese settings of prior genre hits.
No local New Zealand or Australian pricing or release window for Tides of Annihilation has been confirmed by Eclipse Glow Games yet, so regional PS5 owners will need to wait for an official date before budgeting for the studio’s ambitious debut. In the meantime, Barker’s mall detour is a reminder that these overseas press trips increasingly double as informal dispatches on the local fan culture surrounding the games themselves, not just the hands-on demos that justified the flights in the first place.
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News Desk
The GamesReviews News Desk covers the latest gaming news across PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, PC and esports. Reporting is AI-assisted and reviewed by our editorial team.
