A year after its initial reveal, Shanghai-based CyancookGames has returned with an expanded look at Of Peaks and Tides — an Unreal Engine 5 open-world survival crafting game drawing its creature designs directly from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海經, Shan Hai Jing), the ancient Chinese geographic and mythological text that has supplied source material for centuries of Chinese fiction, art, and now, increasingly, games.
Everland, Abandoned by Its Gods
The setting is Everland — a vast world once connected to the heavens, torn apart when the connection between sky and earth collapsed, leaving the civilization humanity built behind in ruins. Players wake as a “Noland,” someone with nothing, and begin from there: gathering resources, building shelter, fighting the creatures that now populate the broken landscape, and gradually uncovering traces of the lost civilization scattered throughout the world.
The narrative throughline gives the survival loop a destination beyond pure subsistence: as exploration continues, players eventually confront the gods who abandoned humanity, and the mystery of what actually happened to the lost civilization becomes the game’s central discovery arc.
Environment as Weapon
The stated design philosophy — “boundless creativity, imaginative combat” — is built specifically around Unreal Engine 5’s physics systems, turning the surrounding environment itself into a combat resource. Sandstorms and blizzards directly affect fights; plants can be used to trap or redirect the movement of giant creatures; tamed creatures can carry mobile bases on their backs, and massive flying creatures can serve as actual world traversal.
Everyday objects get repurposed in similarly unexpected ways — a strawberry-shaped hammer or a honeycomb hammer are cited specifically as effective tools against powerful bosses, extending the “combine environment and objects to invent new combat approaches” philosophy down to the individual weapon level rather than only the macro-environmental scale.
Creatures From the Shan Hai Jing
Everland’s inhabitants are drawn from named entities in the Shan Hai Jing: Fuzhu, Little Taotie, mischievous monkey-creatures, and the massive Xi are cited specifically. Rather than functioning purely as combat encounters, these creatures are built to behave as an actual ecosystem — hunting, hiding, and reacting to their surroundings independently of whether a player happens to be nearby.
The world spans multiple named biomes, including the Cangmu Source, alongside dense forests, sprawling deserts, and snow-capped peaks — each region populated with distinct environments and creatures meant to keep exploration producing new challenges and discoveries as players move between them.
The Team Behind It
CyancookGames is an independent Shanghai studio built around veterans with backgrounds at Tencent and development experience on Naraka: Bladepoint and Diablo Immortal. Founder Ted Cao, a former Tencent Games producer, framed the studio’s goal directly: responding quickly to market shifts through a creative development approach, aiming to deliver the kind of immersive game experience players actually want to have directly.
A Year of Iteration, Confirmed at a 500-Person Shanghai Event
Since its initial reveal last year, the development team has spent roughly a year refining the game based on international player and media attention. The current build adds more dynamic environments, improved visual effects, expanded environmental interaction systems, and large-scale boss encounters — with overall scope and interactivity expanded meaningfully beyond what the original reveal showed.
A two-day offline hands-on event in Shanghai drew more than 500 local participants, who tried the current build directly — including crafting, natural-disaster mechanics, and road and bridge construction systems — with attendee-captured gameplay footage subsequently shared through local community channels.
No specific release date or pricing was announced alongside this update. A PC Steam version remains in active development, with further details to follow.
Who This Is For
Strong fit for: survival crafting fans who want a setting built specifically around Chinese mythology rather than generic fantasy; players who want environmental physics genuinely integrated into combat rather than cosmetic; Naraka: Bladepoint or Diablo Immortal players curious about what this specific dev team builds next; co-op groups looking for a new up-to-4-player open-world survival option; anyone drawn to creature ecosystems that behave independently rather than existing purely as combat triggers.
Cautious fit for: players who need a release date or pricing before following; anyone who wants to evaluate the game through an available demo (none exists yet outside offline events).
Less ideal for: players who dislike survival crafting mechanics regardless of setting; anyone seeking narrative-first pacing over open-ended exploration; players wanting single-player-only design.
The Takeaway
Of Peaks and Tides is CyancookGames using a year of post-reveal development to expand an open-world survival sandbox built specifically on Shan Hai Jing mythology — creatures that behave like an actual ecosystem, environmental physics that turn weather and terrain into combat tools, and a lost-civilization mystery underneath the resource-gathering loop. Five hundred Shanghai attendees got hands-on with the current build; everyone else still needs a release date.
Everland is broken. The gods left. And somewhere between a honeycomb hammer and a tamed flying creature carrying your mobile base across a snow-capped mountain range, CyancookGames is betting Chinese mythology has more left to offer the survival genre than it’s been given credit for.
PC Steam version in development. Release date TBA.
Information regarding ‘Of Peaks and Tides’
| item | detail |
|---|---|
| Developer | CyancookGames (based in Shanghai) |
| Genre | Open world survival crafting, action adventure |
| platform | PC (Steam, Under Development) |
| Release date | Undecided |
| characteristic | Based on Unreal Engine 5, online co-op for up to 4 players, based on Eastern mythology (Shan Hai Jing). |
| Steam Page | Shortcut |
