At Gamescom 2026, from Opening Night Live to the Koelnmesse's packed show floor, you couldn't help but notice the rising prominence of Chinese studios with huge AAA ambitions, from Netease's Ananta that looks like anime GTA and everything else in the open world kitchen sink to Hoyoverse's pivot to hyper-realistic dark fantasy with the newly announced Nodsufall.
But while these examples are still rooted in the mobile free-to-play space, Genigods: Nezha is following the same path of premium AAA that began with 2024's Black Myth: Wukong. Of course, just being a Chinese AAA game isn't enough, and Young Lau, Producer at Genigods Lab, is keenly aware of identifying the 'secret sauce' that sets Genigods: Nezha apart.
"Before Black Myth: Wukong, there was no Chinese AAA, so that game is successful just by proving that it's the first Chinese AAA game," he tells me. "Then there's Phantom Blade Zero, and the secret sauce is they are motion-capturing all their martials arts. For our game, we are tackling Chinese genesis myth, where we are fighting in the sky, on the ground, so our idea is clash of the gods with unique relics."
As Spirit Pearl, the first life forged by Nüwa, the Goddess of Life, you're battling against colossal gods on an epic quest to mend the shattered sky and seal the spacetime rifts opened up by the slumbering Genesis God Pangu. It's a lot to take in, especially if your grasp on Chinese genesis myth is a little rusty, but the easiest way to describe it is this is China's version of God of War - or Goddess of War.
My hands-on demo at Gamescom is a pretty brief one, though it does a lot to condense what Genigods Lab is. It opens on a crimson desert seemingly scorched by ten suns from above, and it is here we meet our heroine Pearl as she fights an armoured boss referred to as The Rift-Cursed.
It's an early demonstration to its melee combat system that's easy enough to pull off auto-combos when mashing face buttons while holding the right bumper, while you can easily close in on the enemy taking to the air or back to the ground. "We want you to fight in the air and on the ground, but also from ground to air, air to ground, or air to air," says Lau.
So far, Genigods: Nezha isn't a million miles away from other action games like Devil May Cry or God of War, though the aerial fighting did also make me think of Dragon Ball Xenoverse, while Street Fighter 6's modern controls was an inspiration for the auto-combo system.
What's more intriguing is the tech that's making these clashes feel out of this world. A crucial part of Pearl is that she has been made from water and clay, and so these are elements you can see as her form shifts, the way liquid splashing effects come from her attacks or a special move summons water particles in fluid motion.
There's all kinds of particle effects going on, whether it's the dust and sand the boss kicks up when landing a stomping attack. And when we're on the especially painful receiving end of an attack, Pearl's vulnerable clay and water form is also exposed, along with her beating heart.
All these effects can however take its toll, and in this early work-in-progress build, there's evidently moments when both the resolution and framerate take a hit. Yet there's a lot of ambition behind what the studio is trying to achieve.
Referring to it as 'Cinematic Fluid Simulation' and using Vertex Animation Textures (VAT), Lau says the studio has essentially developed technology that can incorporate feature-film quality rendering effects to real-time rendering in Unreal Engine 5. In fact, this technology has been developed with the animation studio behind the blockbuster Ne Zha animation films (Ne Zha 2 breaking global box office records to become the highest grossing animated film of all time).
Admittedly, it was harder to see this in the brief demo, and Lau was perhaps over-passionate to the point of exaggerating as he claims, "I'm using animation movie technology to make graphics 1000 times faster." I instead had to rely on some slides shown during my appointment, which compared some animation effects of water and dust particles, and how much smoother and movie-like the studio's tech is.
Yet even without these details, I also feel that Genigods: Nezha is already distinct with its celestial art direction, with a recent trailer debuting at Gamescom Opening Night Live also showing colossal stone giants and multi-headed dragons, some which you'll even be scaling akin to Shadow of the Colossus. Even this tutorial boss hides another layer, as it turns out you're just fighting his 'head' as a giant's body emerges beneath him from the sand in a later phase of the fight.
It's still early days yet, and Genigods is only getting started as Genigoids: Nezha is the first of a planned trilogy. But even though it's also just been announced for Xbox Series X/S alongside PC and PS5, I wonder whether we'll have to wait for the PS6 and Microsoft's Project Helix, currently expected to arrive in 2028, to fully realise the vision this studio has planned.
Genigods: Nezha is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S and you can wishlist now on Steam.
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