Doom Meets Hades In the Coolest New Action Game of Gamescom 2026

During the Gamescom demo, Dlala Studios showed off Murals’ fifth chapter, in which The Hero enters a beachy, aquatic realm based on The Little Mermaid. (Loaf chimes in: “This mural’s gonna be a beach, am I right?”) When you enter a combat chamber, walls go up, trapping you in that room until you defeat all of the enemies in the area. You can attack them close up with a quick-slashing sword or a lumbering, powerful hammer, and have ranged attacks as well. It’s a fast-paced, dash-based game, too: Forget parrying, you’ll zip around the arena dodging enemy attacks.

OK, fair, you can keep some Hades comparisons.

But the surprising inspiration isn’t anything from Supergiant’s canon or even the obvious Diablo DNA. It’s Doom (2016). The design ethos of Murals is built around the same one underscoring iD Software’s totemic shooter — that every enemy is really good at performing one attack, so rather than forcing players to memorize enemy movesets, the challenge in each encounter comes from the combinations of foes that appear during each fight. You could be fighting a group of spider crabs, and find yourself caught off guard by another group of horseshoe crabs who emerge unexpectedly from the sand, lobbing a stream of projectiles your way.

As you defeat enemies, you’ll build up a killstreak, too, which gives you bonus XP. (Internally, Dlala has an internal leaderboard as to whom on the team can set the highest score. Grand-Scutton said he’s not even close to the top of the leaderboard.) Defeating enemies also builds up a sort of limit break gauge. When it’s full, you can perform a massive area-of-effect attack called Canvas Clear.

Various accessories, called Eeries, can modify your attacks even further. Some tweak basic stuff, your health, your damage, that sort of thing. Others add elemental effects, allowing you to shock or freeze enemies. And there are some that fundamentally change your attacks, like one that weakens your weapon but causes it to deal damage to every enemy on screen at once.

Dlala is effectively thinking of these modifiers as roguelike abilities that you get to keep for good, rather than losing them on death. You can equip up to nine total, and though I didn’t see the full breadth of these abilities, it’s clear you can create some potent, game-breaking combos. Grand-Scutton said the team didn’t really care about fine-tuning for meticulous balance. If a player is demolishing waves of enemies in a single-player game, and is having fun with the game as a result, who are they to stop it? Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Murals will be released for Windows PC in 2027.