A World Built Around Bonds, Not Just Creatures
Going into my meeting with HoYoverse during Gamescom 2026, Honkai: Nexus Anima was one of those games I thought I understood before I actually spent enough time looking at it. On the surface, the description is simple enough: this is a creature-collecting adventure strategy game set within the Honkai universe, where you meet creatures called Anima, build a team around them and use their abilities in battle and exploration. The obvious comparison is Pokémon, and visually there are moments where your brain naturally goes there, but after seeing the game in more detail I think reducing Nexus Anima to another creature collector would be unfair. What immediately caught my attention was how much effort HoYoverse is putting into making the creatures feel like part of the world rather than collectibles waiting to be added to a menu. The environments I saw felt broad, colorful and deliberately inviting, with enough visual variety to make exploration feel like something I would actually want to do without constantly being pushed toward the next objective. I liked that feeling. There was no sense that the world existed only as empty space between missions. It felt designed for wandering, discovering things and simply spending time with the Anima accompanying you.
The foundation for all of this is the Nexus, a system of invisible connections between paired concepts called Aspects, including Love and Hate, Light and Dark, and Reality and Illusion. Following an event called the Sundering, those connections were broken and their remaining power became scattered throughout the world as Anima. That concept sounds complicated when explained on paper, but it gives HoYoverse an interesting excuse to make creatures radically different from one another, both visually and mechanically. This was one of my favorite parts of what I saw. The Anima did not feel like slight variations built from the same design template. They have different shapes, personalities and abilities, and those abilities matter beyond combat because different companions can influence how you interact with the surrounding world. The starting town of Iia is a good example. Its New Quarter, commercial areas, architecture, Nexus Hall and True Nexus Building give the location a stronger sense of identity than I expected from an opening area. I personally enjoy games that let me explore at my own pace, and Nexus Anima seems to understand that exploration becomes far more interesting when the creatures traveling beside you are involved in it instead of disappearing into an inventory the second a battle ends.
Collecting Anima Has More Meaning When They Actually Feel Like Companions
The creature collecting itself also has several small touches that I found surprisingly important. Anima can evolve, but evolution is presented as something connected to the relationship between the traveler and the creature rather than simply another statistical milestone. You can name individual Anima, preserve your first encounter through a photograph and potentially discover rare Chromatic Anima, effectively giving collectors another reason to search every corner of the world. None of these ideas individually reinvent the genre, but together they give the collection a more personal quality. I think that matters enormously in this type of game. If I am going to spend dozens or potentially hundreds of hours collecting creatures, I need to remember more than their combat statistics. I want to remember where I found one, why I decided to keep it and what made that specific Anima different from the others. Nexus Anima appears to understand the emotional side of collecting, and during my Gamescom experience that became far more interesting to me than simply asking how many creatures the final game will contain.
The technical situation also makes it clear that what I saw should not be treated as a finished product. HoYoverse ran the Evolution Test from July 9 to July 27, 2026 as a free closed beta with no monetization, with all account data wiped afterward. The test was available across PC, iOS and Android, and HoYoverse has repeatedly stressed that the game remains in development and that test content can change before release. That cross-platform approach is particularly interesting for a game built around exploration and collecting because it gives Nexus Anima the potential to work both as something you sit down with properly on PC and something you continue playing in shorter sessions on mobile. HoYoverse also brought a playable version to Gamescom 2026, confirming hands-on access to the game at the event. My biggest hope here is that the company does not allow the need to accommodate mobile hardware to limit the scale or complexity of the environments. The world was one of the strongest elements of my experience, and I would rather see fewer locations with meaningful interaction than a huge map filled with repetitive tasks.
The Real Challenge Is Understanding the World, Not Just Winning Battles
Combat is where Nexus Anima starts separating itself more clearly from the most obvious creature-collecting comparisons. HoYoverse has described its direction as including auto-chess mechanics, with team composition and the relationships between different Anima playing an important strategic role. The Aspect system gives the developers plenty of room to create combinations, counters and specialized roles instead of relying exclusively on straightforward elemental weaknesses. What interested me during the presentation was the potential relationship between everything outside combat and the decisions you eventually make inside a Nexus Battle. If discovering an Anima, understanding its abilities and recognizing the meaning of its Aspect gradually teaches you how it should be used, then collecting becomes part of the strategy rather than a separate checklist. Personally, this is where I think Nexus Anima has the opportunity to become genuinely special. I do not want another game where I simply identify the strongest units online, copy somebody else’s team and allow numbers to solve the rest. I want the creatures I discover to make me reconsider how I approach a situation.
At the same time, there is another layer that I think players should understand before expecting a simple and immediately accessible adventure. Honkai: Nexus Anima is extremely interested in its own story. There are many conversations, concepts, factions and pieces of information to process. For me, one of the most interesting lessons from the Gamescom presentation was that the game rewards attention. You need to understand context, connect hints and sometimes read between the lines instead of treating dialogue as something standing between you and the next gameplay section. That can become a genuine strength because information you receive through the narrative can shape how you understand the world and the decisions available to you. But I also see a risk here. If the final game overwhelms players with terminology and long conversations before giving them enough emotional reason to care, the same narrative complexity that currently makes Nexus Anima interesting could become exhausting. I like games that expect me to pay attention, but there is an important difference between depth and information overload. HoYoverse will need to manage that balance carefully.
What Impressed Me Most, and What HoYoverse Still Needs to Prove
What stayed with me after the meeting was not one individual mechanic. It was how interconnected the different parts of Nexus Anima appeared to be. The creatures are connected to exploration, exploration feeds your understanding of the world, the world introduces Aspects and factions, and that information eventually affects the way you think about your Anima and Nexus Battles. That structure is much more ambitious than simply creating a large map and filling it with monsters. I also genuinely loved the creature variety. Different Anima looked like they belonged to completely different ideas rather than variations of a single art direction, and their special abilities gave them more personality than I expected. Combined with the scale of the environments, it created the type of experience where I could see myself losing an evening simply because I decided to investigate another street, another path or another strange creature in the distance. That sense of curiosity is difficult to manufacture, and during my Gamescom 2026 experience Nexus Anima managed to create it.
My reservations are mostly connected to whether all that ambition can remain enjoyable across a full game. The dense storytelling demands concentration, the systems appear capable of becoming significantly more complicated as additional Anima and Aspects are introduced, and HoYoverse still needs to prove that Nexus Battles can maintain meaningful strategic depth after players understand the strongest combinations. There is also the unavoidable question of identity. Creature collecting is such an established genre that Nexus Anima cannot survive purely on attractive creature designs or the strength of the HoYoverse name. I think its identity needs to come from the relationship between Anima, Aspects, exploration and narrative interpretation. That is the part I found most exciting, but it is also the part that will be easiest to weaken if progression eventually becomes more about grinding numbers than understanding your companions and the world around them. After seeing Honkai: Nexus Anima at Gamescom 2026, I came away considerably more interested than I was before the meeting. It is colorful, technically ambitious and filled with creatures I genuinely wanted to discover, but what gives it potential is something less obvious: it expects the player to pay attention. If HoYoverse manages to preserve that depth without allowing the story to become overwhelming, Honkai: Nexus Anima could become much more than another creature-collecting game. For me, that possibility is exactly why it became one of the projects from Gamescom that I want to keep following.