Doom Meets Hades In the Coolest New Action Game of Gamescom 2026
Overview & Key Takeaways
Murals, a new action game from Disney Illusion Island maker Dlala Studios, has obvious Hades and Doom references according to our preview.
If you play video games, you’ve probably internalized an automatic association without even realizing it: see isometric, think roguelike. Murals, a new action game from the makers of Disney Illusion Island, bucks that trend.
Revealed at the 2026 Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase, Murals is the next game from Dlala Studios, the British-based developer that also gave us 2020’s beat-em-up revival of Battletoads. Murals is a deviation from both of its hits: an isometric, narrative-forward action game. But it is not, as CEO and game director Aj Grand-Scutton was quick to tell me during a hands-off preview at Gamescom, a roguelike. Don’t expect a one-to-one Hades clone here, folks.
Murals reimagines your favorite fairy tales
Image: Dlala Studios
Murals is a (mostly) original IP for Dlala Studios. You’re cast as The Hero, a stony, let-my-fists-do-the-talking type, and are accompanied by a chatty anthropomorphic slice of bread named Loaf. In a neat touch, reflective of the game’s painterly art style, all enemies are in 3D, but all friendly NPCs, like Loaf, are in 2D. The gimmick of Murals is that it puts a dark, twisted spin on classic folklore like Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood. Rumpelstiltskin, for instance, takes the form of a gigantic Shelob-like spider monstrosity, according to an official prequel comic. Each of these stories is contained in a so-called magical mural, the idea being that you enter each mural as a form of level selection.
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.
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
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Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
Image: Dlala Studios
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.
