The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat. But not from you.

At intervals throughout Amplitude’s new 4X strategy game (the studio’s first reveal since they bought their independence back from Sega) mysterious “tidefall” events cause the surrounding waters to plummet and reveal a new expanse of hexagonal terrain, rich with questable dungeons and other eldritch sights. A world map that began as an Earthsea-style archipelago gradually becomes a set of proper continents, with more opportunities to meet and out-gambit other factions, and more secrets to discover. It’s an evolution of the first Endless Legend’s seasonal dynamics, and “the beginning of an answer” to what Amplitude co-founder Romain de Waubert de Genlis describes as a classic 4X challenge: keeping players interested beyond the early game, once every last scrap of territory has been disclosed.