Hollow Meridian review: the best open world since 2023

Platforms	PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Release date	October 22, 2026
Developer	Tideglass Studios
Publisher	Argent Interactive
Price	$69.99 (Standard) · $89.99 (Deluxe Edition)

There's a specific kind of fatigue that sets in about forty hours into most open-world games: the map fills with icons, the side quests start repeating their own structure back at you, and the world stops pretending to notice you're in it. Hollow Meridian is the first game since 2023 that never let me get there. Fifty-four hours in, I was still finding roads I hadn't walked, and the continent of Veren Ashta was still keeping score.

A continent that keeps a grudge

Tideglass Studios built its reputation on smaller, systemic games, and that pedigree shows in how Hollow Meridian is stitched together. The headline feature — and the one the marketing leaned on hardest — is the "standing" system, which tracks your actions at a settlement level rather than a quest level. Burn a granary to end one warlord's siege early, and the farming town three regions over feels it in grain prices a season later. It's not a binary morality meter; there's no halo over your head. It's closer to a spreadsheet the world is quietly running on you, and it only reveals itself in small, specific ways: a merchant who won't extend credit, a guard captain who recognizes your horse.

None of this would matter if the writing couldn't carry it, and this is where Hollow Meridian separates itself from its influences. The faction leaders are written as people managing their own bad options, not quest-dispensers waiting for the player to arrive. The Ashwake Compact's leadership spends the whole back half of the game negotiating a surrender nobody wants to be the one to sign, and the game lets you push that negotiation in three or four directions without ever telling you which one is "correct."

The skill web replaces the skill tree

Mechanically, Hollow Meridian drops the skill tree in favor of what the game calls a "web": abilities that sit in a shared pool and pull resources from each other instead of a fixed number of points per level. Investing in the fire-focused "Ember" line makes your stealth options slightly more volatile and loud, which is a trade-off I didn't fully appreciate until I'd committed forty points into it and had to rebuild a chunk of my approach to the mid-game stealth sections. It's a system that rewards planning but punishes nothing permanently; respec costs are trivial, which keeps the web feeling like a toolset rather than a trap.

• Ember line: fire and area damage, trades subtlety for burst output.
• Tideglass line: the namesake kit, built around slowing and redirecting projectiles.
• Hollow line: stealth and movement, the one most builds eventually borrow from.
• Warden line: companion and summon-focused, strongest in the game's siege encounters.

Combat without a safety net

Combat itself is the area I expect to generate the most disagreement. There's no lock-on, no soft auto-aim pulling your reticle toward the nearest hostile, and enemy groups are genuinely willing to flank and retreat rather than queue up to be hit. On the default difficulty this produces some of the best skirmish-scale fights I've played in an open world in years; dropped down a notch, for players who want the story and the world without the friction, it becomes a much calmer, still-competent action game. I played most of my run on the default setting and never felt like the game was being unfair to me, which is rarer than it should be in a genre that often confuses difficulty with punishment.

Fifty hours in, still finding new roads

The map design deserves specific credit here. Veren Ashta is built in layers rather than a flat sprawl: the surface roads are the least interesting way to travel, and the game quietly teaches you that within the first few hours by making the fast routes slightly dangerous and the safe routes slightly dull. By hour thirty I was routing through old mining tunnels and collapsed aqueducts as a matter of habit, and the game kept rewarding that curiosity with small, specific payoffs rather than another checklist marker. It's the single clearest sign that this was designed by people thinking about exploration as a verb, not a UI element.

The watch-out here is pacing in the back third. Once the main Ashwake Compact storyline resolves, the remaining content leans more heavily on repeatable contracts than I'd like, and a couple of the late-game dungeons reuse earlier set pieces with palette swaps. It's a minor complaint against everything the game gets right, but it's the one place Hollow Meridian starts to resemble the genre it's otherwise outgrown.

Performance and technical notes

On PC, with an RTX 4070 and a mid-range Ryzen chip, I held a stable 1440p/60 on the "High" preset with only occasional dips in the capital city's market district, which is clearly the most geometry-dense space in the game. The PS5 and Series X versions both target 60fps in their performance modes, with a 30fps "Fidelity" mode that adds ray-traced reflections and noticeably better foliage draw distance; I'd stick with performance mode unless you're taking screenshots. Series S runs a visibly scaled-down version of the same settings and holds 30fps consistently, though load times into fast-travel points run close to twenty seconds, longer than the other platforms.

Where to buy Hollow Meridian

Hollow Meridian is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The Deluxe Edition adds the digital soundtrack, an art book and the first expansion when it releases in 2027. Prices below are the current list prices at major retailers; we've seen the Standard Edition discounted slightly during pre-order windows, so it's worth checking each storefront before buying.

• Steam (PC) $69.99
• Epic Games Store (PC) $69.99
• PlayStation Store (PS5) $69.99
• Xbox Store (Series X|S) $69.99
• Argent Direct, Deluxe Edition $89.99
• Retail (physical, all platforms) $69.99

Watch: Hollow Meridian video review (11:42)