Haex
About this game
There were a lot of reveals at Summer Game Fest 2026, and most of them were sequels, expansions, or follow-ups to established franchises. Which is fine - there's nothing wrong with more of something that works. But occasionally a completely new IP shows up and just grabs you in a way that nothing familiar does, and that's exactly what happened when Dead Astronauts walked out and showed HAEX for the first time. I couldn't look away. And I'm still not entirely sure I can fully explain why. Dead Astronauts is a brand-new Swedish studio making their debut here, but the team behind it has serious pedigree. Veterans from Massive Entertainment - the studio behind The Division - alongside former Epic Games developers and people who worked on Little Nightmares make up the core of the team. The studio already secured 4 million euros in seed funding led by Behold Ventures, which for a debut outfit going straight into a project this ambitious suggests genuine industry confidence in what they're building. HAEX is a co-op first-person survival shooter set in a sub-arctic Nordic wilderness that has been fundamentally altered by a paranormal anomaly and the alien activity it's generated. You play as a member of a scientific expedition sent to investigate the phenomenon, who wakes up after a helicopter crash to discover that several of your colleagues have vanished. Finding them becomes the immediate goal. Understanding what the anomaly actually is becomes the larger one. The world - procedurally generated but saved independently from your character - is where the design gets genuinely interesting. Your character keeps their progression and gear across all sessions, but each world maintains its own distinct state and storyline. So you can take your fully equipped character and drop into a friend's world mid-adventure without either person losing their progression. It's a clean solution to one of the most persistent friction points in co-op survival games, and it immediately made me think of the hours I've lost trying to synchronise game states in similar titles. Survival is layered through cold exposure, hunger, thirst, and resource management. The wilderness is described as being as lethal as the creatures themselves - push too deep with the wrong gear and the environment alone will finish you. As you progress, the threats evolve alongside the rewards, so there's a meaningful risk calculus to every expedition into the mist. The centrepiece mechanic is the sentient cube - an artifact you discover that allows you to scan the environment and gather resources, with upgrades that eventually unlock alien abilities including dashing and double-jumping. Beyond that, alien seeds can be found or crafted and planted to physically reshape sections of the world, opening new routes, revealing hidden resources, and altering the landscape in ways that persist across sessions. The idea that you're not just playing in the world but actively transforming it is the kind of design hook that makes survival games feel purposeful rather than repetitive. Combat blends visceral gunplay with heavy melee weapons and specialised gadgets, with different enemy types demanding different approaches and a modular weapon mod system promising genuine build variety. HAEX is heading to Early Access on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store in 2027, with no more specific date confirmed. The trailer showed off angular alien structures, claustrophobic environments, strange humanoid creatures, and enough atmosphere to make the whole thing feel like it's gesturing toward something much larger than its opening premise. I tend to approach debut studios with cautious optimism rather than outright excitement. But the pedigree here, combined with how genuinely considered the design sounds at this early stage, makes HAEX one of the announcements from SGF 2026 I keep coming back to. 2027 Early Access is going in the calendar.
