Dead Astronauts has revealed Haex, a co-op survival FPS set in the Nordic wilderness and built for up to three players. The game was unveiled during the Summer Game Fest 2026 showcase, putting the Sweden-based studio’s first announced title in front of players looking for the next hard-edged survival game.
The pitch is simple on the surface: you and your crew head into the sub-arctic north, hunt for the source of a massive and ominous monolith, and try to find what happened to the rest of the expedition. Along the way, Haex throws in aliens and other mysterious creatures, first-person gunplay, and the basics that keep survival games honest — temperature, thirst, resources, and the constant pressure of running short.
What gives the reveal its edge is the way Dead Astronauts is bending the genre around the world itself. Tobias Nyman said the studio has poured a great deal of care, creativity, and hard work into the project, and that Haex is meant to let players fundamentally reshape their surroundings rather than simply endure them. Alien seeds scattered across the map can open up new caches of resources and give the crew a better chance to push deeper into the wild.
That matters because Haex is not being framed as a disposable run where everything disappears when a session ends. Progress carries over between playthroughs, gear and resources can move from one crew to another, and characters and worlds are saved separately. Each world keeps its own state and storyline, which means the game is asking players to think about survival as something they build on, not just survive through.
Dead Astronauts, a Sweden-based studio formed by former Epic Games and Massive Entertainment developers, has made Haex its first announced game. It is in development for PC and will launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store, but there is no release date yet. For now, the reveal gives players the shape of the project and leaves the biggest detail unanswered: how soon they will be able to step into that northern wasteland themselves.
