Dead Astronauts Debuts Co-op Survival Shooter HAEX at Summer Game Fest
Dead Astronauts, a studio founded in 2024 by veteran developers formerly from Ubisoft Massive and Epic Games, has officially unveiled its debut title at Summer Game Fest on June 6, 2026. Titled HAEX, the game is a multiplayer first-person survival shooter set in the Nordic wilderness ravaged by alien lifeforms and shrouded in mysterious supernatural fog. Players are tasked with searching for a missing scientific expedition team that lost contact while investigating strange phenomena north of the Arctic Circle. The game supports solo play or cooperative teams of up to four players.
HAEX presents a deadly open world where alien creatures and mechanical constructs emerge endlessly from the fog, while harsh environmental conditions pose threats equal to its hostile fauna. Players must manage body temperature, gather resources, and carefully plan loadouts to survive. Deeper exploration into the fog increases both terrain difficulty and enemy danger levels. Combat requires adaptive strategies using firearms, heavy melee weapons, and various survival tools to handle ever-changing threats.
A distinctive gameplay feature involves alien seeds that players can collect and process to reshape the open world’s local terrain. Planting these seeds clears patches of fog, opens new traversal routes, unlocks rare resources, and fundamentally alters the map’s structure. This mechanic gives players agency over their environment and creates strategic possibilities for exploration and resource gathering.
Character progression is fully shared across save files, allowing players to enter any session with fully equipped characters, including worlds where friends are currently playing. Character saves and world saves are independent, with each game world maintaining unique scenario states and narrative threads. Dead Astronauts was founded in 2024 by industry veterans focused on breaking design conventions in the open-world genre, emphasizing technological innovation alongside depth, exploration freedom, and player agency. HAEX represents an ambitious first outing that combines cooperative survival mechanics with environmental manipulation, and the team’s pedigree suggests this is a project worth watching closely.
