The upcoming survival adventure from Dead Astronauts blends Scandinavian wilderness, procedural transformation and cosmic horror into a world that refuses to stay still.
Open-world games have become increasingly skilled at making landscapes feel enormous. Haex, the debut game from Scandinavian studio Dead Astronauts, is interested in something more difficult: making that landscape feel alive.
Set in the sub-Arctic north, Haex places players in a remote Scandinavian wilderness filled with towering pine trees, strange vegetation and an unsettling sense of isolation. The environment is beautiful, but it is not simply there to be explored. It can change.
At the center of that transformation is the Seed, a mysterious cube-like object that can be planted in the ground. Once activated, it alters the surrounding environment, generating new vegetation, reshaping terrain and potentially revealing new storylines and enemies.
The result is an open world that is designed to respond to the player rather than simply surround them.
A World Shaped by the Player
According to creative director Tobias Nyman, each campaign begins with a procedurally generated world. Seeds introduce another layer of procedural change, allowing the environment to evolve as players progress.
That idea gives Haex one of its most distinctive concepts: no two adventures should unfold in exactly the same way.
The transformation is not purely visual. The altered landscape can influence exploration, encounters and narrative possibilities. Instead of treating the world as a fixed stage, Dead Astronauts is building a setting where changing the environment becomes part of the game itself.
The approach also fits naturally with Haex's cooperative design. Players can explore the changing wilderness together, confronting threats and mysteries that may emerge from the world's constantly shifting geography.
Science, Survival and Something Much Stranger
The premise begins with a group of research scientists investigating an unexplained anomaly. From there, the game moves into much stranger territory.
Players encounter shapeshifting objects, unnatural creatures and an enormous sentient wall that reportedly reaches into the clouds. An unknown system of arcane symbols adds another layer of mystery, suggesting that the world may contain a language and history that players must gradually decipher.
Combat and survival mechanics provide a familiar foundation, but the game's identity appears to come from the tension between those systems and its more surreal ideas.
The wilderness is not simply hostile because of conventional survival threats. It feels hostile because something fundamentally unfamiliar appears to be operating within it.
The Influence of Cosmic Horror
The creative direction of Haex draws from several sources of science fiction and weird fiction. Films such as Annihilation and Arrival, along with the work of author Jeff VanderMeer, are among the inspirations cited by Nyman.
There is also a less conventional influence: cosmic black metal.
That combination helps explain the atmosphere Dead Astronauts is pursuing. Haex is designed to balance awe with dread, presenting nature as something beautiful enough to inspire wonder but strange enough to become frightening.
The game's northern setting is central to that mood. The vast forests, long summer light and extreme sense of silence are not just visual decoration. They are part of the emotional foundation of the experience.
From Blockbusters to Independence
Nyman previously worked at Ubisoft Massive, contributing to large open-world productions including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws. Those games offered enormous, highly detailed environments, but Haex represents a different approach to the open-world formula.
Rather than focusing primarily on scale, Dead Astronauts is attempting to make the environment more dynamic.
That is an ambitious goal for a studio of around 12 developers. The smaller team has also given Nyman the opportunity to create something more personal, drawing directly from his childhood experiences in northern Sweden.
His memories of the region include vast fields of cloudberries, clear night skies and, perhaps most importantly, an overwhelming silence.
That sense of silence may ultimately be one of Haex's most important ingredients. The game is not merely trying to make players feel small in a huge world. It is attempting to make them feel surrounded by something they do not fully understand.
An Open World That Changes With You
The most interesting idea behind Haex is therefore not its guns, survival mechanics or even its strange creatures. It is the possibility that the world itself becomes part of the story.
Every Seed can represent a decision, a discovery or a threat. Every transformation can make the landscape more useful, more dangerous or more mysterious.
That gives the open-world format a potentially different rhythm. Instead of simply asking players where they want to go next, Haex asks what kind of world they are willing to create.
The result could be a survival adventure where exploration is not just about discovering what already exists. It is about witnessing what the world becomes.
Haex is scheduled for release on PC in 2027.*
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