Dead Astronauts revealed its debut game, HAEX, during Summer Game Fest yesterday, a first-person survival shooter set in a sub-arctic wilderness covered by a mysterious, paranormal mist. Playable solo or with up to three other players, it casts you as part of a science expedition investigating an anomaly in the far north, waking from a helicopter crash to find that some of the team has gone missing.
The expedition’s goal is to work out what caused the anomaly and where the missing crew went, but the wilderness makes that difficult. Alien creatures and machines emerge from the mist, and the elements are just as deadly. Cold management, hunger, thirst, resource gathering, and loadout preparation all determine how far players can push. The deeper players go into the mist, the more dangerous the world and its enemies become, and new threats call for different tactics. Combat moves between firearms, heavy melee, and specialized survival gadgets depending on what players are facing.
Alien seeds, either found in the world or crafted, let players reshape parts of the open world. Planting them opens new pathways and resources and alters the structure of the environment, for better or worse. Progress carries across sessions, so players can bring a fully geared character into any world, including a friend’s active game. Characters and worlds are saved separately, which means each world keeps its own independent state and storyline.
Creative director and co-founder Tobias Nyman described HAEX as the kind of game the team wanted to play themselves, built around a universe where players can “fundamentally reshape their world.” Dead Astronauts was founded in 2024 by a team of open-world veterans, with HAEX as its first project.
HAEX is in development for PC, with pages live now on Steam and the Epic Games Store. No release date has been announced.
