Haex – a wilder, weirder open-world adventure
The debut from Scandinavian outfit Dead Astronauts promises shooting, survival, and, in a shake-up to the genre, seeds that terraform its pristine world right before your eyes
The wilds of the sub-Arctic north: towering pine trees, flashes of psychedelic-yellow lichen, and a sun that never wholly sets during the summer months. This land is gorgeous, yes, but also unforgiving, yet in Haex (pronounced “hex”) you have an unusual tool at your disposal to make it a little more hospitable: a cube that fits snugly in the palm of your hand out of which grows a plant. You plant this so-called Seed in the earth and – voilà – the world around you transforms: new vegetation and topography but also narrative threads to follow, and, naturally, enemies. Wield these small-but-mighty kernels of change at your own peril.
“Your adventure and your world is player-shaped,” says Haex’s creative director Tobias Nyman. He explains that everyone starts a campaign with a unique, procedurally generated world. Each Seed then contains further procedural data that causes it to terraform before your eyes. “You change the world as you go,” he says. “It becomes even more unique.”
The singularity of each game world is crucial for keeping not just you but other players on their toes. That’s another of Haex’s wrinkles: it is an online co-operative game, meaning your friends may join you on this ever-transforming survivalist adventure.
Teaming up, you play as a group of research scientists sent to investigate an anomaly in the rugged Scandinavian landscape. You come across odd, shapeshifting objects and beasts: for example, an ash-grey humanoid creature with spikes protruding from its face that would make even Pinhead from Hellraiser wince; also, a sentient wall so supermassive that it scrapes the clouds. There is a further layer to these spatial and, perhaps, alien mysteries: an unknown language of arcane sigils that must be decoded.
Nyman talks effusively of influences: sci-fi movies such as Annihilation and Arrival (as is clear from the trailer); the weird fiction thrillers of author Jeff VanderMeer, too. Unexpectedly, the creative director cites the niche music genre known as cosmic black metal as a touchstone. “There is the wild, grim, frostbitten north, an extraterrestrial entity and a thing that traverses the mist,” says Nyman, hinting at a shared emotional effect between his beloved music genre and the game: a mingling of dread and awe, and of seeking transcendence in nature.
Nyman co-founded Haex’s studio Dead Astronauts (another nod to VanderMeer), in 2024, having previously worked at Ubisoft Massive, where he helped make recent open-world blockbusters, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws. Yet where those titles’ settings are gorgeous and gigantic (“monumental,” stresses Nyman), they are also somewhat static. By contrast, Haex’s game world is more dynamic, and it is being made by just 12 developers. The theory is that its morphing, geo-engineered space should foster more fluid, interesting experiences, despite Haex’s focus on somewhat familiar-feeling shooting and survival mechanics.
Taking the leap to independence has also enabled Nyman to make a game that is more personal to him. As a youngster, he split his time between Stockholm and the far north of Sweden. He recalls looking up at the night sky blanketed with constellations as his father explained Einstein’s theory of relativity. Another memory: gazing out at an expansive crop of cloudberries – a “field of gold,” says Nyman, by virtue of the small fruit’s colour. What has stuck with him most, however, is the region’s silence – a silence so great that it was “almost screaming at me”, he says. That feels like an apt summation of Haex’s aims: an experience that is miraculous and malicious; a setting that is beautiful yet can feel as if it is bearing down on you with cruel intensity.
• Haex is due for release on PC in 2027.