Haex’s sentient cube turns survival into co-op puzzle shooter, and it teaches double-jump

If you watched the Haex trailer and got stuck on one image, congrats, your brain is doing what the game wants. The debut trailer from developer Dead Astronauts keeps circling back to a cube that looks like a Rubik's cube covered in glowing alien sigils, and it is not just set dressing. In the trailer, players jam the cube into a socket on a forest floor. Then a huge wall of rectangular spikes swallows the surrounding nature, and when that environmental event clears, the cube disappears, leaving behind a strange, featureless structure.

That is the surprising part. It is also only half the story. The Steam page for Haex adds a twist that is big enough to matter for anyone evaluating what “gameplay differentiation” actually means: the cube is sentient, and it can teach you how to double-jump. So the cube is doing double duty, as both a world-changing tool and a traversal tutor, hinting that the core loop may be built around interacting with one signature mechanic rather than relying purely on gunplay variety.

Now zoom out to what Haex says it is. It is a 1-4 player co-op survival shooter in an open world, where players track temperature and starvation while exploring. That immediately places it in a familiar survival lane, but Haex also adds sci-fi framing to the survival math. The trailer opens with guns pointed at sci-fi monsters, then pivots to the cube, then the Steam page expands the system. “Alien seeds” let you open access to new areas and uncover new gadgets and crafting recipes, and those discoveries can then carry into “your friends' saves.” That last clause matters more than it sounds. Co-op survival games often treat progression like a personal checklist. Here, the game is signaling shared advancement across player worlds, which can change how teams organize sessions and how retention plays out.

The cube itself becomes the likely centerpiece of that structure. We are told it can trigger sweeping changes in the environment, turning the landscape from “nature” into something industrial, then leaving behind a featureless structure. That is not a small visual effect. For a player, it implies new routes, new spaces, and possibly new ways to approach combat and exploration. For a studio and an investment-minded reader, it is an example of “mechanic-first” worldbuilding. Instead of asking players to learn a complicated setting lore before anything feels rewarding, Haex seems to be designing the setting response around the cube as the interaction you keep returning to.

Haex also teases a procedural angle without drowning you in promises. The Steam page hints at procedural generation and an emphasis on hopping from game to game: “Every world keeps its own story. Every character keeps its own progression.” Even if you have never built a roguelike, the business subtext is clear. This is a pitch for replayability and session value. If each world has its own story, then players can justify running multiple cycles. If each character keeps progression, they can justify sticking around long enough to master the traversal and survival loop.

That genre blend matters right now because survival games with rich sci-fi mysteries have an unusually ravenous audience. PC Gamer points to Abiotic Factor as proof that players show up when the survival scaffold is wrapped in a compelling mystery box. Haex, according to the description, might be going for a similar vibe, but with a key difference: it looks more like a shooter than survival-craft, and it is framed as “sans the Half-Life homage.” The caution there is important for executives and boards. Genre adjacency can attract early attention, but it also raises the bar. If the game is too generic in gun feel or too unclear in how the cube-based loop teaches players, the uniqueness can turn into confusion. If it nails traversal and co-op progression, the cube mechanic could become the thing that earns word-of-mouth and guides new players into the “right” first playthrough behaviors.

There is also a strategic scheduling note embedded in the coverage. PC Gaming Show returns Sunday, June 7 at 12 pm PDT, and the show invites viewers to wishlist anticipated games and tune in for big reveals. Haex did not have a release date announced at the time of the trailer coverage, and the trailer was light on raw gameplay footage. That combination usually means the current selling point is concept and differentiation, not finished product certainty. For decision-makers, the question is whether the cube's promise translates into repeatable, learnable player actions, especially in co-op. If the cube can both reshape the environment and teach double-jump, then early onboarding may be more structured than in many survival shooters.

So what should peers take from this? Haex is betting that a single sentient-object mechanic can unify exploration, survival pressures, and progression across a small co-op group. If it lands, it could offer a clean example of how to make survival systems feel less like busywork and more like a puzzle you solve together. And if it misses, the same focus could backfire. In a market where players are quick to compare and even quicker to bounce, “cube differentiation” has to become more than a cool trailer moment. The advantage, at least, is that the cube already has a job. Now it just has to keep earning it every session.