I really want to know what the cube is all about in Haex

One of the most puzzling trailers from today's Summer Game Fest was the one for Haex, the debut game from developer Dead Astronauts. It opens with some pretty normal-looking guns pointed at some pretty normal-looking sci-fi monsters, but my mind keeps coming back to that cube. That damn cube.

It looks like a Rubik's cube adorned with glowing alien sigils, and in the trailer it's used to trigger sweeping changes in the environment—the player jams it into a socket on the forest floor, a huge wall of rectangular spikes swallows up all the surrounding nature, and then it disappears to reveal a strange, featureless structure.

I don't know how this makes the game meaningfully different from other shooters, but I do know most of 'em don't have cubes! The Steam page piqued my interest further by revealing that the cube is sentient, and that it can teach me how to double-jump.

As for the game itself, it's a 1-4 player co-op survival shooter that'll have you tracking temperature and starvation as you explore an open world. "Alien seeds" will let you open access to new areas and uncover new gadgets and crafting recipes, which you can then take into your friends' saves. It seems more narrative-driven than other survival games, but the Steam page teases some procedural generation and an emphasis on hopping from game to game: "Every world keeps its own story. Every character keeps its own progression."

No release date was announced and the trailer was light on raw gameplay footage, but the concept is intriguing. Abiotic Factor certainly proved that survival games with rich sci-fi mysteries have a ravenous audience, and while this game looks to be more shooter than survival-craft, it might be going for a similar vibe sans the Half-Life homage. I'm interested! Mostly because of that cube.

Cubes: they're really in right now.