Blight: Survival has reemerged with a new gameplay trailer — and its developers are promising big news in 2026 after a whopping 1.5 million Steam wishlists.
In a new development update, publisher Behaviour Interactive, of Dead by Daylight fame, and developer Haenir Studio, announced small scape playtests to help shape the game’s future.
Blight: Survival is a medieval co-op action horror game whose 2022 announcement trailer — an early look at gameplay — has seen 3.9 million views on IGN’s YouTube channel alone. The new trailer, below, shows new in-engine footage showcasing combat finishers.
After the trailer went viral and those Steam Wishlists piled up, Ulrik Langvandsbråten, creative director and cofounder at Haenir Studio, partnered with Behaviour and set about rebuilding Blight’s core systems from the ground up.
In an interview with IGN, Ashley Pannell, senior creative director on Blight: Survival at Behaviour Interactive, acknowledged the pressure the team is now under following its viral success and the weight of so many Steam Wishlists, but said the pressure will result in a better game.
“We understand the heightened expectations of what we are being asked to deliver upon here,” he said. “What I personally really love about this is somehow the zombie trope is so powerful that it’s such an all- encompassing thing that we just have to deliver on those expectations to the best of our ability. And that’s really our goal every day, is to try and reach that benchmark to work towards those goals. And yeah, it absolutely is a big responsibility for us to do that. But one of the things that we have as a result of this, is that we have a community with us, and we have a group of people who are on this journey with us. We’re not alone here. It wasn’t just comments from three years ago. And even now, we are doing small scale play tests with members of the community, with the team, to really try and fulfill those expectations and make sure that we deliver on the game that A, they thought it was going to be, and B, that we believe that it can be at the same time.
“So we’re on a journey together. We may have not been loud to the world, but we’ve been very active with our community, talking to our community, making sure that we get their feedback whenever we can. And like I said, even through actual small scale playtesting already, which we’re doing regularly.”
2022 feels like a long time ago now, and gamers have been burnt before by Steam games that have either failed to meet expectations, failed to even come out, or scammed customers outright. People are more sceptical now of flashy, ‘too good to be true’ gameplay reveal trailers from unknown developers than they perhaps were just a few years ago. And this is something Pannell said the team is well aware of.
“From a dev team perspective, we obviously know that we’re building a real game every day, every moment,” Pannell said. “So on a day-to-day basis, as a creator, I tend not to think too much about it. But it’s true. It’s absolutely true and correct that obviously people have been burned by things that have been released. Our goal is to ultimately, as we move forward, prove that we are making a real game, that it is awesome. We’re focusing on the fun, we’re focusing on the things that really matter to making a good quality, fun game that fulfills these expectations.
“We do talk about it. We do think about it. It does, like anything, that worries us. But then 10 years before that it was, did you have a loopbox in your game? 10 years before that it was something else. There’s always something to worry about. And I guess our goal is to manage the expectations and make sure that as we move forward and develop, that we release what we think is right. What is good, what is right and what is fun? And how can we deliver this message in a way that is meaningful to people and especially our community that if anyone is primed for a fall, it’s the people who started coming along for the ride in the first place. So yeah, it’s a thing we think about, but I wouldn’t say it dominates our thoughts. I mean, certainly, before we had this meeting, we had like, this could come up. It’s a thing that is real in the world right now and it’s important to be able to tackle.”
So, what is Blight: Survival? It’s an action horror co-op game set in a brutal medieval world. “It is a game where tension beats at the heart of the whole experience,” Pannell explained. “So I’m not going to land directly on any obvious genres here other than that overall thing. So as a player, every combat you enter will have a risk and reward. And risk reward is a key element of the overall driving part of many features in the game. So whatever you do, you always have to weigh up your decisions really carefully because every fight might be your last, every investigation might be your last, or it might bring you great reward. It’s not just a traditional action horror, it’s not a hack and slash, but it definitely is beating at the heart of this tension that is driven by risk and reward wherever we can find it in the situation we have.
“So it borrows from a number of different genres, but I think our closest landing point is action horror. It is a combat driven game with elements of exploration, with extraction light elements that are in there, and other elements also from games of that genre that help us drive the internal tension and the risk the players take whenever they’re in a given space.”
As for those extraction elements, don’t expect a clone of Arc Raiders or Marathon. “We have loss in our game, and the decision whether to bank that or keep it at some point in the game will become a key choice the player makes,” Pannell teased. “The decision to take more risk at the consequence of, for want of a description, call it extracting early to bank your reward will or is currently in the game as we would expect and a core component of how the game plays. So we have extraction elements, but it’s not driven exclusively as the extraction genre. And we’re also taking extraction influence from other types of games, like for example, Helldivers or Deep Rock Galactic, that have extraction components as a core part of the phase of the game.
“Again, not a direct analog, but we have both elements of what we normally consider a round-based game with extraction, plus a pure extraction game too. We have both those elements in our game, and they work in harmony with each other over the course of your playtime.
“The core game loop is you go in, you try and amass what you can, and you can always push for more, but you could always back out when you feel like you’ve got something that is meaningful.”
Don’t expect a release in 2026, but things are certainly ramping up. There are 45,000 people in the Blight discord, where playtesters will be plucked from. And the developers will then respond to feedback.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
