Blight: Survival has reemerged with a brand new gameplay trailer — and its developers are promising big news in 2026 after a whopping 1.5 million Steam wishlists.
In a brand new development update, publisher Behaviour Interactive, of Dead by Daylight fame, and developer Haenir Studio, announced small scape playtests to assist shape the sport’s future.
Blight: Survival is a medieval co-op motion horror game whose 2022 announcement trailer — an early have a look at gameplay — has seen 3.9 million views on IGN’s YouTube channel alone. The brand new trailer, below, shows recent in-engine footage showcasing combat finishers.
After the trailer went viral and people 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 bottom 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 burden of so many Steam Wishlists, but said the pressure will lead to a greater game.
“We understand the heightened expectations of what we’re being asked to deliver upon here,” he said. “What I personally really love about that is by some means the zombie trope is so powerful that it’s such an all- encompassing thing that we just should deliver on those expectations to the perfect of our ability. And that is really our goal day by day, is to try to reach that benchmark to work towards those goals. And yeah, it absolutely is an enormous responsibility for us to do this. But considered one of the things that we have now consequently of this, is that we have now a community with us, and we have now a gaggle of people who find themselves on this journey with us. We’re not alone here. It wasn’t just comments from three years ago. And even now, we’re doing small scale play tests with members of the community, with the team, to actually try to fulfill those expectations and be sure that that we deliver on the sport that A, they thought it was going to be, and B, that we consider that it may well be at the identical time.
“So we’re on a journey together. We can have not been loud to the world, but we have been very energetic with our community, talking to our community, ensuring that we get their feedback at any time when we will. And like I said, even through actual small scale playtesting already, which we’re doing usually.”
2022 seems like a protracted time ago now, and gamers have been burnt before by Steam games which have either failed to satisfy expectations, did not even come out, or scammed customers outright. Individuals are more sceptical now of flashy, ‘too good to be true’ gameplay reveal trailers from unknown developers than they perhaps were just a number of years ago. And that is something Pannell said the team is well aware of.
“From a dev team perspective, we obviously know that we’re constructing an actual game day by day, every moment,” Pannell said. “So on a day-to-day basis, as a creator, I tend to not think an excessive amount of about it. But it surely’s true. It’s absolutely true and proper that obviously people have been burned by things which were released. Our goal is to ultimately, as we move forward, prove that we’re making an actual game, that it’s awesome. We’re specializing in the fun, we’re specializing in the things that basically matter to creating a great quality, fun game that fulfills these expectations.
“We do speak about it. We do give it some thought. It does, like anything, that worries us. But then 10 years before that it was, did you’ve got a loopbox in your game? 10 years before that it was something else. There’s all the time something to fret about. And I assume our goal is to administer the expectations and be sure that that as we move forward and develop, that we release what we expect is true. What is nice, what is true and what’s fun? And the way can we deliver this message in a way that’s meaningful to people and particularly our community that if anyone is primed for a fall, it is the individuals who began coming along for the ride in the primary place. So yeah, it is a thing we take into consideration, but I would not say it dominates our thoughts. I mean, actually, before we had this meeting, we had like, this might come up. It is a thing that’s real on the earth immediately and it is vital to find a way to tackle.”
So, what’s Blight: Survival? It’s an motion horror co-op game set in a brutal medieval world. “It’s a game where tension beats at the center of the entire experience,” Pannell explained. “So I’m not going to land directly on any obvious genres here aside from that overall thing. In order a player, every combat you enter could have a risk and reward. And risk reward is a key element of the general driving a part of many features in the sport. So whatever you do, you usually should weigh up your decisions really fastidiously because every fight could be your last, every investigation could be your last, or it would bring you excellent reward. It is not just a standard motion horror, it is not a hack and slash, however it definitely is thrashing at the center of this tension that’s driven by risk and reward wherever we will find it within the situation we have now.
“So it borrows from quite a few different genres, but I believe our closest landing point is motion horror. It’s a combat driven game with elements of exploration, with extraction light elements which are in there, and other elements also from games of that genre that help us drive the inner tension and the chance the players take at any time when they’re in a given space.”
As for those extraction elements, don’t expect a clone of Arc Raiders or Marathon. “We’ve loss in our game, and the choice whether to bank that or keep it sooner or later in the sport will grow to be a key alternative the player makes,” Pannell teased. “The choice to take more risk on the consequence of, for want of an outline, call it extracting early to bank your reward will or is currently in the sport as we’d expect and a core component of how the sport plays. So we have now extraction elements, however it’s not driven exclusively because the extraction genre. And we’re also taking extraction influence from other varieties of games, like for instance, Helldivers or Deep Rock Galactic, which have extraction components as a core a part of the phase of the sport.
“Again, not a direct analog, but we have now each elements of what we normally consider a round-based game with extraction, plus a pure extraction game too. We’ve each those elements in our game, and so they work in harmony with one another over the course of your playtime.
“The core game loop is you go in, you are attempting and amass what you’ll be able to, and you’ll be able to all the time push for more, but you may all the time back out if you feel like you have got something that’s meaningful.”
Don’t expect a release in 2026, but things are actually ramping up. There are 45,000 people within the Blight discord, where playtesters will likely be plucked from. And the developers will then reply to feedback.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You possibly can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.