Blight: Survival Returns With New Gameplay Trailer and Big Promises for 2026

1.5 million Steam wishlists. That's the number Blight: Survival hit before most people even knew it was still in development.

The medieval co-op horror game from developer Haenir Studio and publisher Behaviour Interactive - the folks behind Dead by Daylight - resurfaced this week at the Future Game Show with a new in-engine trailer. And yeah, it looks properly brutal. Combat finishers, grotesque undead wading through swamp muck, impaled heads on stakes. The atmosphere is dark in all the right ways.

The original 2022 announcement trailer still sits at 3.9 million views on IGN's YouTube channel, which tells you everything about the appetite for this game. After it blew up, creative director Ulrik Langvandsbråten and the team at Haenir essentially tore Blight's core systems apart and rebuilt them. Quietly. Over years.

The game pits you and up to three friends against both monsters and men in a desperate push to find and destroy the source of the Blight, a deadly affliction spreading across a war-torn medieval land. It mixes visceral combat with mechanics borrowed from rogue-lites and extraction games, which is a genuinely interesting combination that not many games have tried in a medieval setting.

The new trailer also confirmed Blight: Survival is targeting a release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2026 alongside PC. So this isn't a PC exclusive situation.

The Pressure is Real

Ashley Pannell, senior creative director at Behaviour Interactive, spoke to IGN about what 1.5 million wishlists actually feels like from the inside.

"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."

He went on to stress that the team hasn't just been sitting in silence these past few years - they've been actively working with their community through closed playtests and ongoing conversations. "We may have not been loud to the world" he added "but we've been very active with our community, talking to our community, making sure that we get their feedback whenever we can."

Fair enough. Going quiet is often the better call when a game needs serious reworking. No one wants a repeat of the "coming soon" trailers that age badly.

Public playtests are confirmed for 2026. Players wanting to get in early on closed sessions before that can sign up through Behaviour's Playtest Squad at bhvr.com/playtest.

The environmental design on display in the new footage is striking. Swampy regions filled with the remains of destroyed villages, caged skeletal remains hanging from trees, scavenging vultures. The kind of world-building detail that tells you this team takes atmosphere seriously.

Senior Creative Director Ash Pannell put it plainly: "We're designing Blight: Survival to be a brutal, visceral game, from the first clash to the final deadly blow."

Worth keeping an eye on. The whisper that this one had something special back in 2022 hasn't really gone away, and 1.5 million people agreeing with that gut feeling is hard to argue with.