Gravhounds Revealed: Co-op Chaos with Bio-Engineered Dogs in Space

This week at gamescom, we lastly revealed Gravhounds, the primary recreation from our seven-person unbiased studio, Octopus Panic – it’s set to launch into Sport Preview on XBOX Collection X|S and XBOX on PC on November 2, 2026, and can be obtainable day one with XBOX Sport Cross.

We’re a small group, however between us we’ve spent years making a lot larger video games. Throughout the studio, we’ve labored on franchises like Halo, Battlefield, and Star Wars, alongside with video games like Full Spectrum Warrior, Def Jam: Struggle for NY, and The Saboteur. We began Octopus Panic to get small once more: to experiment, have enjoyable, and construct methods that depart room for gamers to shock us.

The canines got here early. All of us love canines, and their personalities and breed traits gave us so much to work with. From there, it wasn’t onerous to think about a future company seeing those self same qualities and deciding canines would make the right workforce.

So, in Gravhounds, you’re a bio-engineered canine constructed for harmful industrial work, stranded with your crew on the far aspect of the galaxy. Getting house means salvaging alien worlds, constructing questionable infrastructure, and surviving issues significantly greater on the meals chain than you might be.

Sadly, being stranded in one other galaxy doesn’t get you out of labor. Your shipboard AI supervisor, COSMO, nonetheless has jobs that want doing.

One other Day on the Workplace

Gravhounds is constructed round a easy loop: take a job, drop onto a hostile planet, construct an operation, get what you got here for, and attempt to depart with everybody nonetheless alive. That sounds organized; it normally isn’t.

Jobs would possibly contain recovering alien expertise, extracting precious sources, or establishing infrastructure someplace the native wildlife would strongly favor you didn’t.  Because the operation expands, so do your issues. The longer you keep and the tougher you push, the extra harmful the planet turns into. Quickly you’re repairing defenses, hauling sources, rescuing any person who wandered off alone, and deciding whether or not you’ve gotten time to seize yet another factor earlier than leaving. Logic tends to deteriorate because the shift progresses.

Put Gravity to Work

On the middle of Gravhounds is the Grav Beam, the commercial software each Gravhound makes use of to seize sources, haul gear, place Construct Kits, and manipulate objects world wide. It additionally seems to be extraordinarily helpful for violence.

You possibly can throw objects, transfer heavy sources between teammates, rip smaller creatures out of the struggle, or flip no matter occurs to be close by into an improvised projectile. Perhaps your teammate wants a well being pickup. Throw it to them. Perhaps an enemy is attacking your base. Decide it up and throw it some place else.

The Plan Lasts About 30 Seconds

We’ve at all times liked co-op video games the place gamers genuinely want each other. Gravhounds is about fixing issues collectively, not 4 folks merely capturing on the similar goal. Generally meaning coordinating a protection completely. Different occasions, any person’s enthusiasm for exploration turns into an emergency rescue operation.

For us, the most effective co-op moments are when issues unexpectedly go off the rails, and but one way or the other you continue to pull it off collectively. Gravhounds is intentionally systemic, giving gamers instruments and leaving room to determine the right way to mix them. We’ve already watched gamers discover options we didn’t anticipate. We count on that downside to get significantly worse as soon as all of you begin enjoying.

Construct to Survive

Constructing isn’t a separate part in Gravhounds. It’s a part of the struggle. Your pipeline is the spine of each operation, carrying energy throughout the planet and offering locations to deploy constructions and defenses. Push farther and you’ll attain extra precious sources and distant aims, however you’re additionally creating extra infrastructure to guard.

We wished constructing to really feel quick and bodily. It enhances the motion moderately than pulling you out of it. Seize the gear, get it into place, energy it up, and get again to work. Ideally earlier than one thing eats you.

Each Shift Will get Weirder

As you struggle, construct, collect sources, and contribute to the job, you’ll earn Reward Pods containing randomized weapons and upgrades. You would possibly lean into mobility, uncooked firepower, protection, or construct round an uncommon mixture of upgrades. As these results stack, your construct turns into more and more highly effective. In the meantime, the opposition is escalating too. By the top of a great shift, either side are usually significantly extra harmful than once they began.

Transfer Quick, Die Final

Each Gravhound wears an industrial propulsion rig that permits you to enhance in a number of instructions, soar, hover, and shortly reposition across the battlefield. Get onto the pipeline and the rig supercharges, letting you grind alongside it at excessive pace with limitless enhance. This turns into significantly helpful when your base is collapsing in three totally different locations, or when any person has made a sequence of poor choices and now requires help. Once more.

Coming to Sport Preview and Sport Cross

Gravhounds launches into Sport Preview on Xbox Collection X|S and Xbox on PC on November 2, 2026, and can be obtainable day one with Xbox Sport Cross. Sport Preview is a pure match for Gravhounds. The sport is pushed by methods, steadiness, co-op interplay, and participant experimentation, and we need to preserve growing it alongside the people who find themselves enjoying it.

If you happen to’re at gamescom this week, you can too play Gravhounds on the ID@Xbox sales space in Corridor 7. We hope you’ll come take a shift.