Gamescom 2026 brought me to the Snail Games booth for an exclusive interview about Honeycomb: The World Beyond with Szymon Szymaniak-Gnaś, Product Owner at Frozen Way. Among the games competing for attention across Cologne’s enormous show floor, this was one I specifically wanted to investigate.
As you might know, being an indie blogger comes with its own perks, and one of the biggest is independence. I don’t have to build my Gamescom schedule around whatever happens to be pushed hardest by PR or marketing. I can choose games through sheer curiosity — and Honeycomb landed on my radar almost immediately.
My family has a particular weakness for open-world survival games, especially those that give you enough freedom to wander off and create your own stories instead of constantly pushing you towards the next objective. Games such as Slime Rancher and Palworld have consumed hundreds of family hours, so Honeycomb’s combination of exploration, building, strange creatures and a colourful alien world naturally caught my attention.
On the surface, it is easy to read Honeycomb as another cosy survival game with cute alien animals. During my interview with Szymon, however, the game revealed itself as something more unusual. Frozen Way has given Honeycomb a deliberate attitude towards its environment — one that differs from the familiar Valheim-like approach of arriving in a wilderness, reshaping it around yourself and treating the landscape primarily as a source of materials.
That discovery was one of the most interesting parts of our conversation. Honeycomb’s ecological ideas appear across several parts of the game, from its creatures and plants to the player’s relationship with the wider world. Szymon explained how the team approaches planet Sota7 and the systems built around it, giving me a clearer sense of what Frozen Way is trying to achieve.
Before getting into those systems, though, it is worth looking at the world that makes this mission necessary.
Studying a World That Survived
Earth is effectively finished, and humanity lives underground while hoping to restore the surface. It is a familiar premise, but Honeycomb sends Hennessy beyond Earth to find a possible solution.
Her destination is Sota7, an alien planet that may hold the knowledge humanity needs. As part of Operation Honeycomb, she must study its ecosystem and discover how it could help make Earth green again.
During our interview, Szymon explained that the mission is built around two connected ideas: exploration and biological research. Players study the planet’s plants and animals, learning their properties and behaviour before using that knowledge in breeding and experimentation. These discoveries fill the expedition’s database while also helping develop new materials and tools, opening the way to further progress.
Exploration has a deeper purpose than finding another biome and collecting whatever happens to be lying there. The planet appears to have faced an ecological crisis of its own before Hennessy arrived. Somehow, that process was stopped and reversed. Part of her mission is to investigate what happened, understand how the world recovered and determine whether its experience could offer humanity a way forward.
That history makes the setting more than a colourful backdrop for another survival game. It is a world with an ecosystem and, potentially, lessons humanity needs to understand.
The game will eventually take players through 12 different biomes, giving you plenty of environments to study. Each region can contribute new organisms, resources and discoveries to the wider expedition, while also revealing more about the planet’s past.
There is also an interesting personal dimension to Hennessy’s mission. According to Szymon, she grew up underground and has never experienced the natural environment she is trying to restore on Earth. Her understanding of nature comes largely from images and recordings. Her AI companion, EGO, begins from an even more technological perspective, functioning as an assistant before gradually developing a deeper understanding of the natural world alongside her.
Hennessy and EGO therefore encounter this world as something they need to learn rather than something they already understand. That learning affects even the most basic survival-game assumptions.
Survival Without Conquering the Planet
Most survival games teach us a fairly simple routine. Find a tree, cut it down. See an animal, work out what it drops. Discover a useful resource, gather as much as your inventory can carry and come back later when it respawns. Honeycomb still needs resources, crafting and progression, but Frozen Way is trying to make the way you interact with the ecosystem consistent with the reason you came there in the first place.
Szymon described the philosophy in wonderfully simple terms: “You always take just a small piece of everything.”
If you need fruit, you pick the fruit rather than destroying the plant. If you need wood, the idea is to cut branches instead of bringing down the entire tree. Animals follow the same principle. They are there to be observed, studied and eventually bred, not turned into the local equivalent of leather and steaks.
It sounds like a small distinction, but for a survival game it changes the relationship between player and environment quite dramatically. Sota7 is not a hostile wilderness that needs to be beaten into submission before you can comfortably live there. Hennessy is a guest and a researcher, and destroying the very ecosystem she travelled across space to understand would rather undermine the point of Operation Honeycomb.
That doesn’t mean the planet is harmless.
Some animals can become aggressive, particularly when protecting their young, and the planet itself presents environmental dangers. One of the more interesting progression systems is immunity. Different regions contain different concentrations of alien bacteria, which gradually drain it and effectively restrict how far you can safely explore. Instead of encountering an invisible wall or discovering that the next area simply requires a higher character level, you need to research the environment and develop an immunity solution appropriate for those conditions.
You can technically push into dangerous areas, but eventually the environment wins. Death, however, is deliberately forgiving. You respawn at your base and lose some carried items rather than suffering a severe punishment. As Szymon explained during the demo, “The goal here is a survival game just to relax, to explore.”
That sentence probably describes Honeycomb’s approach better than attaching another genre label to it. There is danger and there are systems to overcome, but surviving isn’t supposed to become a constant fight against hunger bars, predators and brutal death penalties.
When I asked whether Honeycomb would offer a creative mode, Szymon showed me dozens of settings and toggles instead. Rather than forcing players to choose between a standard survival experience and a completely separate creative mode, the game lets them fine-tune individual parts of the experience. Building costs, crafting speed and organism-related systems can all be adjusted, alongside other options that allow players to decide how much resistance they want from the world.
We have seen a similar approach in games such as Palworld, and I think it works better than a simple creative-mode switch. Minecraft’s binary choice is useful, but it can also feel like choosing between two entirely different games: one where every block and resource has to be earned, and another where everything is immediately available. Honeycomb’s collection of settings sits somewhere between those extremes. You can preserve the survival loop while reducing the grind, make construction more generous, or remove specific frustrations without turning the whole game into a sandbox with no progression. It is less about making Honeycomb easier and more about letting players decide what kind of survival experience they want.
A World That Keeps Moving
Exploration in Honeycomb starts with observation. Plants and animals can be scanned to gradually build up information about their properties and behaviour.
During the demo, we examined one of the plants using an AR-like scanning mode. Once identified, its research entry showed the lifecycle of the plant, including when its fruit was ready to harvest. The specimen we found was already nearing the end of that period, with ripe fruit falling from its branches. Once on the ground, fruit gradually deteriorates, restores fewer stats and eventually disappears.
It is a small system, but one I like. Finding a useful plant isn’t simply about remembering where it grows; you can learn its cycle and plan around it. Seeds can also be extracted from fruit and planted back at your base.
Animals receive similar attention. They have routines, visit water and can react to what is happening around them. Normally peaceful creatures, for example, may become protective when their young are nearby.
Which naturally made me ask: if Honeycomb lets us breed alien creatures, do they actually have babies?
They do. Nests behave like small living populations where young animals appear, mature and can eventually be replaced as the population changes. Frozen Way doesn’t continuously simulate the entire reproductive process behind the scenes — and frankly, I don’t need two alien creatures calculating genetics somewhere outside my render distance. What matters is that returning later can show that life has moved on without you.
Some creatures can eventually come home with you as well. Animals can be raised around your base and grow accustomed to you and one another, potentially turning an outpost into a small alien zoo.
From Observation to Experimentation
Observation is only the first half of Honeycomb’s biological research. Once you understand the organisms around you, the next step is to start changing them.
This is where the game’s title begins to make considerably more sense. The knowledge gathered through exploration feeds into a crossbreeding system where useful properties can be combined to create new organisms, materials and tools.
“We want you to get to know all about their behaviour — what they like, what they dislike,” Szymon explained, describing the knowledge players need to gather before they can begin working with the local wildlife.
The system is built around traits. Different plants and animals possess different properties, and crossbreeding gives players a way to combine them in search of more useful results. Rather than treating every organism as an isolated resource, Honeycomb encourages you to consider what each one might contribute to a larger experiment.
Animals can be brought together using a pheromone device, which helps encourage compatible creatures to breed. The resulting offspring can inherit traits from their parents, giving you a reason to study individual animals rather than simply collecting whichever specimen happens to be closest.
Naturally, seeing a collection of increasingly friendly alien creatures made me ask whether we could eventually ride them. Apparently, I’m far from the first person with that idea. Szymon laughed that mounting animals is one of those “crazy feature ideas” the team keeps hearing from players. It isn’t something I would put on the confirmed feature list yet, but perhaps the fact that people immediately want to turn every sufficiently large alien creature into transportation is simply an unavoidable law of survival games.
What matters to Honeycomb’s progression is what those experiments produce. Crossbreeding can provide special properties and materials, which can then be turned into additional tools. Those tools open new possibilities for exploration, where you discover more organisms to study — and the cycle begins again.
That creates a rather neat progression loop: explore, observe, crossbreed, create, then explore further.
More importantly, bioengineering isn’t disconnected from the story and added simply because combining alien creatures sounds fun. Operation Honeycomb exists because Earth needs something useful to come out of all this research. Every strange plant studied and every useful property isolated is another small experiment towards that much larger goal.
From Outpost to Network
Of course, running an increasingly ambitious research operation requires resources. A lot of them. And Frozen Way doesn’t expect you to spend the rest of the game personally digging up every rock.
As the expedition grows, some of that work can be automated. Underground deposits can be fitted with miners, moving resource gathering into the background. Extracting everything is only half the problem, though. You still need to get it home.
That’s where Honeycomb’s relay network comes in. Antennas built across the world can transport resources between locations, while the same infrastructure also carries energy and water. Better still, those antennas double as fast-travel points.
I like that automation still requires you to establish a physical presence first. You have to find a useful location, reach it, set up the necessary equipment and connect it to your network. Only then does that part of the world become easier to manage.
The system also makes multiple bases and smaller outposts considerably more practical. As Szymon pointed out, building a second home in survival games often means hauling half your possessions across the map or gathering the same basic materials all over again. Here, once an outpost joins the network, resources can reach it and you can quickly travel there yourself.
Fast travel isn’t the only option. During the demo, Szymon showed me a hoverboard, and apparently the team is debating whether simply getting from A to B is enough. Ideas include time-trial races and even something closer to Tony Hawk-style tricks, with ramps, hoops and other opportunities to mess around with the movement system.
None of that sounded like something Frozen Way was ready to promise yet, but I like the idea. Fast travel will always win on efficiency, so giving players reasons to use the hoverboard with a bit of style could make the journey itself worth taking.
That same effort to remove unnecessary friction extends to actually building those outposts. Honeycomb uses relatively large premade modules rather than asking you to assemble structures from hundreds of tiny individual pieces. There is still freedom in how a base develops, but construction isn’t intended to become an exercise in placing every beam and floorboard individually.
That immediately made me ask one of my usual survival-game questions: what happens when I place something wrong?
The answer was pleasantly simple: dismantling returns 100% of the resources.
That matters particularly when you’re working with larger modules. If something doesn’t fit the way you imagined, you can take it apart and try again without losing materials simply for changing your mind. Build it, hate it, tear it down, try again.
Taken together, these systems make expansion feel less like repeating the early game in another corner of the map. Automated miners keep resources coming, the relay network connects distant outposts, fast travel and the hoverboard handle movement, and forgiving construction lets you experiment once you arrive.
Following the Clues
For a game so heavily built around experimentation, it makes sense that experimentation doesn’t stop when you leave the laboratory.
The same curiosity is encouraged during exploration. Honeycomb isn’t only sending you into new regions because the next crafting recipe requires a particular plant or mineral. Frozen Way has scattered locations and environmental clues across the planet that gradually reveal more about what happened there before humanity arrived.
DDuring the demo, Szymon showed me some of the visual hints used to pull players away from the obvious route. Question marks can appear when something interesting is nearby, giving you a reason to stop heading directly towards the next objective and investigate what the game is trying to point out.
Some discoveries are more substantial. Special locations connected to EGO can reveal pieces of information about the wider mystery and the civilization that once dealt with its own ecological problems.
EGO becomes particularly useful here. At the beginning of the journey, the AI is primarily a technological assistant — something considerably more comfortable interpreting data than appreciating a forest. As the expedition continues, however, it helps make sense of the traces left behind while developing its own understanding of the natural world.
That gradual curiosity gave me a faint echo of Scavengers Reign, although the comparison stops at the broadest thematic level. The animated series is far more brutal and unsettling in its treatment of alien life, while Honeycomb appears to approach its ecosystem with a much more constructive spirit. Still, both stories find something compelling in the idea of an intelligence encountering nature it doesn’t fully understand and slowly learning to look beyond its initial assumptions.
I find that relationship rather fitting for Honeycomb. You have Hennessy, who grew up underground and knows nature largely through recordings, alongside an artificial intelligence that understands it initially as information. Neither arrives with the connection to nature that the player might normally expect from the protagonist of an ecological story.
Exploration therefore serves two purposes. Mechanically, you’re looking for organisms, resources and places that can advance the expedition. Narratively, you’re trying to piece together how another world faced an ecological disaster and apparently came out on the other side.
A Different Kind of Survival
And somewhere between those two goals, Honeycomb has room for the most important ingredient of an open-world game: seeing something strange in the distance and deciding that whatever you were supposed to be doing can wait.
That is probably where my initial impression of Honeycomb changed the most during the interview. From the outside, it is incredibly easy to put the game into the increasingly crowded box labelled “cosy survival”. Colourful world, adorable creatures, base building, farming and relatively forgiving survival systems — all the familiar ingredients are there.
After seeing how those systems connect, however, that description feels incomplete.
Honeycomb isn’t removing conflict simply to make the experience comfortable. Frozen Way seems to be replacing the usual conflict with a different kind of interaction. Instead of mastering an alien world by becoming increasingly effective at killing its wildlife and consuming its resources, progression comes from understanding what lives there and learning how to work with it.
That philosophy appears in surprisingly mundane places. A tree isn’t automatically lumber. An animal isn’t automatically meat. A strange plant isn’t just an icon waiting to be collected. You study them because the information itself has value, and eventually that knowledge becomes part of your progression.
There is still a familiar survival-game satisfaction underneath all of this. You arrive with little, establish a base, gather resources, improve your capabilities and gradually expand your reach. By the time automated miners and relay networks are connecting multiple outposts, you’ve clearly changed your relationship with the planet.
But the fantasy isn’t really about conquering it. It is about becoming capable of understanding it.
That distinction is probably what kept Honeycomb in my head after leaving the Snail Games booth. Plenty of games can make an alien planet beautiful, and plenty can fill one with creatures worth collecting. Frozen Way is trying to make the act of paying attention to that world part of the game itself.
Whether all those systems will come together as naturally in the finished game as they did during our conversation is something we’ll know very soon. Honeycomb: The World Beyond launches on September 8, 2026, barely a week after I’m writing this.
You don’t have to wait even that long to visit Sota7. Frozen Way released a free Steam demo today, giving players around an hour with the opening part of the game and a chance to explore, gather resources, build and get their first taste of its bioengineering systems.
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