Octopus Panic’s Gravhounds Launches Game Preview November 2026 With Day-One Game Pass

Octopus Panic, a seven-person independent studio, unveiled Gravhounds this week at gamescom—their debut title set to enter Game Preview on Xbox Series X|S and PC on November 2, 2026, with immediate availability through Xbox Game Pass.

Gravhounds casts you as a bio-engineered dog built for dangerous industrial labor, stranded with your crew on the far side of the galaxy. Your shipboard AI supervisor, COSMO, still has jobs to complete, and getting home means salvaging alien worlds, building infrastructure, and surviving creatures considerably higher on the food chain.

How a Shift Actually Works

The core gameplay loop follows a simple structure: take a job, drop onto a hostile planet, build an operation, grab what you came for, and attempt to leave with your crew intact. Jobs range from recovering alien technology to extracting resources or establishing infrastructure in places local wildlife would prefer you didn’t. As your operation expands, so do the dangers. The longer you stay and the harder you push, the more hostile the planet becomes, forcing you to juggle repairing defenses, hauling resources, rescuing teammates, and deciding whether you have time for one more objective before extraction.

The Grav Beam serves as your primary tool—designed to grab resources, haul equipment, place Build Kits, and manipulate objects. It’s equally effective for combat: you can throw objects to teammates, hurl enemies away from your base, or launch improvised projectiles at threats.

Building isn’t a separate menu phase; it’s woven into the action itself. Your pipeline becomes the backbone of every operation, carrying power and providing deployment points for structures and defenses. Expanding your pipeline reaches more valuable resources but creates more infrastructure to defend.

Combat introduces randomized Reward Pods containing weapons and upgrades that stack as you progress. Your arsenal becomes increasingly powerful—and so does the opposition. By mission’s end, both sides typically pose considerably greater threats than at launch.

Every Gravhound wears an industrial propulsion rig enabling boosts in multiple directions, jumps, hovers, and repositioning. On the pipeline itself, the rig supercharges, letting you grind at high speed with unlimited boost—especially useful when your base is collapsing or a teammate needs emergency extraction.

Why This Matters

Octopus Panic’s team brings substantial AAA experience: across the studio, members have worked on Halo, Battlefield, Star Wars games, Full Spectrum Warrior, Def Jam: Fight for NY, and The Saboteurs. The studio formed to return to smaller-scale design—building systems that leave room for player experimentation and unexpected solutions.

Gravhounds targets genuine co-op interdependence rather than four players attacking the same target. The design deliberately embraces moments where plans collapse into improvised chaos, but the team still succeeds together. With systemic, tool-based gameplay, developers report already witnessing player solutions they didn’t anticipate.

Game Preview placement aligns with the studio’s design philosophy: Gravhounds is driven by systems, balance, and player experimentation, and Octopus Panic intends to develop alongside its community throughout early access.

What to Watch

Players interested in testing Gravhounds can visit the ID@Xbox booth in Hall 7 at gamescom this week. The November 2026 launch window will tell whether a seven-person team can deliver the chaotic co-op experience they’re describing, and how community feedback shapes the game through its Game Preview phase.