Hela: of Mice & Magic Arrives December 1, and It Might Be the Kindest Game of the Year

Picture a forest in northern Sweden in early summer. Light filters through birch trees, a lake glitters below, and somewhere in the moss a mouse the size of your thumb is wearing a backpack, swinging between branches on a thread of silk. That mouse is you, and in a few weeks you can bring three friends.

Hela: of Mice & Magic launches on December 1, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC (Steam and the Epic Games Store). It is the debut game from Windup Games, a studio in Umeå, Sweden, and it is published by Knights Peak, the publishing division of MY.GAMES. Before launch it had already passed one million wishlists, and its clips had been viewed more than 140 million times across social media, without paid promotion, according to the publisher.

From Unravel to Hela

Windup Games describes itself as a mix of industry veterans and newer talent, and the headline credit is a good one: the team includes the creators of Unravel, the 2016 puzzle-platformer about Yarny, a little figure made of red wool who unspools himself across the Swedish countryside.

The family resemblance is clear. Both games are set in hand-crafted Nordic nature seen from a tiny creature's point of view, and both are about connection. But where Unravel was a tight, linear puzzle game, Hela opens up into an open region of forests, meadows, wetlands, lakes, mountains and burrows, inspired by the landscapes of northern Sweden.

What you actually do

You play as one of the familiars of a kindly witch who has cared for her land for generations. She has fallen ill, and the world is losing its harmony. Your job is to gather ingredients, brew potions, solve problems for the animals and small communities around you, and help put things right.

The witch's gift to you is a magical backpack, the core of the game. It is how you collect resources, interact with the world and reach places a mouse has no business reaching. Movement is a big part of the fun:

• Gliding and double-jumping across gaps.
• Swinging between trees on a line, which studio head Alexander Benitez has jokingly called "Spider-Mousing".
• Riding animals. You can befriend and ride hares and magpies, and even hitch a ride with a pike through the water.
• Physics puzzles woven into the story, using objects that behave like real objects.

There is a moral side too: acts of kindness change how characters respond and how the world looks.

A game with no way to lose

The most striking design choice is what Hela leaves out. There is no traditional combat and no fail state. Owls and foxes still prowl, and they can catch you, but instead of a game-over screen, the witch whisks you away to safety. There is no fall damage either. As Benitez put it, a fall only means you have to climb the same stairs again.

The point is not to make the game shallow. The team wants players to "poke at things" and be curious, without the fear that experimenting will cost them. It also makes Hela unusually good for mixed groups, the kind where a parent who rarely plays games sits next to a child who plays every day.

How co-op works

Hela was designed from the start for friends:

• Online co-op for up to four players.
• Local split-screen for two players on one screen.
• Solo play using the Shade System, which creates magical copies of your mouse to handle tasks that would otherwise need a second player.

Players can teleport to one another, so a group never has to spend ten minutes looking for the friend who wandered off to ride a magpie. Cross-play across platforms was part of the studio's late reveals before launch.

In practice, this flexibility is what makes Hela stand out from most co-op games. Many of them are tuned for exactly two or exactly four players, and feel thin or chaotic outside that number. Hela's mix of drop-in friends, couch split-screen and the Shade System means the same save can work for a solo evening, a weekend session with a partner and a holiday get-together with cousins. Because nobody can fail, the strongest player in the group never has to carry the weakest one, and the youngest player never has to sit out a hard section. For a game launching on December 1, just ahead of the holidays, that is very good timing.

By the numbers

• December 1, 2026: worldwide release.
• 4: players in online co-op; 2 in local split-screen.
• 1 million+: wishlists before launch.
• 140 million+: organic social-media views of the game's clips.
• 2: gamescom awards in its debut year.
• 0: fail states, combat systems or fall damage.

Korean players get Korean interface and subtitles at launch; there is no Korean voice track.

WGC's take

Hela is a bet that "cozy" and "adventure" don't have to be separate shelves. Most cozy games are about routine: farms, shops, decorating. Hela is about movement and discovery, the joy of seeing a lake from a tree branch and wondering if you can glide there. Removing failure is a bold move that will not suit everyone, and players who want a challenge should look elsewhere. But for a family, a couple or a group of friends with very different skill levels, it may be the most welcoming game of the winter.

The open question is depth. Removing fail states means the puzzles and the world have to carry the experience on their own. That is what we will be watching for on day one.

There is also the matter of size. Windup Games has talked about an open region rather than an open world in the blockbuster sense, and that is probably wise for a debut. A smaller, denser map that rewards curiosity in every hollow log would suit a mouse far better than a huge, empty one. We would also like to see how the story of the sick witch builds over time. Kindness-driven games can drift into a checklist of favours; the best ones make each small good deed feel like it matters to someone.

Finally, it is worth noting how Hela was marketed. More than 140 million organic views is an astonishing figure for a first game from a small Swedish studio, and it came largely from short clips of a mouse doing mouse things: gliding off a leaf, riding a magpie, tumbling down a slope. That is a lesson for every indie team. A single, readable moment of joy can travel further than any trailer.

What to play next

• Before December 1: if you missed Unravel, it is still a lovely, compact way to see where this team came from.
• On launch week: start with a friend in split-screen. The game was built for exactly that.
• If you want co-op with more bite: our preview of Haunted Paws, the two-player puppy horror adventure coming in May 2027, is the spooky cousin to Hela's sunny forest.