Mayday: The Survival Island, the open-world survival game from three-person Brazilian studio Pequi Studios, arrives on Steam on November 2, 2026. The date was announced today on the show floor at PAX West, where the game is playable through September 7 at the indie.io booth, stand #316. Anyone not in Seattle can play the demo on Steam right now.
Unlike other survival games, Pequi Studios did not procedurally generate its open world. The studio drew all 24 islands by hand, in top-down pixel art, with every detail designed to support a natural sense of progression. That same attention to detail extends to the animation, with more than 1,000 individual frames created for the main character. While the world is carefully crafted, resource distribution and island locations retain an element of randomness, giving each playthrough its own challenges.
Mayday starts with everything players expect from a survival game: gathering, crafting, farming, cooking, exploration, and combat, but puts its own creative spin on what comes next. Players can turn natural resources into potions, learn to raise and herd sheep, bring buffalo back to their farm, and discover new ways to use the world around them. Rather than a collection of disconnected survival mechanics, these systems are designed to feed into one another, so every discovery hands players another way to survive, explore, and chase whatever it is they are after. Progression in Mayday is meant to feel natural: the more players learn about the island and its resources, the more possibilities open up.
The island itself is full of mysteries, and there is always something new to discover, from hidden treasures and unexplored places to the truth behind the crash and why players ended up there. As they push deeper, new paths and areas open up, the dangers grow, and the answers begin to come into focus. What starts as a fight for survival gradually becomes something more personal: a journey of discovery as they uncover the secrets of the island and what brought them there
Pequi Studios is a three-person independent team based in Goiânia, Brazil, in the heart of the Cerrado, home of the pequi fruit that inspired the studio’s name. Supporting the local game development community matters to the team, and the studio ran playtests with students at SESI Goiânia, working alongside them so future developers could see how a commercial game is built and tested. The same care shows up in the art, which hides things for players paying attention: nods to the pop culture the team grew up on, and a few characters modeled on the developers themselves.
“What I am proudest of is the way the gameplay and the story weave together, and that players get to choose where and when they push the story forward,” says Daniel Siqueira, Artist and Narrative Designer at Pequi Studios. “ I am looking forward to seeing how people decide to survive, and to watching them find all the things we tucked away for them.”
Mayday: The Survival Island supports single-player and will be available in English and Portuguese (Brazil). The demo is live on Steam now, and the game is available to wishlist ahead of launch.