NetEase Games and Starry Studio announced that their hit free-to-play strange worlds survival title, Once Human, is out now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The companies made the announcement at Opening Night Live at Gamescom.
The launch offers unique advantages across platforms, featuring Day One availability with exclusive perks on Xbox Game Pass, alongside customized DualSense immersion features for PlayStation 5 players. You can download the free-to-play open world game here.
Once Human is a free-to-play, Strange Worlds survival game set in a post-apocalyptic landscape – delivering over 300 hours of gameplay for console players from day one. In the game, anomalies are the center of the core gameplay loop – harness them to explore the Stardust-infected wasteland, automate your shelter, and mutate yourself for combat. From crafting to fighting, anomalies are your only means to survive.
The console launch coincides with a host of new special features arriving in the game, including first-person perspective, which lets players switch seamlessly between third-person and first-person, plus full support of cross-play and cross-progression, allowing current PC and Mobile players to continue their experience on console and play with friends wherever they are.
Xbox Game Pass Membership Benefits
For our XBOX Game Pass members, we’ve prepared some exclusive perks to kickstart your journey. Subscribers can claim an Exclusive Avatar, a META PASS Benefit Card (which includes 300 star sources, 30-day benefits, and allows you to try 14+ cosmetics), a Discount Voucher Bundle, and Battle Pass XP Cards. And the outfits will have monthly updates.
Next-Level Immersion with PlayStation 5 DualSense
PlayStation 5 players can look forward to an enhanced sense of tactile immersion thanks to deep DualSense wireless controller integration. The haptic feedback dynamically distinguishes the terrain beneath your feet – making the drag of wet concrete feel distinct from trudging through desert sand.
Meanwhile, Adaptive Triggers physically reflect your actions, building tactile resistance when drawing a bow string. These subtle sensory touchpoints draw players deeper into the anomaly, making the world feel truly alive.
Biggest Expansion to Date Revealed: The Living Ocean Brings New Horror
Also announced is the Ocean Expansion: Isles of Abyss, Once Human’s biggest content update to date, arriving in October across all platforms. This new content delivers a revolutionary survival gameplay experience spanning across islands, the ocean surface, and the deep sea.
The ocean is a living entity, where players encounter gazing towers, ghost ships, and mechanical behemoths of the deep. To survive these harsh waters, players must build their Exclusive Sea Fortress, starting with a simple wooden raft and freely building and upgrading their mobile maritime sanctuary.
With islands to venture,and the most dangerous sea monsters to encounter, this expansion takes players to a boundless, ever-evolving ocean that guarantees a fresh and thrilling survival experience every time.
Once Human is a free-to-play survival game set in a strange supernatural post-apocalyptic world. So since its launch on in 2024, Once Human has welcomed over 30 million players worldwide, and it has earned over 80% positive reviews on Steam.
But what sets the game apart isn’t the scale; it’s the core experience, the team said. This is a world where the anomalies, or monsters, aren’t just enemies to be killed. They are also the key to your survival. You explore them. You fight with them, you build your home around them, and you even grow alongside them. You can even fuse with them, and that fusion of monster-driven survival with deep exploration, combat, construction, and also crafting is what makes Once Human unlike anything else out there in the market, the team said.
Console players won’t be playing in a separate world-off version. They will be joining exactly the same Once Human world as everybody else with full cross-platform play and cross progression across console, PC, and mobile.
This approach breaks down the hardware barrier, so you can contain anomalies side by side with your friend, your squad, anytime, anywhere, on whatever device you choose. And second, it makes Once Human into one community, a shared cross-platform ecosystem where everybody plays together. And third, it fills the real gap in the console market. It’s a free-to-play, high-quality, and monster core open world survival and building experience that hasn’t existed on the console until now.
And this October, the team is launching the biggest update since Once Human went live in 2024. It is bringing put the Ocean expansion. The Ocean expansion is titled The Eyes of Abyss. It’s the largest and the most important expansion since launch.
It carries the Strange Worlds from the land scene out onto the ocean. It massively expands the game’s original territory, and it introduces an island and ocean dual survival loop, and it opens up a mysterious underwater region to explore. But it’s not just a new map; it’s a fundamental shift to how you survive. You initially wake up on an island with almost nothing, and, from there, you explore, you survive, and you grow.
The team said it focused on a single idea: the ocean is alive. In the strange worlds of Once Human, the core concept is this the entire ocean is one single living entity. It’s called the Lord of the Abyss. The water you sail are its body, and the deeper you go, the more you realize that the whole environment is watching you.
For example, a lighthouse gazes at you and tracks your every move. And there are also ghost ships that surface silently out in the fog. It’s like a chilling mechanical behemoth lurking in the deep, watching you, and waiting for its chance to hurt you. Every threat out there is an extension of the same being, the Lord of the Abyss.
There reframes the entire survival experience since the environment isn’t just a backdrop anymore. The environment watches you, it reacts, and it feeds on your despair. Players have to learn to read the sea, and also outlast it under relentless survival pressure, and ultimately uncovers the secrets buried underneath.
Shipbuilding is a central activity in the ocean expansion. The ship is the one pillar that ties every system together. It’s your base, it’s your workshop, it’s your weapons platform, and it’s also, of course, your means of exploration, all at once.
The entire core loop is built around it. You defeat monsters for resources. You can advance a brand new tech tree and get new components for ship. You upgrade your ship’s components, and you set new power to push into the next more dangerous region, and from there you start the loop again, and you will build it, and you you can build your ship with an unprecedented degree degree of freedom, from simple wooden raft to your own mobile maritime fortress.
Visually, it goes with almost any art style. It can be a pirate ship, it can be an industrial rig, it can be a sci-fi carrier, or something completely abstract that hasn’t been seen in human history. It naturally generates its own showcase content.
Crucially, the ship is also the answer to the ocean’s pressures. In one part, there are mechanical island chains where it literally rains meteors from the sky. So to conquer this area, you can either bunker up behind heavy layered armor and take all the hits, or you can strip your ship down to be the lightest ship of all. It’s so fast and simple that you can weave between things. There’s no one single correct answer. The world sets the problem, and the players build to design the answer.
Structurally, this isn’t just a new map bolted onto the game. It’s designed as two survival loops, one on the sea and one on the land, to feed into one another, and it spreads across five distinct ocean regions.
So on the land at your base, you explore, you gather, you fight, and you build a ship that’s uniquely yours. And then you take your ship out to the sea. You keep refitting and crafting on the move, sailing the ship to uncover the ocean’s secrets.
The two loops never stop feeding each other, and for the first time and once human, the world doesn’t only extend outwards; it extends downwards. Beneath the surface of the ocean, a brand new underwater exploration layer opens up.
There, you can find shrunken ruins, you can find shipwrecks, and other all sorts of vital resources reserved for players willing to take the risk.
And looking further ahead into the first half of 2027, the team is already preparing a next major evolution of this game.
Disclosure: Gamescom paid my way to Germany for the event. The content of this story is solely the responsibility of GamesBeat.