Hela: Of Mice & Magic hits Xbox Game Pass day one on December 1, 2026

Hela: Of Mice & Magic, the cozy exploration game where you play as mouse familiars helping a witch tend to the world around her, launches December 1, 2026 — and it's coming to Xbox Game Pass on day one. Developer shared a deep dive into one of the game's central systems: Brewing and Remedies.

Brewing isn't a standard crafting menu. Each recipe is an interactive process with its own sequence of hands-on steps, meaning no two brews play out the same way. Ingredients are gathered across forests, meadows, and wetlands inspired by Northern Sweden's landscapes, then brought back to the witch's cottage to be combined. The most important results of that process are Remedies — magical tools that expand how players move through the world, solve puzzles, and interact with the environment. Rather than straightforward power upgrades, Remedies are designed to reframe familiar spaces: a previously unreachable path becomes accessible, a puzzle that seemed impossible earlier now has a new angle of attack.

Hela is being developed as a co-op-friendly experience, and Remedies lean into that. Puzzles are all solvable solo, but playing with a partner opens up creative combinations the developers say they didn't always anticipate themselves. The game's philosophy — wandering off the path, spotting an unusual plant, wondering if it has a use — runs through the brewing system as a whole. It's designed to make exploration feel purposeful rather than incidental, with every ingredient collected carrying the potential to unlock something new back at the cottage.

The Xbox Game Pass day-one confirmation is the headline news here, giving the game a significant reach boost at launch. The studio says more details are coming as the December 1 release date approaches.