Lunar Strike is a hard sci-fi adventure game about preserving humanity’s legacy on the moon (exclusive)

Gamescom 2025 is upon us, showcasing a smorgasbord of new games for us to get hyped for. One of the most exciting games to come out of the show for space fans is Lunar Strike, a 2026 sci-fi narrative adventure game about preserving humanity’s legacy on the moon before it’s destroyed by an impending catastrophe.

Revealed during the Future Games Show showcase at Gamescom, Lunar Strike is the debut offering from Cognition Europe, an independent studio with huge ties to real-world conservation efforts. Lunar Strike is set in the year 2119, but unlike most sci-fi games, it’s grounded in “hard science,” having been developed in collaboration with space researchers, to offer a realistic and scientifically accurate version of the moon.

We had the chance to sit down with Brian Pope, creative director at Cognition Europe, to grill him about Lunar Strike’s realistic approach and the importance of preserving humanity’s spacefaring history.

Brian Pope

Brian Pope is a writer, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, In 2015, he founded The Arc/k Project, a non-profit organization designed to help preserve

Preserving our spacefaring heritage

“Lunar Strike is a game that was inspired by the concept of safeguarding heritage,” explains Pope. This third-person sci-fi narrative adventure and exploration game will see players take on the role of a rookie lunar archivist, having a rough first day on the job as humanity’s last remaining lunar colony faces an “impending, catastrophic threat from the heavens.”

The developers are being very coy about what that threat is, but eagle-eyed viewers in the trailer will have spotted an ominous object floating in orbit… an object that looks suspiciously like the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The focus on preserving our spacefaring history is a subject near and dear to Pope’s heart. A former visual effects artist himself, Pope is also an entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded The Arc/k Project in 2015 — a nonprofit organization whose mission is “the digital conservation and protection of humanity’s collective culture and history.”

“Generally speaking, if a piece of space technology is successful, it’s not coming back,” remarks Pope. “So, we end up with this gap in history and this gap in the technological and physical expression of what is such an important journey.”

Pope notes that “Lunar Strike is our way of making a call to action that we should be looking to safeguard humanity’s heritage while embracing technological advancements, including AI, as positive forces for our collective future.”

Making science fun

But what does a game about preserving artifacts involve? Filing away moon rocks might sound fascinating to an astronaut, but it doesn’t exactly make for a high-octane gaming experience. While the feature list proclaims that there is no combat in Lunar Strike, there will be plenty of drama.

“The game is not completely violence-free, but it definitely does not glorify violence and is more geared toward a player interested in exploration and discovery,” explains Pope. “We did not want to generate a simple story in which the so-called villain — the bad guy — is laid out as a very two-dimensional character, frothing at the mouth.”

As you follow the narrative and explore the lunar surface, you’ll have to contend with survival mechanics as you perform realistic environment scans, with puzzles to solve along the way. Sometimes you’ll be working against the clock, or defending yourself against the harsh lunar environment itself. You’ll also be required to make “game-altering decisions” that can impact the story.

While there is no combat, there is an antagonistic force at play — something Cognition is keeping close to its chest for now — an organization whose goals are centered on one of the other key themes of Lunar Strike: the ethics of space travel.

The ethics of going to space

“Even now as we reach back out into space again, reaching back to the moon, there are many people who ask the question: Why?” notes Pope. “Why is it so important when there are challenges right here on the Earth that need to be overcome?”

It’s a good question, and one that the spaceflight industry (and the world as a whole) needs to contend with. Pope takes a favorable view of our efforts to reach out and touch the stars, noting the myriads of technological advances that we’ve made thanks to spaceflight, while also noting the various threats to our existence as a species if we stay on one planet. But beyond all that, Pope notes that “we are a species that is built on exploration and a certain curiosity.”

The previously mentioned antagonists of the story don’t share this optimistic view, though, and it seems their mission is to destroy not only our presence on the moon, but also any evidence that we were even there. This dark plot point has some disturbing real-world parallels that Cognition drew inspiration from.

“Arc/k Project […] fights to preserve heritage not simply before it is lost or forgotten, but often times because it faces destruction due to religious extremism, vandalism or theft,” explains Pope. “So much of the cultural heritage of Syria was actually stolen by ISIS, a group which then professed to destroy such ancient art objects even though they were Islamic. They weren’t the particular flavor of Islam that Wahhabists prefer.

“So, we’ve got a real-world example and we really wanted to use it, and sadly, it’s very accurate.”

In the role of a junior archivist, we’ll be doing our best to preserve these historical artifacts in Lunar Strike, while also working to save the world as we know it — a tall order for your first day in a filing job. Cognition is tight-lipped about which famous lunar gizmos we’ll be collecting, but we’d imagine it’s going to be a whistlestop tour of all the greatest hits.

“Hard science”

It’s very obvious from the trailer that, despite the time-jump of nearly 100 years into the future, Lunar Strike is taking a very realistic, modern-day approach to space travel.

“Keeping as much realism as possible in the Lunar Strike story is critical to create a willingness to suspend disbelief,” explains Pope. “You can tell an extremely exciting story and largely keep within the bounds of real-world physics.”

That means you’ll be obeying the laws of physics on your adventures, with Pope mentioning the “conservation of mass, gravitational acceleration and orbital mechanics” as some key examples. “That makes the story so much more real, and also it constrains the writing,” muses Pope. “I think that science fiction often is too unbounded in the stories we try to tell as science fiction writers.”

The team also consulted with experts to help ensure their vision was as grounded in reality as possible. “Once we realized we had a story that could really be told within the constraints of physics, we collaborated pretty closely with Angelo Vermeulen,” adds Pope. Vermeulen is a prominent space systems researcher who commanded the first HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) mission in 2013 — a four-month-long Mars habitat analog experiment that aimed to simulate life on a Mars base.

“He’s been a beautiful resource in slapping our hands […] and saying, ‘No, that’s bad science,'” explains Pope. “And then my response to that is, […] why do you have a scientific consultant? So that you can ignore them! Which we do on occasion, but we pay a high price. He keeps us honest.”

To create a realistic lunar landscape, the team used photogrammetry data of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Iceland that they already had in the Arc/k project. “We’ve done extensive work mapping glaciers that are in retreat and unique rock formations,” recounts Pope.

As for the human element on the lunar surface, Cognition turned to the wealth of information that international space agencies have made available to the public. “We’ve looked at some of the ideas that are now being forwarded for a timeline for lunar colonization,” notes Pope. “Many countries have actually published their proposed timeline — The European Space Agency has been fantastic about projecting a view forward in time.”

We can’t wait to find out more about Lunar Strike, along with all the other amazing games shown off at this year’s Future Games Show. Check out the entire show on YouTube.

Lunar Strike is scheduled to release at some point in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.