Lunar Strike is a single-player sci-fi narrative adventure and exploration game set on the hostile environment of the Moon’s south pole in the year 2119.

Lunar Strike blends speculative fiction with a game world grounded in hard science - including orbital dynamics and applied astrophysics - and ethical decision making, as players try to archive humanity’s scientific and cultural legacy before it’s lost forever.

You play as a junior archivist sent to document humanity’s final lunar colony. Your mission begins with scanning and preserving scientific, cultural, and personal records. But when sabotage destabilizes the colony, the task shifts to survival under real lunar conditions: managing oxygen, power, and time while deciding what knowledge and memory must endure. Every choice shapes the archive — and the outcome of the colony itself.

Developed with ethical questions of legacy, memory, and responsibility at its heart, players will face increasingly difficult challenges to build and preserve the archive, with multiple outcomes driven by their decisions and values.

Cognition Europe announced a PC demo for Lunar Strike will launch next month, ahead of participation in June’s Steam Next Fest.

Players will explore humanity’s last lunar base as Bo, an archivist on a mission to digitally archive humanity’s achievements on the Moon. But as their story evolves, their mission becomes critical as sabotage and espionage threatens the colony’s future.

Pushing its accuracy levels further is Cognition’s use of data through photogrammetry, structured light scanning, and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technologies to recreate the lunar and comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko surfaces with extremely high fidelity.

Cognition is closely linked to non-profit organization, The Arc/k Project, which exists to digitally preserve humanity’s collective cultural heritage. The body’s mission forms the basis for Lunar Strike’s narrative.

Brian Pope, Creative Director of Cognition and Founder of The Arc/k Project, said: “This past weekend's successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission begins a new golden era for humanity’s exploration - and occupation - of the moon, one that continues nearly a century into the future when Lunar Strike is set. May’s demo will introduce players to the game’s mechanics and systems rooted in real-world science, and begin to raise the philosophical questions around what it means to be post-human, the intersection of the human mind and synthetic intelligence, and the implicit tug-of-war between our obligations to the Earth, our ambitions for the Moon, and ultimately to one another. We're looking forward to receiving feedback as we continue our trajectory towards the game's launch in the summer.” 

Key Features:

• Rich, multi-faceted narrative: Preserve the culture of the last lunar colony while making game-altering decisions that impact the story unravelling a new future for humanity.
• No Combat: Lunar Strike focuses on survival, scanning, puzzle solving, and decision-making. The gameplay unfolds under time pressures, environmental degradation, and mounting ethical tension.
• Grounded in Hard Science: Developed in collaboration with space researchers, the game incorporates realistic systems and hazards, including 1/6th lunar gravity, toxic Moon dust, and real-world physics. Manage oxygen, suit energy, and habitat systems under lunar constraints as you recover, analyze, and prioritize data across cultural, scientific, and personal domains.
• Cultural Heritage as Gameplay: Preserve humanity’s story on the Moon. Through 3D scanning, photogrammetry, and archival logic, capture the final traces of lunar life before its collapse. Analyse a crime scene from scanned artifacts, decisions on what to save or abandon reshape the colony’s legacy
• Rooted in Real Ethics and Science Fiction: Inspired by real-life heritage efforts, built by creators with backgrounds in cultural preservation and storytelling, Lunar Strike invites thoughtful engagement with space exploration.

Lunar Strike is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam).