The moon is calling. Or at least Artemis 2 just made a loud splash around it. Four astronauts. A loop. Humanity taking a tentative step back to the surface we left decades ago. It’s easy to get swept up in the glitter of it. The optimism. The future.
But let’s kill the mood a second.
NASA’s triumph isn’t happening in a vacuum. Interest in spaceflight is actually waning. Why? Because the goal has shifted. Exploration for the collective good? Dead. Exploitation for billionaire profit? Alive and kicking. The excitement is bleeding out.
Lunar Strike sees this coming. Cognition, the devs behind this upcoming narrative adventure, aren’t selling us a dream. They’re selling a nightmare. You play a junior archivist. Your job? Document humanity’s final lunar settlement. It sounds quiet. It’s not.
Set in 2119. We didn’t make it to the stars. We fizzled. Went home to fight other problems. Climate change tore at the fabric of nations. Religious zealots met bad governance. The result was nuclear fire. A classic human special.
We survived but we shrank. Risk-averse. Terrified.
“humanity recoiled and retreated and withdrew and atrophied”
That quote from an in-universe essay hits hard. Most sci-fi gives us a different story. We usually succeed in space first. Faster-than-light drives. Starships. And then the aliens attack. The cosmic horror is a reward for our hubris.
Lunar Strike isn’t that game.
The horrors here are homegrown. Entirely Earthly. The science is grounded. No warp drives. Just us. Stuck with ourselves.
We’re playing on the Moon’s south pole. A place with actual real-world weight. Artemis 4 aims to land there next. It makes sense. Cold. Shadowed. Full of potential water ice. As Artemis lunar science lead Sarah Nobel noted, it holds access to ancient terrain and vital compounds.
In the game’s century-long timeline though that base isn’t pristine.
It’s worn. Broken. People reuse parts. They fix what’s cracked. Vigilance isn’t a slogan it’s survival. Some residents have never seen Earth. They live inside pressurized tubes under fake sunlight. Their entire world is the hull.
A stark contrast to NASA’s polished press releases. The Artemis Accords talk of peace. Sustained habitation. Dreams of permanence. Lunar Strike shows the rot setting in while we were dreaming. History is forgotten. Pragmatism rules.
Or rather preservation.
Enter the ARCK project.
Named after Brian Pope’s real non-profit. Same goal in game and life: keep history from vanishing.
“collect and preserve scientific research… as a living system that must be… defended.”
That defense part matters. You are the defense. Or at least the guy scanning the receipts while bombs go off.
Economic strain made the public hate spaceflight. Then the hate turned to action. Earth-first movements sprouted. Most are just shouting into voids. One branch didn’t shout.
They brought guns.
The MudBoots. Terrorists. Extremists who see the lunar base as a waste. Their plan? You’ll see. Spoilers withheld. Suffice it to say it threatens the settlement.
Is it all doom? Not entirely.
There is one weird ray of sun in this cloudy future. AI.
Logic says AI runs everything by now. Automation is cheap. Robots are smart. But no. Lunar Strike refuses the trope.
“AI does not run the colony.”
It supports the human standing there. Just a tool. A crutch. Not the master.
We don’t know exactly when it drops. Sometime in 2026. Maybe later.
We wait. The moon waits.
