In The Wandering Earth: The Last Full Moon, You Must Get Rid of The Moon

Of Courtship and Spaceships

The studio behind this game is Surgical Scalpels. The team aren’t strangers to space-based games and in fact, it’s their topic du jour. Its last game, Boundary, was a zero-gravity shooter that punched above its weight. This time it’s working with Starry Dome, the studio that holds the licensing rights, after Starry Dome ran an open call back in 2024 (again, officially blessed by Liu Cixin) looking for a developer partner.

According to Frank Mingbo Li, Head of Studio Surgical Scalpels, getting picked was a lengthy courting process.

“The proposal phase lasted 12 months, and we went back and forth for a long time refining that proposal,” Li told me. “This is also how we built trust between the studio and the IP holder.”

The deal came together earlier this year, and development started right after Chinese New Year. There’s already a playable multi-level demo doing the rounds internally.

The novella’s premise is pure Cixin. The sun is going to swell and engulf the Earth within a few centuries, so humanity builds a small army of planetary engines and launches the “Wandering Earth Project”, a 2,500-year mega-plan to fly the entire planet to Proxima Centauri. The first step is to stop the rotation, point the engines the right way, accelerate to escape velocity, coast, then flip everything around and start braking again. This is appropriately called the “Braking Era”. Unfortunately, not everyone is aligned, and The Earth Faction are at odds with The Spaceship Faction. This violent tension is where the action – and gameplay – lie.

Fly Me to the Moon

The game’s title is a direct reference to Wangri, “the day of the full moon” – the 15th or 16th day of the lunar calendar. In the story, it’s arriving late in the “Braking Era”, when humanity finally has to shove the Moon away from Earth for good.

The full moon usually means reunion in Chinese culture. This story has always been about the opposite: leaving. So the title carries both, the ache of letting go of something familiar and the resolve to keep moving anyway.

You play an engineer sent to the Moon right as that window opens, and things go sideways fast: an assault, a conspiracy and a very old argument reopened.

The novel’s Earth faction and Spaceship faction, two camps who’ve disagreed for 300 years about whether humanity should ride the planet or abandon it for starships, are central to the plot. Don’t expect the studio to spoil how deep that rabbit hole goes. “We can’t spoil any story elements at this stage,” one of the developers told me when I pushed on which other factions might be involved. “If I tell you, I’d have to kill you.”

Hard Science Meets Grounded Gunplay

On the surface (lunar or otherwise), this plays as a third-person shooter first, and the team is oddly insistent about that point. When the obvious Dead Space comparison was brought up, or asked whether Boundary and this game share any DNA beyond genre, the answer was blunt: no.

“We did accumulate a lot of experience, and the setting is shared, but it’s a new IP and it’s not connected,” Li said. “Our motto is to fulfill players’ fantasies for modern shooter games. We want to deliver a grounded, skill-driven shooter. Even with futuristic tools and technology, the gunplay should feel physical and believable, not like an ability-driven sci-fi power fantasy.”

That focus shows up in the toys at your disposal. There’s a backpack-mounted robotic arm that can fling large explosives or haul things no human body should be able to lift, exoskeletons, futuristic sidearms, and eventually space vehicles for getting between the game’s absurdly oversized lunar structures.

None of it, the team insists, is there to replace shooting.

“I wouldn’t say we want to reduce the shooting elements in the game,” Li said. “You can shoot your way from the start to the finish. We’re just adding new ways to interact with the world.”

And in case that wasn’t clear enough, Li repeated it later, looking dead-on, down the metaphorical barrel at me while they said it: “We never compromise the shooting experience.” The point was, suffice to say, driven home.

Future in the Crosshairs

The aiming system is one of the clearest new ideas here. Instead of a fixed crosshair glued to the center of the screen, Surgical Scalpels is building what it calls a triple-reticle setup, tied to the character model and to lunar gravity rather than to your monitor’s midpoint. In fact, as Li tells me later, the player themselves is the fourth layer of crosshair. Effectively, the player’s physical viewpoint matters above all.

“We want an immersive experience,” Li explained. “The crosshair needs to be tied to the character itself, shown dynamically, at the same time as we show what zero-gravity feels like, how velocity actually works out there.”

It’s the kind of thing that sounds fussy on paper and apparently makes a lot more sense the first time you actually pick up the controller. They’re aware of the risk, too: “We’re aiming for a grounded, high-intensity sci-fi shooter, but we don’t want the controls to feel punishing or needlessly complex.”

We saw looping GIFs of the early targeting system and indeed it does seem like a rethink on how third-person targeting works; in low or zero-gravity environment, you’re factoring in inertia and velocity, and at all times, the team wants you studying your environment, not just staring down the middle of static crosshairs waiting for a target.

Visually, the studio is chasing something it described as grounded rather than fantastical – a “Planetary Engine” or “Lunar Engine” aesthetic, in their words, where “humans could actually build this.” Beyond the trailer, we’ve seen glimpses of concept art, and “dwarfing scale” is what comes to mind. I get the feeling you’ll be made to feel very small in the staggering vastness of space.

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

As for Liu Cixin’s ongoing involvement, the team seems genuinely pleased with how hands-off he’s been. “He’s very open and tolerant about people being creative with his work,” one of the devs said. “His view is: if your adaptation is a good piece of work, it’s welcome.” The project is being developed under an official license from Starry Dome, the rights holder, which selected the development partner through its own process.

No word yet on official release window or platforms (though they are targeting current consoles and PC), and there are currently no plans for multiplayer. The focus is clearly (and probably rightly) on getting the narrative-driven single player experience just right.

So it’s early days, but, between the moon-shoving stakes, the faction war, and a studio that keeps repeating “we will never undermine the shooting,” and never at the expense of faithful storytelling, I’m hopeful they have the ability to deliver something very special.

IGN was a guest of BiliBili for this preview event.