{"id":83762,"date":"2026-09-10T12:53:49","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T04:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=83762"},"modified":"2026-09-10T12:53:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T04:53:49","slug":"first-look-the-wandering-earth-the-last-full-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=83762","title":{"rendered":"First Look: The Wandering Earth: The Last Full Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The Sun is going to consume the Earth. Before humanity can fly the planet away, it has to get rid of the Moon.<\/p>\n

Author Liu Cixin loves big existential catastrophes. The same fine fellow who casually bent the nature of reality in The Three-Body Problem also wrote a novella of roughly 23,000 Chinese characters that became The Wandering Earth. In turn, this became a 2019 film credited as the moment Chinese cinema proved it could do hard sci-fi at blockbuster scale.<\/p>\n

Beyond selling tickets, the film\u2019s success proved the commercial potential of Chinese science-fiction IP and kicked off a wave of new development and creative exploration across the industry. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting about The Wandering Earth: The Last Full Moon, the new game from Studio Surgical Scalpels, is that it\u2019s skipping the film entirely and returning to its novella roots. In fact, under the blessing and trust of Cixin, it sees the game as a valid extension of the story, which should please fans.<\/p>\n

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Of Courtship and Spaceships<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The studio behind this game is Surgical Scalpels. The team aren\u2019t strangers to space-based games and in fact, it\u2019s their topic du jour. Its last game, Boundary, was a zero-gravity shooter that punched above its weight. This time it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

According to Frank Mingbo Li, Head of Studio Surgical Scalpels, getting picked was a lengthy courting process. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe proposal phase lasted 12 months, and we went back and forth for a long time refining that proposal,\u201d Li told me. \u201cThis is also how we built trust between the studio and the IP holder.\u201d<\/p>\n

The deal came together earlier this year, and development started right after Chinese New Year. There\u2019s already a playable multi-level demo doing the rounds internally.<\/p>\n

The novella\u2019s 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 \u201cWandering Earth Project\u201d, 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 \u201cBraking Era\u201d. Unfortunately, not everyone is aligned, and The Earth Faction are at odds with The Spaceship Faction. This violent tension is where the action \u2013 and gameplay \u2013 lie.<\/p>\n

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Fly Me to the Moon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The game\u2019s title is a direct reference to Wangri, \u201cthe day of the full moon\u201d \u2013 the 15th or 16th day of the lunar calendar. In the story, it\u2019s arriving late in the \u201cBraking Era\u201d, when humanity finally has to shove the Moon away from Earth for good.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s Earth faction and Spaceship faction, two camps who\u2019ve disagreed for 300 years about whether humanity should ride the planet or abandon it for starships, are central to the plot. Don\u2019t expect the studio to spoil how deep that rabbit hole goes. \u201cWe can\u2019t spoil any story elements at this stage,\u201d one of the developers told me when I pushed on which other factions might be involved. \u201cIf I tell you, I\u2019d have to kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hard Science Meets Grounded Gunplay<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe did accumulate a lot of experience, and the setting is shared, but it\u2019s a new IP and it\u2019s not connected,\u201d Li said. \u201cOur motto is to fulfill players\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

That focus shows up in the toys at your disposal. There\u2019s 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\u2019s absurdly oversized lunar structures.<\/p>\n

None of it, the team insists, is there to replace shooting. <\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say we want to reduce the shooting elements in the game,\u201d Li said. \u201cYou can shoot your way from the start to the finish. We\u2019re just adding new ways to interact with the world.\u201d <\/p>\n

And in case that wasn\u2019t clear enough, Li repeated it later, looking dead-on, down the metaphorical barrel at me while they said it: \u201cWe never compromise the shooting experience.\u201d The point was, suffice to say, driven home.<\/p>\n

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Future in the Crosshairs<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s midpoint. In fact, as Li tells me later, the player themselves is the fourth layer of crosshair. Effectively, the player\u2019s physical viewpoint matters above all.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want an immersive experience,\u201d Li explained. \u201cThe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019re aware of the risk, too: \u201cWe\u2019re aiming for a grounded, high-intensity sci-fi shooter, but we don\u2019t want the controls to feel punishing or needlessly complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Visually, the studio is chasing something it described as grounded rather than fantastical \u2013 a \u201cPlanetary Engine\u201d or \u201cLunar Engine\u201d aesthetic, in their words, where \u201chumans could actually build this.\u201d Beyond the trailer, we\u2019ve seen glimpses of concept art, and \u201cdwarfing scale\u201d is what comes to mind. I get the feeling you\u2019ll be made to feel very small in the staggering vastness of space.<\/p>\n

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Beyond the Blue Event Horizon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As for Liu Cixin\u2019s ongoing involvement, the team seems genuinely pleased with how hands-off he\u2019s been. \u201cHe\u2019s very open and tolerant about people being creative with his work,\u201d one of the devs said. \u201cHis view is: if your adaptation is a good piece of work, it\u2019s welcome.\u201d The project is being developed under an official license from Starry Dome, the rights holder, which selected the development partner through its own process.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s early days, but, between the moon-shoving stakes, the faction war, and a studio that keeps repeating \u201cwe will never undermine the shooting,\u201d and never at the expense of faithful storytelling, I\u2019m hopeful they have the ability to deliver something very special.<\/p>\n

IGN was a guest of BiliBili for this preview event.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n


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