Since the early 2020s, the staff at That’s No Moon have been working on their debut game in heavy secrecy. Pulling together developers formerly from Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, Bungie, and other noteworthy studios, their upcoming project has just made its debut at Summer Game Fest 2026. It’s a single-player narrative-focused reimagining of Smilegate’s multiplayer shooter Crossfire.
The upcoming “tactical action-adventure” shooter bears many familiar hallmarks of a narrative-driven action game, like The Last of Us and Gears of War, but it also carries a lofty goal: redefining how players engage in cover-based combat. It’s all tied to how they’ll navigate the environment to find organic cover.
During a recent studio visit to That’s No Moon, we spoke with chief creative officer and co-founder Taylor Kurosaki and game director Jacob Minkoff about the making of Crossfire and how their focus on creating an “adaptive cover” system has the potential to move the “genre forward.”
Described as a reimagining of the world of the original Crossfire, Kurosaki stated they had a lot of leeway in coming up with a new game.
“We see this arrangement we have with publisher Smilegate as a similar relationship between Sony and Naughty Dog, with how the publisher is giving trust to our vision,” said Kurosaki. “We’re very comfortable with the sort of partnership we have with Smilegate, we’re energized by it, and at the end of the day, we want to make a game where the gameplay and the narrative are inextricably linked to one another. That’s been our north star from day one.”
Building a “tactical action-adventure” game
Remedy Entertainment released a single-player campaign for the online game Crossfire X in 2022, but the core game eventually discontinued service. While Crossfire is a popular shooter in Eastern territories, it’s not a well-known hit in the West. This, however, presented an opportunity for the developers at That’s No Moon. Instead of a companion mode in an existing online shooter, the developers focused on a new concept for a Crossfire game that leaned on the studio’s experience with single-player narrative action-adventures.
This new Crossfire shifts the gameplay to a 3rd person perspective and leans into military-style action, with an added bit of horror. Focusing on two protagonists from opposing sides, Layla and Cross (played by Claudia Doumit and Ricky Whittle, respectively) will have to work together to face a mysterious threat within a hostile battlefield that corrupts ally and foe alike.
The SGF trailer did well to showcase the overall tone of Crossfire while also highlighting the growing camaraderie between Layla and Cross. During our visit to the studio, we got a deeper dive into the gameplay, which revealed that the core action is enhanced by survival-lite elements and resource management from games like The Last of Us and Escape from Tarkov.
“War is a very singular pressure to put on characters, and we then get to reveal their true nature, and we’ve certainly focused that with our previous work that is close to that war genre,” said Kurosaki. “That genre has a sense of adventure, and we love the sense of playing in a contiguous space, where you’ll navigate where they’ll go to reach a destination, and then, of course, when you’re at the top, you can look back down to where you started, and it’s all there.”
“Our game uses a single world map, so it’s a connected world. So we get to combine these two loves of ours, single-player action-adventure games and telling stories in the war genre, and then to innovate on top of that, and really push the medium forward. We’ve never been more excited for a project than this one.”
Rebooting the cover-based shooter
The moment-to-moment action of Crossfire channels the familiar style of third-person military-shooter combat, where players must make tactical decisions about how to engage enemies by leveraging position, finding the right cover for defense, and picking the best moments to strike. The Crossfire team also wanted to innovate by redesigning the pacing and flow of how players navigate and find cover in environments.
In a move away from the “rectilinear” shooters that signpost combat encounters with clear and obvious spots for cover—such as chest-high walls and large objects to push your character up against—Crossfire focuses on a more open-ended approach with an adaptive cover system, where players will have to find “organic” cover from the terrain and geometry.
Essentially, this means carefully positioning yourself against rugged terrain and environmental objects to find effective cover that adapts to each engagement. According to game director Jacob Minkoff, the current technology in Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite and Lumen systems allowed the developers to lean into enhanced environmental detail.
“I am kind of a SIGGRAPH nerd, and I like reading the papers and seeing all the new videos they release about the new tech coming out,” said Minkoff. “Like 12 years ago, I’d seen a video on phase function neural networks, which was a new method of using motion matching for animation, and the whole pitch was that it would allow you to have a third-person character action game where the character was able to navigate incredibly complex environments.”
“And then I saw the Unreal Engine 5 was providing the rendering technology to create incredibly complex organic environments, and those two things together made me feel that there’s this technology that will allow us to make characters navigate the environment in a much more realistic way, and those pieces together generated the concept of adaptive cover,” he continued.
“It wasn’t something that I knew this game was going to be from the start, but these goals of creating more natural, more biomechanically realistic simulation characters that move in more real environments that feel and look more real. I’ve always wanted to be part of a game that does that, for me it’s a continuation of that goal of trying to make the most innovative art that pushes the medium forward.”
Much like Death Stranding pushes players to be mindful when navigating rugged, hazardous terrain, Crossfire fosters a similar mindfulness in its cover system. In addition to having to get low and find protection where you can get it, the characters themselves will adapt and position their bodies in ways to fit the improvised cover, with the character animations carefully shifting and adapting their posture and stance near slopes and shorter obstructions.
With Crossfire, it’s clear that the developers at That’s No Moon are aiming to mix up familiar triple-A action-adventure spectacle with a more free-form approach. It’s an interesting way to tackle that challenge, to be sure, especially with the development team hanging its proverbial hat on the concept of “adaptive cover.” Seeing it in action across multiple playthroughs made for some exhilarating action beats and plenty of potential for player choice with different approaches to encounters—an encouraging sign for a game that wants to reboot the whole approach to the genre.