Deliver Us the Moon (PC) Preview

By Eric Ace 14.10.2019

Review for Deliver Us the Moon on PC

Dubbed as a sci-fi apocalyptic thriller, Deliver Us the Moon is a space adventure game, as an astronaut is sent to try to revive Earth's last hope found on the moon. Developed by KeokeN, this takes place in the middle of this century, where the planet has been decimated, and the only source of energy is now found on its satellite. The source of power has gone silent, and humanity scrapes together one final attempt to save its future. Originally released as a series of episodes a year ago, this has not been finished as some of the negative comments reflected this state. The complete, six-level experience will be out in a few weeks, and Cubed3 sat down to check it out.

Taking place in our near future, where the environment has been devastated, and energy has run out, humanity was given new life by finding a new energy source on the moon, and beaming it back to Earth. This lasts a while, until it goes mysteriously silent, and Earth withers away for one final attempt, and that's where the player comes in. This plays like what might be called a 'walking sim' or something similar to recent titles like Firewatch. Starting on Earth, in some desert before a wind-storm, you explore around, eventually making your way towards the rocket.

The initial story setup, and the exploration of the base while preparing to escape were great, and set a very good stage. The game itself is unique in that you are mostly alone excluding some radio transmissions, simply exploring the base, the space station and the moon. There is no high-octane action here, just one person trying to save humanity's future. There are some obvious plot holes, though, such as why was all of human's future on a single system, or why didn't they send a whole team earlier and so on, yet the individual story is fun enough and pulls the player in.

Screenshot for Deliver Us the Moon on PC

An issue present in here, is the very odd control scheme. Namely for a vast majority of the game it is forgiving about where your character is, but certain puzzle or space sections are oddly frustrating with a sudden "perfection" required to progress. There are auto-saves, but often a lot of the hardest sections are right before auto-saves, leading to some degree of annoyance from dying over and over on parts that should not be as hard as they are, such as trying to float past some wires.

This alternates between first and third-person perspectives. The first-person sections, like the space station segments, are inferior to the third-person sections. The feeling of floating and drifting in a zero-gravity environment was captured, but in the process of it all, this quickly becomes an annoyance and just not fun. This part had some legitimately tense moments of dashing around while running out of oxygen that were memorable, but other parts, like trying to float through electric wires, are very easy to criticise how badly they control.

Visually, this looks very good, and certain sections like leaving Earth, seeing the moon, or the end of the space station were great. It presents an odd dichotomy where, when the game is good, it's really good and immersive - but when it is not doing so good, it is incredibly frustrating. Disorienting, repetitive, and occasionally dull even when just walking around, it could have stood to have an overall better pacing to the experience. Coming in at around four to eight hours to complete, there are some sections that will stick with the player, and others will likely be the source of negative reviews as they come in.

Screenshot for Deliver Us the Moon on PC

Final Thoughts

Novel for its attempt of being a solo semi-realistic space adventure, it has some memorable highs of various close calls and cool graphical events. Issues are present by the very annoying first-person floating sections in space, occasional bad controls, and a bad pacing between these very cool highs, and a lot of just drifting/walking around. It is a unique titles, and helps bridge the medium towards a form of art, but it'd also be dishonest to not point out some flaws definitely present before release.

Developer

KeokeN

Publisher

Wired Productions

Genre

Adventure

Players

1

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  n/a

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  0 (0 Votes)

European release date None   North America release date None   Japan release date None   Australian release date None   

Comments

Hm! This sounds really cool, right up my alley XD

The control frustrations remind me a bit of... Observer (I think) with the slightly confusing interface

I own all the consoles, ask me anything

Sandy Wilson said:
Hm! This sounds really cool, right up my alley XD

The control frustrations remind me a bit of... Observer (I think) with the slightly confusing interface


I found the game a very binary experience.  Some parts were very cool and easy 9/10 type experiences, but then other parts like floating around the space station or backtracking or getting electrocuted over and over were 4/10 type experiences.

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