After depleting its own resources, Earth survived thanks to energy from the moon until the base suddenly went silent. Five years later, you embark on a desperate mission to learn what happened on the moon that fateful day.
Deliver Us The Moon
Developer: KeokeN Interactive
Price: $25
Platforms: PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Sci-fi thriller Deliver Us The Moon begins with a brief introduction to set up its premise: in the near future, Earth is confronted with a resource crisis. The World Space Agency is established to save humanity and sets up a base on the moon from which energy can be sent back to Earth and keep the planet powered. That works for a time, but then the moon base goes silent. Without its energy, Earth falls into a near-apocalyptic state. A small team spends five years working to send someone to the moon, and now are ready to send you to learn what caused the Blackout–and hopefully provide the resources needed to save Earth.
Of course, when you reach the moon, you find it abandoned and the base in disrepair. This sets you on a mostly-linear path as you solve puzzles to proceed and find clues about the events leading up to the Blackout.
Exploration is mostly handled from a third-person perspective, but some sections switch to first-person, such as when you’re in zero gravity or take control of the small robot you activate partway through the game. While the zero-gravity controls take a little getting used to, they are easy enough to work with. Puzzles mainly involve powering up different parts of the moon base to reach your destination, but these often bring in additional challenges such as a power cell located behind electrified wires or an area without oxygen that you must quickly traverse. While hardly an action game, Deliver Us The Moon does have its fair share of dangers, but checkpoints are placed well enough so that you rarely lose much progress.
As you explore, you’ll also encounter objects in the environment you can interact with. Some are puzzle clues such as passcodes, some are small items and notes that provide further details about the people who lived there, and others are important story details that fill out entries for your astrotool dossier profiles.
These are the most important ones, and they come in three forms: items in the environment you can scan for a brief description, audio logs marked with a visible icon in the air, and hologram recordings that show short scenes from before the Blackout. The holograms are a bit jarring at first since they use bright orange and blue silhouettes instead of actually showing people, but they’re well worth watching. The only downside is that holograms are only counted in your dossier once you’ve watched them and there is no clear way to skip scenes, leading to some frustration if you have the bad luck to die before the next checkpoint after watching one.
While there is a story that deals with the main character in the present trying to reactivate the moon base, the bulk of the story comes through these clues. It’s a good story, too. Some parts might feel predictable, but it’s well-told and compelling, with a few moments that are truly haunting. A few loose ends are left open, possibly for potential sequels, but the core questions are all answered by the end. Completing enough dossier profiles also unlocks two encrypted messages, rewarding your diligent exploration with additional story details. The game is also divided into chapters you can access from the main menu, allowing you to easily revisit areas of the game where you missed something.
Exploring an abandoned station while piecing together events from the past to learn what happened to the people there is hardly an original concept, but Deliver Us The Moon does an excellent job with it. Aside from a couple of tedious gameplay sections near the end, I enjoyed all 7 hours I spent with the game and would happily return to this universe if the developers ever decide to revisit it.
The Final Word
The Final Word
Deliver Us The Moon is a beautiful, haunting game perfect for anyone who enjoys games featuring exploration and light puzzle-solving, wants to piece together a tragic story by finding clues and logs from the past, or just dreams of visiting the moon.<
– MonsterVine Review Score: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
