Deliver Us the Moon
Off you go to the moon to save humanity all on your own.
Deliver Us the Moon is a narrative sci-fi action puzzle game. You play as a lonely protagonist sent to the moon to discover the answers behind why the big laser has stopped sending energy back to Earth and to get it started again.
I’ve been very lucky so far with Quick Play – almost all the games I’ve written about in the 18 months since starting have been games I’ve loved, or they’ve taught me something (I’m looking at you, Hotline Miami). You can call me easy to please and you’re probably right. I go into games wanting and hoping to love them and have a nice time. Yes, as a critic, I do have my eyes open for other details, but I am primarily concerned with two things: how did this game make me feel, and did I have fun?
So in cases like this, when an experience was just…fine…I feel somewhat on the back foot. Writing about something you love or something you hate – usually pretty easy, the main challenge is teasing out why you felt that way (something I am still learning how to do effectively). It’s really hard to write about why something didn’t make you feel much at all.
Unfortunately, that was my experience with Deliver Us the Moon. If anything, I found it to be a little disappointing. Back in 2020 or 2021, one of my favourite streamers (Psyche) played this game, and while I didn’t really remember much from her playthrough (my memories of those years are patchy at best), I remember her emotional response being quite strong.
Maybe it’s a factor of time. Deliver Us the Moon came out in 2018, which is somehow seven years ago. Technology and what we expect from it change pretty rapidly, especially within video games. There are some (like Portal) that do something so inventive and stand out that they feel good to play years later, but Deliver Us the Moon didn’t do anything innovative, new, or particularly interesting to me. It didn’t iterate on what had come before; it just emulated them.
I also think that some reviews have done me dirty here, casually describing this as an exploration game on multiple occasions. It very definitely is not an exploration game. It’s extremely linear and you are given almost nothing to explore. This is not a mark against the game generally, but I had been looking forward to exploring a space base, an experience which I was denied on this occasion.
I do try to give the benefit of the doubt to indie games, but I think the developers were asking things of Deliver Us the Moon that it couldn’t quite support technologically. The controls were fairly floaty, making you feel like a sedan and making some fiddly bits annoying and exasperating. The hologram segments flickered and distorted in what looked like an unintentional way (maybe this was on purpose – that doesn’t really make me look any more kindly on it). At one point, my robot buddy got clipped out of the space station and I could look at it from the outside, which was neat but didn’t help me unlock the door I was stuck behind. Sure, not every indie game can be Hollow Knight, but I think a six-hour game should run well enough that you don’t need to restart it partway through to fix issues like this.
I am usually quite a big fan of this style of narrative adventure, one step up from a walking sim but stripped of many traditional elements of gamification. There’s no health bar or inventory or combat or stealth. You can only interact with the world when you’re meant to. This is fine, let me experience your interactive fiction. Deliver Us the Moon was a kind of chimera – predominantly you’re walking through rooms moving wheeled things to stand on (most of the time it isn’t even subtle, and you’re left literally dragging stairs into place) or using your little robot buddy to zip through a tight space and activate a lock. But sometimes, there’s no oxygen and you have to do something BUT FAST.
Moments like this are meant to cause tension and excitement, but I was just frustrated and annoyed by them. There was absolutely no penalty for failure aside from having to re-do a small segment of the game since the last autosave. A lot of the time (the vast majority), I am strongly in favour of low-to-no penalty failure states. Don’t punish me for being slow or bad at the game, please, I am here to enjoy myself. But in the instances in Deliver Us the Moon, I found myself grumbling, “Why make it timed at all then?” Maybe it’s because I don’t think solving puzzles under time pressure is fun, but if any of you reading this know the ludic psychology behind my dissonance here, I’d love to hear about it. I hope I’m not just contrary.
Oftentimes, the story will be enough to smooth over these rough edges for me, but Deliver Us the Moon falls flat in that aspect, too, at least in my opinion. I found it did quite a lot of telling rather than showing, which made the environmental disaster we were dealing with feel extremely heavy-handed and moralistic. The story played out through low-resolution abstract hologram recordings and voice notes, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but when combined with the wooden voice acting, made the characters feel flat and disconnected and meant that emotional moments didn’t land as intended.
Even the little floating robot buddy didn’t work for me, and I am usually an absolute sucker for a little robot buddy. There’s never any conversation between the player and the robot; it doesn’t emote at all, not even with little beeps. There is no personality in it, despite the game going to some lengths to drive home that this one has been modified to have a personality! Saying it’s so doesn’t make it true!! I think the protagonist is silent throughout because it’s meant to be ambiguous who you’re playing as, but (oblique spoilers I guess, skip to the next paragraph if you like) when it does eventually get revealed who you are, it’s the most obvious person for it to be! Even after the reveal, there’s no interaction from the player character, and I just can’t figure out the point of withholding this information for an absolute wet squib of a reveal. Having the character be silent and of mysterious identity wasn’t interesting, and finding out who it was wasn’t interesting.
I also found it deeply dissatisfying how the game ends. I guess this gets into spoiler territory again, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you need to. On a micro-level, the post-credits scene shows a future astronaut finding the spot where your character dies at the end, implying that you solved the problems on Earth by repairing the big energy laser. But the big energy laser had been running for years and humanity had not got its shit together to halt or reverse the intense environmental disaster befalling our planet. Nothing suggests a lesson learned, a long-term improvement. So, you’ve solved the immediate energy crisis, but for what?? Humanity to continue polluting the planet and making it increasingly unliveable? Getting energy from the moon will not halt or fix the extreme desertification described at the beginning of the game. It’s enough to make me wonder if I didn’t get it somehow??
I feel like this game had all the ingredients to make a cake. It had a sack of flour and a carton of eggs, and all the rest of it. But it didn’t measure them out or mix them up or preheat the oven. It just dumped a bit of each in a pan and cooked it for a bit, and tried to present the sad, flat mess as a cake.
OK, I’ve done a lot of complaining despite saying I think the game is fine, so what did I like about it? I enjoyed its ambition and scale. Some of the external shots, especially, do a great job of portraying the world that has been built to contain this story. I love existing in a well-realised world, especially a sci-fi space one like this. I love the broad arcs of the story – go to an abandoned space base on the moon to try and save the world.
I don’t think I’ll be replaying Deliver Us the Moon, and I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone, but I feel like a bit of an outlier in this instance. It has received a lot of praise and a lot of love, particularly from audiences, with a ‘Very Positive’ average on Steam. I guess I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone, but I wouldn’t warn them off it, either. At least I wasn’t bored.
Game: Deliver Us the Moon
Developer: KeokeN Interactive
Publisher: Wired Productions
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox
Time to complete: 6 hours
Despite you starting out saying it's hard to write about something you just feel mid about, this was a thoroughly punchy read with lots of really valid points about the let down of the experience! Probably won't be rushing to get this game x
I don't think your frustration with timed puzzles is unique. There's a reason that most puzzle games don't have a timed element - and I think the exceptions tend to be sparsely used to drive home the stakes of the story (e.g. getting chucked into a fire in portal). Generally, I would say that using time limits to make a puzzle harder is kind of lazy design. Make a better, harder puzzle!