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dkirschner's Deliver Us the Moon (PC)
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| [August 14, 2026 05:07:04 PM]
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This was nice! It reminded me of Observation and other such space station mysteries. Perhaps the more recent The Invincible as well. I haven’t found a perfect example of such games. I liked those other two, but they had problems. This was similar. It’s an indie for sure and was rough around the edges. Notably, it refused to save my graphics settings. Every time I booted it, it cranked itself up to ultra and turned on ultra ray tracing. Like, please, my laptop is about 5 years old and has one of the earlier ray tracing video cards. It’s never been able to really use the feature; the fan cranks to the sound of a jet engine, the laptop heats to the temperature of the sun.
The puzzles were basic (started to get a little more interesting toward the end), it used your standard audio logs / video logs / read papers to convey the story, and it was totally predictable in its linearity. Go here. Oh no, things are broken. Fix them. Oh no, something else is broken. Fix it. Go there. Oh no, another thing is broken. Fix it. Luckily, I found the story compelling, the gameplay was smooth, the pacing was good, and it was able to inject some manufactured urgency into a handful of gameplay segments.
In the story, you play as [spoiler], who goes on a solo mission to the moon to find out what happened to the work colony that maintained the facilities that sent power back to the Earth, which was facing environmental catastrophe. With the work colony missing, the power was off, which was causing an obvious problem for Earth. So, you learn about the people there, what they were doing, why the facility went silent, and you have to get the power back on to save Earth. There’s some good human drama.
Some of my favorite parts were the manufactured urgency ones. The game does a really good job of having you juuuuuust make things in time. You juuuust make it to the airlock before you run out of air; you juuuust align the transmitters before the old, creaky one falls over; the QTE on the monorail activates juuuust as it’s about to go off the track; etc. A player who is slower to react might have to play these segments a few times because there is little room for error (you’re usually doing something in a straight line, but still, it’s possible to go too slow or try to explore at the wrong time, or whatever).
Oh yeah, one funny design decision was how constantly the game reminds you of your objective. But it does so in the game world, not just through your “mission” menu. So, as you run around the facilities, there are always screens displaying that the power is off here, the bay doors are locked there, the generator is on here. You’ll never be at a loss as to what to do. It’s so unrealistic though, the amount of monitors displaying the statuses of things. They also added a few “slice of life” things around the facilities. One is a poster that you keep seeing for an upcoming movie night. The posters tell people to vote on the movie. Like the monitors, such posters are reused a hundred times. I noticed, at the end of the game, the climax, in the elevator to the reactor core, there is…a poster about voting on movie night. I laughed out loud. There are probably two engineers who ever ride that elevator, and if one knows about the movie night, then the other one does too. And who put that poster in there?
Overall, I certainly enjoyed this one. I’d give it a solid C+.
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dkirschner's Deliver Us the Moon (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 23 June, 2026
GameLog closed on: Thursday 25 June, 2026 |
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