Deliver Us The Moon

An enjoyable little game, but one I am glad I bought on sale and not at full price.

At it’s core I would describe it as an adventure game, mostly in 3rd person. It is not a walking sim, and to it’s credit has plenty of gameplay in the form of traversal, puzzles, interaction with the environment, and even a little stealth. There’s a decent story as well.

Unfortunately, while I liked the main plot of the story, I found the set up or background for it rather ridiculous. Earth has apparently run out of resources very rapidly after a decade or so, and now there’s massive desertification going on. Only the helium 3 reactor on the moon can provide the needed power for earth, and it suddenly goes dark. 5 years later, a single astronaut is is sent to investigate and restart the reactor.

This left me with some questions, such as why the space agency on earth had no contingency or backup plan to get ships to the moon if something went wrong, while it was the sole reliable power sauce. What happened to nuclear or renewable energy? Why is is desertification happening on such a massive scale if a clean energy source for years? How, if resources were rapidly running out, or had run out, did they manage to build a big space station, a 400km high space elevator, miles upon miles of monorail track on the moon, and multiple large bases? Finally if this was all so important, why was only 1 person sent (particularly as even the ship you are sent in has a second seat)?

This may seem like nitpicking, but I want stories in my game to make sense. The reason for some of this is because of budget, as they obviously couldn’t do a set up with multiple characters on an a mission to the moon, and all characters are either helmeted, seen in obscured holograms, or a voice on the radio, likely to work around the low budget. I wish they had adopted the story around these budget restrictions more, however.

Despite this, once into the game, I did actually enjoy the meat of the story, which had a number of good twists and turns and was well voice acted. The game had some muddy textures, but generally looked very good. It delivers on a semi realistic style space adventure, and was pretty exciting and interesting.

Deliver Us The Moon is both atmospheric and immersive. A walking simulator with light puzzle elements.
P.S.: I'll give you a tip for the end of the game (you'll understand when you get there!). Make sure your mouse sensitivity is low and aim your cursor directly at the target!
🎚️ Difficulty
🔲 My grandma could play it
🔲 Easy
☑️ Normal
🔲 Hard
🔲 A challenge to be reckoned
🔲 In the heat of confrontation, (Only PVP games)
🗺️ Graphics
🔲 MS Paint
🔲 Bad
🔲 Meh
🔲 Normal
☑️ Very Good
🔲 An original artistic direction
🔲 Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece
📚 Story
🔲 This game has no story
🔲 Basic element of the contractual requirements
🔲 It's there for people who want it
☑️ Well written
🔲 Leading to more in-depth researches/thoughts
🔲 A model to get inspired by
⌛️ Length
🔲 0 (No story)
☑️ Short
🔲 Average
🔲 Long
🔲 To infinity and beyond
🎶 Music
🔲 Just filling noises/No music
🔲 Trivial and uneventful
☑️ Good and/or fitting the game's artistic dispositions
🔲 Memorable
🔲 Transcending whispers of a forgotten world
🕹️ Interest
🔲 I would rather watch paint dry
🔲 Hard to enjoy
🔲 Repetitive and/or uninspired
☑️ A good moment
🔲 Sticking out of the pack
🔲 You will remember it long after
🔁 Replayability
🔲 A one-time experience
☑️ For achievements (You can choose chapters freely.)
🔲 If you wait a few months/years (or with mods)
🔲 Definitely
🔲 Infinitely replayable (or almost)
🐛 Bugs
☑️ Never heard of
🔲 Minor bugs
🔲 Can get annoying
🔲 Impacts the player's experience badly
🔲 The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
⚙️ Requirements
🔲 You can run it on a microwave
☑️ Low
🔲 Average
🔲 High
🔲 NASA computer
💰 Price
🔲 Free
🔲 Underpriced
☑️ Perfect Price
🔲 Could be cheaper
🔲 Overpriced
🔲 Complete waste of money
🤑 Worth Buying
🔲 No
🔲 If you have nothing else to play
☑️ Wait for sale
☑️ Yes
🎯 Expectations
🔲 It's a completely different game
🔲 This game is a scam
🔲 It's missing many features they announced
☑️ Looks very similar to the steam page
🔲 Better than expected and/or announced
🔲 Masterpiece, no patch or feature has to be added.
✒️ Final Rating
🔲 1
🔲 2
🔲 3
🔲 4
🔲 5
🔲 6
🔲 7
☑️ 8
🔲 9
🔲 10
Thank you for taking the time to read and think about this review.

Firstly I thought it was a simple puzzle game in which you solve and try to reach to the final level. But after starting, I have to say, it was beyond my expectations.
It is like a short TV show and you always want to know what you are going to learn about the story
Chill and deep game at the same time
already bought the sequel game

You play as an astronaut exploring an abandoned Moon base. Part walking simulator, part third person platformer, part puzzle game: Deliver Us The Moon has a lot to keep you going.

TLDR: An interesting setting grounded in plausible science. Some great intense moments that are heavily inspired by sci-fi movies. A bit minimal on the gameplay though.

PROS:
➕Graphics and RTX look beautiful
➕Interesting narrative grounded in current issues
➕Great moments of action/drama

NEUTRALS:
🔹Big RTX performance hit

CONS:
➖Cannot rebind keys
➖Typical Unreal Engine “Floatyness”
➖Some frustratingly difficult QTEs
➖Lack of personality with main character

Content (Game world/Narrative) –
The game world takes place in a few locations - Earth, a space station, and a few various moon bases. In each location, the areas showcase a very real, lived-in, science fiction environment. Furthermore, many of the locations gave me a feeling of famous movie scenes, like Interstellar and Gravity. Overall, a very well designed world.

The narrative is good. It takes place in a setting where the Earth is dying. Climate change has caused irreversible damage and the entire planet is turning into a dustball. Around 2030, a new element, Helium-3, was found on the moon. This element is able to provide enough energy for the earth to sustain itself. But in 2054, the moon base has gone silent, leaving Earth powered-down and in the dark. It’s taken 5 years to get enough resources together to finally start a trip to the moon to understand what happened and fix the issue.
I enjoy the concept and unraveling the mystery. The ending wasn’t mind-blowing, but good enough to where I didn’t feel disappointed.

Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) –
The mechanics can be deceptive. I would say for about a solid 60% of the game, the gameplay can be summarized as a walking simulator. As you progress, you slowly unlock tools that contribute to solving puzzles. Towards the end of the game, it’s much more puzzle-oriented.
There are also a few situations that combine puzzle solving with a constant loss of oxygen (timer). I found these to be exciting and intense.

The difficulty is generally very forgiving. I would say the only truly difficult part is a rather frustrating QTE on a speeding tram where you have about 1 second to press a button or you fail. There are multiple fail states in this game, but at most you’d lose a few minutes restarting at a checkpoint.

Graphics (Quality/Technical) –
Generally, astounding. I was able to run the game fully maxed out for the majority of the game. There are numerous graphical options and the RTX, when it works, is amazing to behold.
The game does show some “Inexperience” or “AA” development that I’ve noticed to be a constant issue with the Unreal Engine. This is especially noticeable in the third person view where your character just feels “Floaty” against the environment. Something like the movement just doesn’t match up with the distance you traverse. It’s hard to describe, but it definitely doesn’t feel perfect.

On the technical side - near the end of the game, once I got to Tombaugh, there was a clear issue with performance with RTX. I experienced crazy stuttering and dips of ~50 FPS. I tested this by even putting the game on low settings and the dips continued, indicating a clear issue with RTX. When I turned RTX off, it was smooth.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

Audio –
Good. It’s atmospheric most of the time with some subtle scores during intense dramatic moments. Nothing stood out to me as exceptional, but it's good.
Similar with the voice acting, I could tell that it wasn’t AAA quality, but it's still solid.

Replay Factor (Longevity) –
Low, there is no reason to replay this other than achievements. Also the way the chapters are broken out can make achievement hunting hard. Of the ~5 hour gameplay, there were only a few chapters, making each one fairly long.

Final Verdict –
Deliver Us The Moon (DUTM) is a great sci-fi game set in the very near future. It explores a potential outcome of runaway climate change and the scientific advances needed to combat it.

For my biggest negative, I’d probably have to go with the lack of personality with the main character.
I don’t understand why the developers decided to go with a faceless, “Nameless”, silent protagonist when so much of what this mission should have been about was teamwork and communication from mankind in order to overcome challenges. Instead, you get a barely functioning robot man as your main character. It’s especially interesting this choice given that it’s heavily hinted that you’re actually playing as one of the characters you HEAR speak in the logs, Rolf. So it's like I know this character is capable of speech, I hear the other characters call him by name, I would have loved some inner monologue like Cooper in Interstellar, or Mark in The Martian. It really would have added some liveliness to an otherwise completely dead environment.

For my biggest positives, I would have to say it's a few notable things - narrative, graphics, and mechanics.
All of my positives are not something that DUTM does exceptionally well, but each are done to a good/great extent and complement each other to a great extent. The superb graphics and artstyle really makes the narrative pop and become all the more believable as you retrace the steps of those just a few years ago. The mechanics, while simple and few in count, do a good job at showcasing the unique dramatic narrative elements.

Overall, I enjoyed Deliver Us The Moon and do recommend it. I’d call it an “Advanced walking simulator”, where the gameplay is minimal for normal interactivity, but expansive beyond just moving forward. Due to the length, picking it up on sale for $10 seems fair.

This game interest you? Should also check out The Invincible, one of my highest rated games of all time. Review:
Recommend?
Yes
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This is a light platforming puzzle solving game. It's quite relaxing and interesting. You basically land on a moon base and try to find out what happened while fixing some offline machines.

The music is great and the environments are amazing. really has a great soundtrack for being in space.

performance wise I would recommend to not play with RT on. It causes the game to stutter quite a bit and TBH you're not really missing out on anything by having it off.

Played the game a handful of times over the past few years and somehow forgot to leave a review. I personally really enjoy the story. The puzzles really aren't that difficult. I'm not sure what the negative reviews are about regarding it. Some negative reviews point out that the game puts you under pressure. If this game is putting you under pressure... Oh boy wait until you see the real world.
Here's the idea, if you like a good story and don't mind using your brain to complete puzzles this is a good game for you. If you don't like puzzles or you're scared of timed events, this is not a game for you.