Deliver Us the Moon by Dutch indie developer KeokeN has already had a few lift-offs. The team self-published the story-driven space adventure in 2018 on PC before bringing it to consoles with publisher Wired Productions the following year. After a next-gen refresh in 2022 and the release of the sequel, Deliver Us Mars, in 2023, the title is finally blasting onto the Nintendo Switch.
The game takes you on a sci-fi tale to save planet Earth, but ultimately, you’ll find yourself in a more personal story. Immaculate environmental storytelling and a stellar soundtrack breathe life into a game that suffers from same-y gameplay, janky performance, and a narrative that ends up losing itself.
Deliver Us the Moon is out now and is available on Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.
After having exhausted the planet’s resources, humans colonize the moon to harvest a Helium isotope and beam it to Earth to keep the engines running. Until one day, the lights go out and communication with the moon is cut off. You get sent to space to find out what happened and restore Earth’s energy supply.
The main theme may appear to be a political one, with a clear warning about humanity’s reckless overconsumption of Earth’s resources plastered all over it. At its heart, the game tells various personal stories, and to what lengths humans go to save the ones they love.
Deliver Us the Moon Feels Like an Atmospheric Walking Sim
The game could be described as a walking simulator that sends you on a linear narrative through space. This niche genre is known for crafting immersive stories that invite you to self-reflect, and Deliver Us the Moon tries to achieve that.
Incredibly detailed environmental storytelling along with holograms and voice recordings unravel the story and bring light to a sinister undercurrent.
What starts as a promising story ultimately falls flat. The fact that the protagonist doesn’t show any emotions seems like a missed opportunity that could have added emotional stakes to get the player invested.
Instead, I felt like a detached observer until the end. Somewhere along the way, the narrative loses track of its purpose and ends up missing a full conclusion, leaving numerous loose threads.
Get All the Energy Cells You Can
You progress through the story by exploring contained environments and solving puzzles. A lot of puzzles. Searching for door codes, sending your droid down vents, aligning towers, and finding energy cells make up most of your time in Deliver Us the Moon.
After completing a couple of missions, the same process repeats itself, making the puzzles feel like a chore. Somehow, I constantly found myself looking for batteries, and I’m not even playing with an Xbox controller.
Adding to the monotony of it all, none of the puzzles are truly challenging. It’s only in the very last chapter when things rev up a bit and the gameplay gets more engaging.
A Stellar Score Elevates the Janky Experience
If I were to name one reason why you should play this game, it would be its sound. The soundtrack elevates the overall experience by setting the atmosphere with an orchestral score that sometimes made me stand still just to listen.
This is enhanced by a clever sound design. From your character’s heartbeat thumping in your ears to the muffled sounds of walking on the lunar surface, the auditory experience truly immerses you in the world.
I wish I could say the same about the visuals. The team crafted such a detailed world, yet with a lack of textures, a lot of it gets lost on the Switch.
Something I found particularly annoying was how dark the game is, with no option to adjust this. Oftentimes, all I could see in the darkness was my backpack’s red light, indicating that my flashlight was out of battery.
The game’s performance was another cause for headaches, with frequent stutters, frame rate drops, and blurry visuals when the game picks up the pace. Hard crashes and bugs meant I frequently had to restart from checkpoints.
Let’s see if my curiosity about whether the game’s loose threads get tied up in the sequel, Deliver Us Mars, will be enough for me to pick it up. FandomWire critic Dan Boyd called it one of the most underrated games from recent years, so it might be worth a shot.
For now, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Deliver Us the Moon on the Switch, unless you don’t mind janky, monotonous gameplay to accompany an impressive auditory experience.
Deliver Us the Moon has many good ideas, but ultimately fails in its execution. It feels like the game reached for the moon, but went adrift and lost track of its goal in the dark void of space.
Deliver Us the Moon – 5/10
