It does such a good job of delivering heart-racing moments, desperate attempts to reach oxygen supplies before time runs out so compelling that I found myself leaning ever closer to the monitor in the unconscious hope that it would somehow get me there faster. Because this is really good! Right up until it stops midway through the story it was telling. Certainly unusual, but suggestive of nothing in particular. What I have found is that the developers split with their publisher Starbreeze only last month, announced in the same post that revealed the release date. Once it was done I scoured its Steam page and website to see if it's 'episode 1' of an ongoing series, and can find no such information. It certainly still could be the case that I'm being a thicko and entirely failed to make a leap of comprehension, but even if so, I'd still argue that the game reaches nothing close to a conclusion of the story it had been telling. I've re-watched it three times now, certain I must have missed some sort of twist, or failed to understand the consequences of a previous piece of information, or simply that I'd just not paid proper attention.

Or so I thought, until the very final moment. Discovered elements of the story are stored in a log, and as you play you piece together the totality of the events leading up to the power failure on Earth. I'll not touch on the nature of the story at all, because I had the pleasure of arriving on the moon with no prior idea of what happened, so you should too. As you go, you discover all the parts in your way that aren't working, and set about trying to fix them, whether by realigning satellites on the lunar surface, or finding access codes locked in crew quarters, or sending your floaty robot companion down space-vents to activate distant switches.Д®n-route you'll encounter all manner of story about what took place four years ago, through notes, emails, environmental storytelling, and perhaps most directly, audio and holographic video recordings. The core of the game, perhaps about five or six hours long, is spent exploring a few different areas of the quite extensive moon base constructed in the 2040s. And it all comes together rather well, if a little clunkily in places. So begins a first and third-person narrative adventure that rather interestingly combines ideas familiar from successful walking sims like Tacoma with frequent action beats, and even a little bit of Ubisoft-style tower ascension. So after four years of dark Earth misery, they're finally ready, and goodness me, it's you who's going! A band of rebel scientists and techies are determined that something can be done, and working out of an abandoned base try for years to gain the means to send someone to the moon to find out what the blazes is going on. They believe they've no means of contacting the moon base, and no hope of fixing it.Д«ut not everyone is so pessimistic.

Earth is a bit stuffed, and the powers in charge, with neither charge nor power, abandon the whole project and resign humanity to a grim, electricity-free future. The beam becomes the planet's new source of energy, and everyone's happy, until the day it mysteriously switches off. But how much does that matter? Here's wot I think:ДЄccept, if you will, that an Earth depleted of its own resources eventually became dependent upon a giant energy beam being fired at it from the moon. Now I want to find the developers and kick them all in the shins. I absolutely thoroughly enjoyed Deliver Us The Moon, right up until the moment it ended. And it would make a lot of games an awful lot better. Wouldn't life be better without them? It would certainly last longer.

Deliver us the moon fortuna