Having exhausted the natural resources of our own planet, humanity turns to the moon as a new source of energy. The moon is mined, energy is created which is then beamed back to the Earth. The system works well until the day that the energy stopped and all communication is lost...

Deliver us the Moon is a cross platform science fiction thriller, though the review for this edition is for the PS4.

I suspect that the game was originally designed for a platform more powerful than the PS4 as the game has a rather irritating habit of completely freezing during transitions and save points. It doesn’t completely break the game but it is noticeable enough to pull you out of the gameplay. Which is a shame as it has many good things going for it.

With the energy cut off to the Earth, the last remaining resources are ploughed into building a rocket, a rescue mission to discover what happened and, hopefully, restore the power.

The game starts, after a little prologue, with you tasked to successfully launch your rocket. There is a certain issue with these sort of games. One of the two strong elements in the game is the story telling. As you progress you uncover the events surrounding the loss of both the space station and the moon base and I enjoyed this part of the game.

What I didn’t understand was why my character behaved like he was an amnesiac. For instance there is a timed sequence of events you have to cover just to launch the ship and oddly there is an idiot board for you to follow. Now, I know that part of the gameplay is to present a series of puzzles for you to solve, but including the launch of your ship just felt really odd. Nor has your character prepared in any way for the mission leaving you relying on maps to navigate stations and areas for which you should have had the schematics.

These are more niggles on what turned out to be a very entertaining science fiction story. For most of the time you will be travelling around and fixing things which have broken, often fixing one thing causes something else to break. This exploration is both dangerous - you may run out of oxygen - and lonely. The atmospheric environments with their moody lighting are a continual reminder that you are exploring potentially dangerous areas and this is further enhanced by the excellent score. All of this goes to creating a very real sense of solitude.

Not that you spend the whole game on your own, as you eventually pick up a small robot helper that can be used to scout areas, interact with some equipment and strangely enough you come across some puzzles which, by some miracle, turn out to be so small only your robot friend can tackle them.

The overall design of the environments tended towards something which may be scientifically possible, rather than going down the route of presenting something more outrageous, and this helps to ground the game. Likewise, the human elements is represented by all the environmental assets. As well as the crew logs and audio files to listen to, the game is packed with the sort of human minutia, like children’s drawings, that remind the player that this was once a place where humans lived and worked, a place you are very much alone in.

9

Charles Packer