3/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Deliver Us Mars.

Deliver Us Mars is the sequel to the cult hit Deliver Us The Moon. It follows the daughter of one of the characters from the first game as she attempts to reach her father on Mars and uncover the truth of a secretive project that has humanity’s fate in its sights. I generally enjoy these indie games. I like seeing what smaller dev teams can come up with, and getting to see a variety of imaginative ideas brought to interactive life in a game. Deliver Us Mars does not disappoint on this front - the game spans Earth, the Moon and Mars, complete with lots of big set pieces, and environments. There were plenty of really impressive shots of spaceships orbiting planets, and other other-worldly machinery.  Unlike the first game, you travel with other companions for various parts of the game, but generally you play alone as you invariably get separated and have to make your own way. And of course you get the usual dose of holographic narrative replays, collectible notes and letters to help you uncover the story as you progress. As much as I enjoyed the scale of the world I was exploring, the actual story itself didn’t quite reach the ‘plausible believability’ bar that any game needs to meet. For a start, just like in the last game, apparently space travel requires only 4 people. Also everyone you either come into contact with, or hear/read about are completely nuts. The characters are meant to be professional astronauts yet spend their entire time squabbling, lying, and generally putting everything at risk all the time. The central theme of the story is finding your dad and reconnecting with him, spurred on by finding plenty of his notes that adoringly refer to how much he misses you. Yet he is a complete psychopath, and he somehow forgets he has a second daughter (who is part of the game) that he basically never mentions. And she never mentions this the whole time. A core puzzle mechanic of the game was to point different beams at each other across various locations, as a way of transferring power from A to B. So to open a locked door, for example, you’d set up a complicated mesh of radars, receivers, extenders etc, resulting in a maze of bright beams travelling across the air in front of you. Apparently this is just a usual method of powering objects when you’re in space....  Even the ending, I think designed to be a positive father and daughter reconnection, seemed to gloss over a rather grim byproduct - you basically ruin things for a lot of people while saving yourself. The game doesn’t seem to mention this, or maybe it did and I wasn’t paying attention - it’s possible! Anyway, basically this game seems to want to tell a tale of humanity’s struggle to balance its own ambitions with its tendency for self-destruction, but all it really does it paint humans as awful, incompetent people who don’t really deserve anything good that’s happened to them. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I think I preferred the original - it was a bit purer/simpler and therefore these odd narrative choices didn’t make as much as an impact.