E3 isn’t usually a good place to show off slow, quiet games since the loud noise and bright lights of the show floor are hard to tune out. That doesn’t stop anyone from trying, of course, nor the demos from succeeding. Deliver Us The Moon from Keoken Interactive was one of those demos. It’s a survival/adventure game set in a time where the Earth’s resources have begun to dry up. That causes the world’s governments to unite and send a research team up to the moon to work out a solution to the problem, only to suddenly go dark. Thus you’re the lone astronaut sent up there to figure out what went wrong and hopefully secure humanity’s future in the process.
The E3 demo didn’t have anything in the way of story, however, as the build was still relatively early. Audio logs, notes, and other popular environmental storytelling techniques were promised to be in full effect in the final game. Instead the demo focused entirely on atmosphere. It was set on an abandoned space station above the moon. The place was still functional and well-kept, but there were few signs that anyone had lived here.
The game moves at a calm, languid pace. There’s no sense of urgency, and you’re encouraged to take your time and explore at your leisure. The indoor scenery may not be much to look at compared the majesty of space just outside, but I still enjoyed checking every nook and cranny for some kind of hint at what happened here, just checking out rooms and examining my surroundings for a few minutes. I knew I wouldn’t find anything, but just exploring the station was enough to help get a feel for the game.
Locked doors served as the primary obstacle in the demo. The first set were unlocked by turning on the power, the second set requiring a tool that fired some sort of energy or a robot to dock on a receptacle beside the door. Though opening doors was the extent to which the bot and tool were used, it felt like there was way more to them than the demo let on.
Just as I set foot on the moon’s surface, the demo ended. A large blue beam of light could be seen off in the distance before the screen faded to black, hinting at what was to come. Deliver Us The Moon is billed as a survival game, and the most that the indoor section showed me in that regard was the option to refill the protagonist’s space suit’s oxygen tanks, though I don’t recall seeing any indication of how much oxygen was left inside them. But again, this was a very early build of the game. I imagine even more survival elements will come into play when we get to do more on the moon’s surface and uncover some of its secrets in the final version of the game.
Deliver Us The Moon will be out on PC later this year, the Xbox One version coming sometime thereafter.
