Deliver Us Mars

This game doubles down on everything that made Deliver Us the Moon so good, but bafflingly retains so many of its flaws.

The story, the characters, and the telling of it all are exceptional. There are some overarching clichés (humanity is flawed, blah blah blah, and daddy issues) but they are put together in a way that's both intimate and forceful. I won't soon forget what I've experienced here.

Gameplay is very simple. This is basically a walking-sim-type game with some basic tasks to do, as well as a handful of puzzles. Happily they did away with the time-sensitive sequences that were so frustrating in the previous game, but this game introduces its own frustration: climbing sequences, with finicky controls and a jump button that never seems to do what you want.

And we can't ignore the elephant in the room. After already releasing a game packed with many technical problems, the devs went ahead and did it again. Do you want gorgeous ray tracing, which adds so much to the beautifully realized environments? Then you will get constant game-breaking stutters, even on the highest-end GPU. Do you want HDR, to fully complement the stunning lighting and color scheme choices? Well, you need to enable DX12 for ray tracing, and that makes HDR all blown out and light-crushing. How simple is it to not release untested features? How simple is it to ruin a game that otherwise has so much heart and soul in it? Of course you can turn these visual features off and enjoy a stable game (I hope?), but what a let down.

So, yes, wow, there is an astounding adventure to be had in this game, and the story is strong enough for me to happily recommend it (Deliver Us the Moon didn't make the cut). But I feel it could have been much better with some basic quality control and more attention to gameplay. Hopefully we'll get that in the next Deliver Us... game.