Deliver Us Mars

I keep thinking about the moment Deliver Us Mars stops being a game about saving Earth and becomes something quieter: a daughter searching across 140 million miles of space for a father who left without saying goodbye. KeokeN Interactive, a small Dutch studio, built something with real emotional ambition here, and for long stretches that ambition lands. The question is how much friction you are willing to accept around it. Mechanically, the game spreads itself across several modes without going especially deep in any of them. You play as Kathy Johanson, the youngest member of a four-person WSA crew, and the toolkit she carries across Mars is a mix of things that feel genuinely clever and things that wear out their welcome. Routing power through MPT energy beams, aligning receivers and extenders to open locked systems, has a satisfying geometric logic early on. Flying AYLA, Kathy's small robot companion, in first-person to reach otherwise inaccessible spaces and unlock holographic recordings is probably the most atmospheric mechanic in the game, those stop-motion low-resolution playbacks functioning less like puzzle rewards and more like found-footage archaeology. The dual-trigger ice axe climbing, where each hand is controlled independently and you alternate triggers to scale rock faces and spaceship walls, starts as a genuinely novel idea. By hour seven or eight, most players will agree it has been asked to do too much of the heavy lifting, deployed so frequently that the novelty has long since dissolved. There are also wrist-laser sequences for cutting metal clasps, rover sections that connect biomes, and pre-flight checklist moments aboard the Zephyr that briefly make you feel like an actual working astronaut, flipping switches and adjusting flight sticks in a way that earns a rare sense of craft and specificity. The story is where the budget disappears as a concern. Kathy and her estranged father Isaac are voiced with real conviction, and the family dynamics, resentment, longing, and complicated loyalty across siblings, carry genuine weight across the nine chapters. Childhood flashback sequences, playable rather than passive, thread through the main narrative and do real work on the emotional through-line. What occasionally undermines this is the supporting cast, which several reviewers noted feels thinly sketched, and character models that range from passable to distractingly rough during cutscenes. The story also leans into some sci-fi logic you have to agree not to interrogate too hard. If you can extend that generosity, the final act pays off the emotional setup in ways that stay with you. At least one player, by their own admission, cried. That is not nothing. For people who skipped Deliver Us The Moon, the first game is not a strict requirement. The gaps are filled in thoughtfully enough that newcomers should find their footing. Veterans of the original will spot familiar faces and get more out of the context. The pacing in the early chapters is slow, especially before the crew reaches Mars, and the game leans on hologram unlock sequences so repeatedly that they shift from mysterious to routine. The exterior Martian environments, though, are genuinely breathtaking in places, and composer Sander van Zanten's score carries an almost Blade Runner quality in its quieter moments that elevates the mood well beyond what the visual fidelity alone could achieve. This is a game that knows what it is: a small studio reaching toward something cinematic with limited technical resources and a story worth telling. The climbing needed more development. The character renders needed more time. The hologram puzzles needed a harder edit. But the core of it, a science fiction story operating at both planetary and deeply personal scale, holds. If you go in ready for a slow-burn narrative adventure rather than a mechanically tight platformer, Deliver Us Mars delivers more than its rough edges suggest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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