So I finally got around to trying out Deliver Us Mars, having never played the predecessor but having a fair few friends rave about it (the previous game) being this rough but amazing gem.
With the successor… I made it to just after landing on Mars before I had to drop it. Ugh.
It’s not a bad game, not at all. I found two really big positive things about it:
- The vistas on Mars are truly breathtaking with everything cranked up to max. They did phenomenal work here, it really feels like you’re alone on this giant red planet that is utterly alien to you.
- The sequence before that, in zero gravity, was amazing in how it felt moving around in a cramped space. Especially in first-person view.
But throughout the entire 3 hours up to that point, the actual atmosphere struggled hard against the facial and character models. And since the game is talk-heavy in the early parts, the camera constantly shows faces. Which look incredibly bad. Really amazing, as if someone intentionally tried to do that.
And this would be alright - after all it’s a small-budget game - but it contrasts really hard against the amazing scenery and space graphics.
It was this weird contrast that kept pulling me out of the story, ruining the immersion. Then came the first bigger climbing areas, and budget Lara Croft was okay, but ultimately the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So, for me at least, set to “Abandoned” as completion state and uninstalled. A shame, there’s a lot of really good pieces in here, they just never come together IMO.
For those of you who played it, what was your experience?
I enjoyed both games but the 1st more. Character dialog is heavy. Which really slows getting into the game. Felt like an hour before it really started. After which I felt pretty immersed in the story and wanted to keep going to unravel the mystery. Puzzles are too not challenging with just 1 or 2 giving me a 15 min thought session which ends with discovering a “hidden” thing. What killed the game was the climbing. Waay too tedious. Was only at the end of game that it needed any brain power to warrant needing to aim sticks. Overall, It felt less like a game and more of a medium for the story. By the end I thought it was a fun experience. After what happened to the outward colorists I want play something Frost punk on Mars.
I died three times in a row directly before reaching the first shelter and Alt-F4’ed out.
Until then the game just couldn’t pull me in. The dialogue and characters were just bland, foreseeable, two-dimensional.
Some of the puzzles are fun though and the tutorials are disguised well.
I actually really enjoyed the game. It was a great visual novel. Right up until the ending two scenes. The character took a huge nonsensical 180° change in focus, and their actions no longer matched what I was willing to condone as a player. I had to stop playing. I simply would not do the thing that the game required me to do that I did not agree with. At a philosophical level. I watched the last 10 minutes the game on YouTube. To see how the story finished. But I simply would not participate in such a abandonment of my character.
So maybe this is just a case of me and the authors of the story diverging significantly and how we view the world, but it felt so so wrong
