I criticized Deliver Us The Moon for its depiction of a near-future environmental apocalypse. These sorts of apocalyptic depictions of climate change can cause people to take the real-life threat less seriously, since it's slower and less dramatic than the fictional depictions that people see. I tried to give Deliver Us The Moon the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the developers were maybe going for more of a "overpopulation and depletion of resources" kind of apocalypse, and less of a "anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse emmissions" apocalypse. However, Deliver Us Mars makes more explicit reference to greenhouse gasses and climate change, so I feel like my earlier criticism is a bit vindicated.
Exaggerated and apocalyptic depictions in fiction can give the public the wrong ideas about climate change.
That being said, flashbacks show an Earth that is very much still alive, as opposed to the previous game, which made the Earth look like a barren wasteland. Flashbacks show the character and her family hiking through forests and diving among coral, while talking to each other about how much of a shame it is that the forests and coral are dying off and probably won't exist for very long. As the game goes on, we see extreme weather events, and examples of the damage they can cause and the danger they represent. Deliver Us Mars also highlights some of the socio-economic complications of overpopulation and resource-scarcity, with clear divides between "haves" and "have-nots".
Overall, I like this depiction of environmental collapse a lot better than in the previous game. It's a much more nuanced and (importantly) accurate depiction of the near future of climate change, and it shows the personal and individual cost of climate change at small scales, rather than making it an apocalyptic, planet-destroying event. It's still blunt and heavy-handed in its delivery, but it's far less exaggerated this time around.
The depiction of climate change is much more accurate and nuanced this time around.
Martian sight-seeing
Deliver Us The Moon felt like it peaked early, with a lot of the first-person, zero-G set pieces. After landing on the moon, so much of the rest of the game was just walking around sterile space station interiors. There was like 1 or 2 short sequences driving a rover on the lunar surface, but that was it. The player hardly got to explore the lunar surface at all.
Deliver Us Mars follows a similar progression path. It starts with zero-G segments on the rocket approaching Mars and a space station in orbit of Mars, before crash-landing on Mars. Then the rest of the game is walking around Mars. Despite this similar progression path, Deliver Us Mars is far less monotonous than its predecessor, as it varies the scenery and gameplay a lot more. There's frequent flashbacks to the protagonist's childhood, in which she hikes, climbs, and scuba-dives with her family in playable vignettes. These sequences are very much on-rails, and don't give the player hardly any freedom of exploration, but they are a welcome break from sterile, claustrophobic white walls.
The player spends more time walking and driving on the Martian surface, instead of claustrophobic space stations.
More importantly, there's a much larger focus on exploring the Martian surface. This takes the form of rover trips between levels, and some outdoor levels that require the player to climb and platform across Martian cliffs and canyons.
The climbing mechanics are also somewhat novel. The player uses a pair of pick axes to scale canyon walls, which the pickaxe in the left and right hand being aimed via the left and right analog sticks (respectively), and being struck into the climbable surface by pressing and holding the left and right trigger buttons (again, respectively). As the game goes on, it will throw progressively more complicated climbing paths at the player, as well as the occasional jumping obstacle or death trap that must be avoided. Most climbing segments also take place outside, so there's also a ticking-clock element due to the limited oxygen supply of the character's space suit.
Climbing requires aiming the picks with the left and right sticks, respectively.
It's not quite Death Stranding, but it's far more involved than simply holding a "parkour" button and pressing the stick in the direction you want to climb.
The only downside to all this is that the Martian environment doesn't feel as isolating and oppressive as the moon did in the previous game. So all the sci-fi horror vibes that were present in the first game are kind of missing in this one. Even when the plot starts to suggest that there could be hostile colonists and maybe even the possibility of mutated creatures, it never really establishes any atmosphere of horror or genuine threat. Once you get past the initial crash-landing on Mars (which has an obnoxiously strict time limit to find shelter before your air runs out), the potential of suffocating or freezing on the Martian surface just never really feels like a serious threat. Maybe this is because falling off of cliffs or missing platform jumps is the much more immediate threat?
This game occasionally almost veers into survival horror territory.
Laser light show
Most of the rest of the game consists of collecting documents and collectibles and doing some simple puzzles. The protagonist is supposedly an engineer, skilled in the operation of the sci-fi energy beams used in the game. She is brought along because the team of astronauts needs such a specialist to help them fix the energy beams on Mars. However, the actual puzzles are pretty simplistic, and basically come down to pointing the energy beam at specified receivers. Surely, any trained astronaut could have figured this out, and a specialized engineer was not necessary.
The puzzles aren't exactly quantum physics...
Later puzzles involve placing filters in front of the beams to reduce the amount of energy they transmit, or to split the beam to go to multiple receivers. It might have been better if splitting the beams or changing their energy output would have required some kind of "hacking" mini-game on the transmitter, which might been a better thematic fit with the idea of playing as a specialized engineer.
Other puzzles are solved by the player's robot companion, and require flying circles in 3-D space around a hologram in order to position various keys to "unlock" playback of a holographic recording. It's also pretty simple, and comes off as filler content -- a puzzle for the simple sake of having a puzzle. I get that it's all abstractions of the player character's engineering talents, because the player isn't a theoretical wave physicist, but neither of these puzzle varieties feel like more than simply busy-work to pad out the play-time.
This sequel also brings back the rocket launch sequence from the first game, and even gives us multiple instances of similar sequences. Sure it's mostly just following rote instructions (just like in the previous game), but it's very immersive from the first-person perspective, and is just an awesome set piece. It looks awesome, and it has a fantastic sense of scale and tactility. It's just too bad this isn't playable in VR.
There's more neat rocket launch sequences!
Screw humanity
I also think I preferred the narrative of Deliver Us The Moon. Deliver Us Mars tries to make a more emotionally resonant story by making it much more personal. It's about a daughter trying to find her father, who abandoned her as a child in order to flee to Mars. She also has personal conflicts with her older sister and fellow astronauts, who don't entirely trust her to put aside her personal motivations for the benefit of the mission.
Unfortunately, the character performances don't carry this game as well as they did the first one, in large part because of the character models and animation. The first game benefitted from the fact that all the characters were faceless holograms or were wearing helmets. This time, the development team tried to be a bit more ambitious, but their efforts just don't quite work out. It's clear that the animators were trying very hard to make these characters emote, but the results just don't look good. Character faces and expressions often fall into uncanny valley territory, and movements are frequently stiff and robotic.
Hair and facial hair looks particularly bad, to the point of being distracting. Ryan's beard, in particular, seems to disappear into his chin and jawline, and then re-appear as he moves, and it just generally looks awful and patchy. At least, that was the case on the PS5 version that I played.
Endearing Star Trek references don't save the characters faces, hair, and animation from looking uncanny.
The mission itself is also not as clear as in the previous game. Last time, we went to the moon to figure out why the transfer of power to the Earth stopped. It's a very simple, clear motivation.
This time around, we have a set of conflicting and poorly-explained motivations. The primary purpose of the mission is to recover 1 or more "arks" from Mars. The game never really bothers to clearly explain why the arks are special until much later in the game. I was never really quite clear why it was so important to retrieve them, other than some vague notion that they might have advanced technology that could be helpful in dealing with Earth's climate and resource problems. In fact, I'm not even sure if the characters know what is onboard the arks, since they seem to be surprised when they find out, which makes the whole mission kind of feel like it was a blind shot in the dark all along. It's also not entirely clear if the purpose is to recover all the arks, or if a single ark is sufficient.
Combine this with the fact that Kathy has her own motivation for being on Mars, and that her fellow astronauts aren't entirely honest with her about their own goals and agenda, and it feels like the writing is trying too hard to manufacture conflict and tension where there doesn't need to be any conflict. It's as if being stranded on a barren planet without a breathable atmosphere wasn't a tense enough situation on its own right, that the designers felt it necessary to bring all this extra personal baggage along with them.
The central question of both games seems to be whether Earth is a lost cause.
It's especially frustrating because the thematic center of the game is actually the conflict between the non-player colonists (not the conflict between the player character and her fellow astronauts). The character writing itself is pretty good, and the central question of whether humanity is worth saving or too far-gone is approached thoughtfully. Kathy and her father are particularly complex, nuanced characters who are, themselves, torn between a sense of moral obligation to the rest of humanity, and their own cynicism about human nature. The colonists escape Earth and go to Mars to get away from the greed, selfishness, and in-fighting of humanity, thinking that they are above all that, only to devolve into their own bitter and petty in-fighting.
I was a bit frustrated that the colonists who wanted to go back to help the rest of humanity end up being turned into outright terrorists. I think the game's designers are, themselves, pretty cynical about human nature. They seem to go out of their way to keep showing humanity and the Earth as a lost cause.
Deliver Us Earth?
Deliver Us Mars also suffers from technical and stability problems. It seems a lot more stable than Deliver Us The Moon was. I didn't experience any outright crashes, and framerate dips seemed to be less common, but the framerate did still dip fairly often. This game also takes place in much larger, open spaces, so it's doing a lot more than the previous game did. So the developers seem to be a little bit better at optimizing their games, but still have a lot to learn.
I had a lot of trouble getting the audio properly balanced. Even after I had tweaked the settings to lower the volume of music and sound effects compared to dialogue, the dialogue was often drowned-out by music and other sound effects. This was especially true with any dialogue that was coming from a radio transmission. The developers were even kind enough to include separate audio balancing sliders specifically for cutscenes, which I appreciated, and which seemed to work a lot better than the gameplay audio sliders. I also wasn't quite sure which audio output setting I should use. I didn't see an audio output setting for surround sound, so I wasn't sure if I should use "speakers" or "soundbar", or maybe even leave it on its default of "headphones".
Deliver Us Mars is a much more ambitious game than Deliver Us The Moon was, and it has a lot of the same strengths. Unfortunately, despite the dev team learning from their previous mistakes, the technical ambitions of the game still seem to be outpacing the developers' ability. As such, we get a game that is well-conceived, but flounders in many aspects of its technical execution. I really hope that their technical abilities catch up to their ambitions for the inevitable third entry in the trilogy (which I assume will be called "Deliver Us Earth"), and that maybe the finale will be a little more optimistic and hopeful for those of us who are stuck here on planet Earth.
Finding all 5 NASA rovers was a fun little side-activity -- but also a sad one...