Deliver us the Moon: Fortuna Review

The Earth is dying after something happened to the colony on the moon five years ago. Due to resource shortages, humanity hasn’t been able to send a lunar mission to reestablish contact - except for a small team working in secret at the abandoned World Space Agency launch site. You have been tasked with one mission - save the Earth.

After a successful Kickstarter in 2016, Deliver us the Moon: Fortuna has finally released - adding the subtitle Fortuna to it. It’s an exploration/puzzle game with first and third person sections. Anything with zero gravity is in first person, the rest is third - which makes sense as far as motion capture and difficulty goes.

Originally touted as an episodic title, the decision was made last year to release it as a full game. Which is confusing, since it contains only slightly more content than the announced Mission One. The change to a full game was made almost a year after the first episode was supposed to have been released, too. Taking a look at the infographic on their Kickstarter, it’s interesting to see what’s been changed and cut. For instance, the “jetpack functionality” has been removed and there is only the Moonhub and some ancillary stations, rather than three lunar bases. At a push, I’d say that Fortuna contains Mission One and Two.

Infographic from the Kickstarter campaign

The long and short of Deliver us the Moon: Fortuna is that the moon has an element called Helium-3, and the moon colony had been using that to send power to Earth. Something happened, the power stopped coming - and the colony went dark. Nobody knows what occured, since as I mentioned Earth didn’t have the resources to send anyone to find out. The colony is spread out across a large portion of the moon to mine the Helium-3.

The game starts on Earth, and you’re tasked with launching your rocket before a dust storm hits. The other members of your team are already either in a bunker or on their way to it, meaning that you have to do everything yourself, from disconnecting the fuel lines to getting into orbit. Once you’re in space and on the space station, you have to repower everything and get down to the moon, so that you can reactivate the microwave energy transmitter to Earth.

So, that’s the launch pad, the space station and the main moon base. You also get to leave the Moonhub in a lunar rover, and drive to your heart’s content - within boundaries you won’t see until you’re “out of range”, where the screen just gets more staticy until you get back within the boundaries. There are a few substations to visit in the rover, however, if you’re outside of the rover or a sealed building/space station, your oxygen is going to run out quickly. You have three minutes, unless you grab yellow oxygen tanks which add 20-30 seconds.

This makes sense in the second half of the game after an accident - they could have said it had damaged your suit. Unfortunately, it’s present from the moment you leave your rocket, which just feels like arbitrarily adding tension early on. It’s bad enough that there are quick time events at random points…

On the positive side, some of the puzzles are fun to work out, and the game mechanics are enjoyable to work with, especially in low gravity. The story is also interesting, as you encounter holograms which retell events which occured, and the occasional audio log, you piece together what happened.

And get to use a laser! Pew pew!

It’s just unfortunate that the game is poorly optimised. It defaulted to Ultra graphical settings, which ran fine for a short while, but I began to encounter lots of stuttering, so knocked it down to High. Again, this was fine - for a time - and I wound up having to knock it to Medium. Towards the end of my almost-four hour playthrough to the finish, the game was again lagging quite badly in places. It was developed in Unreal Engine 4, which may account for this, but for such a short game I really shouldn’t be getting such bad issues. I even played it in two separate chunks because my computer crashed, so it’s not like it was four hours all at once.

Since Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna is only four hours long, and seems to end halfway through the story, it’s disappointing to see that it’s priced at £19.99. It left me wanting more, but at this price point it’s a bit difficult to recommend. Once it’s had some patches, and is on sale, then it will be worth checking out. In its current state, and while Kickstarter backers who are still waiting for the console versions to get a confirmed year of release, keep it on your watch list.