Deliver Us the Moon: Fortuna

When you set out to write a story, most people subscribe to the theory that you need a beginning, middle and end. But the developers of Deliver Us the Moon: Fortuna have a different approach to constructing a narrative. They absolutely nail the beginning and give us a truly compelling middle full of life or death struggles in outer space, but for whatever reason they chose to ship their game without an ending. The whole thing is building up and adding layers to the mystery, only to conclude with a giant cliffhanger and the promise that a resolution will eventually come in the form of free DLC. Unfortunately, I don't have time to wait around for an ending that should have been here on day one, which makes this otherwise captivating adventure hard to recommend.

Set only a few decades in the future, this is a science fiction game that deals with a dying planet. Earth has all but run out of its natural resources, which has forced humanity to look elsewhere for their energy. For a while, it looked like the Moon might be our savior, since it had a type of mineral that we could use to once again power Earth. But something happened and we lost all contact with the project. Years have gone by and a one-man mission has been ordered to reconnect the power and figure out what happened to the survivors.

Deliver Us the Moon takes us on every step of the amazing journey, from the takeoff to the technical problems. The story plays out as both a first- and third-person adventure game with some light puzzle elements sprinkled in for good measure. Our goal is to explore both the space station and Moon base in order to reboot a bunch of computers and turn the power back on. We're basically a glorified I.T. worker who is also tasked with investigating the remains, reading old emails, listening to voice recordings and eventually watching holographic video replays, all in an attempt to figure out what really happened.

It's the mystery and exploration that helped suck me into this adventure. I also really like that sometimes we're floating through the space station or getting major air on the moon's surface. The developer does a lot with this premise, and I appreciate the lengths they go to keep the adventure fresh. Running at around three hours, this is a fairly brief but occasionally breath-taking journey that I wanted to love. I want to be able to champion this kind of realistic science fiction game and reward the passion and ambition, but there's something about Deliver Us the Moon that is holding me back -- the ending.

As I mentioned at the top, there is no ending here. I don't mean that in the sense that it has a bad ending, but rather that everything is left incomplete. You read the emails, listen to the voices and watch the replays to see it building to something, but that something is neither revealed nor paid off. It's a lot of build up to nothing. Don't get me wrong, the journey to get there is interesting and the mystery really ramps up towards the end, but the conclusion is so abrupt that I felt like I had missed something.

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The problem is that the end undermines everything that came before it. Without a conclusion, the information we get doesn't really matter. It's nice to know and some of it is genuinely interesting, but it's ultimately just narrative noise that doesn't amount to much. It's a series of things that happened for some reason. That reason will supposedly be revealed in upcoming DLC, but there's no indication when that will come. In fact, there's nothing in the game to suggest that the story will be continued in one way or another, so you either need to stay up-to-date on the Deliver Us the Moon news or get Tweeted by the developer in order to know there's more to come.

On one hand, it's nice that the developer has a plan for the conclusion, but it's hard for me to get beyond the idea that this is an incomplete package. And not in an episodic kind of way where everybody knows it will be released in chunks, but rather in a way that suggests they either ran out of time or simply wanted the conclusion to be open-ended. Either way, I don't think you should spend money on an incomplete game with the vague promise of a real ending somewhere down the road. Maybe that DLC will come and will wrap things up in such a way that the game is considered by most to be a must-own classic, but without the ability to see into the future, I'm left with no other choice but to caution you from buying Deliver Us the Moon: Fortuna.