Deliver Us Mars is a puzzle-led adventure that follows Kathy Johansson to Mars after a distress signal from the stolen Arks. The search for her father Isaac drives the journey, with holograms and scannable logs slowly reconstructing the colony’s collapse.
The MPT beam puzzles are the mechanical core, with stream points, splitters, reducers and power fields that are far more responsive than the first game’s. The cutter, ice-pick climbing, swimming, rover driving and EVA sequences keep the traversal varied throughout.
The movement is a clear improvement over Deliver Us The Moon, far more responsive and free of the original’s floaty, on-ice feel. The father-daughter relationship forms the emotional core, supported by prologue flashbacks and a quiet, devastating close.
The atmosphere leans on the eerie silence of the dead colony and the dust storms of the Martian surface. The scannable worldbuilding, from the Moonman comics to the biorpinter that can recreate extinct species, rewards curiosity.
The climbing is the weakest part, awkward and slow, with ambiguous surfaces that sometimes read as climbable when they are not. Fall deaths from unclear platforming and invisible walls crop up more often than they should.
A few beam connections take longer than they should, and the late stealth section is so brief it barely registers as stealth. The roughly seven-hour campaign is a good deal longer than its predecessor, which makes the pacing feel more substantial.
Overall, story and beam puzzles make Deliver Us Mars as good as its predecessor. The awkward climbing and the ambiguous platforming are the main caveats.