It’s an understatement to say that the last few years have been difficult for video game creators both big and small. Cancelled projects and huge publishers have led to swathes of layoffs, but it goes deeper than that, with smaller studios struggling to find the funding to make ends meet.
That was the situation that Dutch studio KeokeN Interactive faced earlier this year, the creators of Deliver Us The Moon and Deliver Us Mars unable to either find support for a third Deliver Us game or for other projects and forced to almost completely wind down the studio. But game development is often a passion, and that holds true for KeokeN co-founder Koen and Paul Deetman. They’re looking to rebuild their studio “brick by brick”, with a foundational stone being a Kickstarter for Deliver Us Home.
With the crowdfunding drive in its final hours – it concludes at 9PM BST today, and has crossed its minimum funding goal – we’ve been able to go hands on with a prototype demo that is included with some backer rewards. It immediately features familiar ideas and gameplay mechanics from Deliver Us Mars in particular.
The ending of Deliver Us Mars suggested that the surviving characters and all of the knowledge and technology they had managed to salvage would be heading back home, to Earth. Naturally the assumption for a sequel titled Deliver Us Home is that it would, somehow, tie into that desperate struggle to salvage something from our homeworld.
What KeokeN actually has in mind is something a little bit different. Much like in the blockbuster film Interstellar – how is that a decade old now? – Earth is a lost cause and mankind needs to find their way to other planets in order to survive as a species. Skipping ahead to the 23rd century and humanity has long since departed this planet and our solar system, journeying into the unknown to prospective new homes.
A descendent of the evacuees from Earth sent to survey planets, you crash land on Carlo 394e and are faced with a stark reality. Yes, it appears that this planet is rather Earth-like, but you’re not the first human to have set foot on this world. There’s isolated little facilities and buildings of different kinds, dotted across the landscape, a few message logs that start to peel back just a little of what the rest of this planet holds and what the previous expedition faced, and more.
There’s also little previews of the fundamental gameplay mechanics, many of which are returning from Deliver Us Mars. Played from the third person, there’s some environmental traversal in the vein of Uncharted or Tomb Raider, aided by a jet pack, some early puzzles to find and repair an ASE companion bot, and a vehicle you can hop in to get around.
A new element is that there’s much more scavenging the environment, scrounging up the left behind resources needed to craft core items: a new radio antenna, thrusters to repair the ASE, and the like. The Deetman brothers have also explained that they want to take more of a ‘wide linear’ approach, opening up the world a bit more for freeform exploration and getting a mix between the lonely adventuring of Deliver Us The Moon, and the more cinematic group storytelling of Deliver Us Mars.
This prototype amounts to a tech demo, but it also shows the direction that KeokeN will take now that they’ve successfully funded the Deliver Us Home. You still have a little time to dive in and add your support to the game’s development, but now the long road of game development and for KeokeN’s revival begins. Through the next year, they’ll be working to create a vertical slice of the game – another backer reward – with an aim to release the full game in the second half of 2026.
