To borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin: Mom and Dad will ruin you. Cassie, the protagonist of "Deliver Us to Mars," can assert that truth as strongly as anyone. She is a young woman who has been on a mission to save a planet that is rapidly declining without her, because she watched her father disappear into space. Stuck on her overheated home planet, filled with panicked inhabitants, Cassie turns her childhood passion for space into an obsession with becoming an astronaut. The goal would be to one day reunite with her father and finally ask him: "And ask...

And it is these two stories running in parallel that form the heart of KeokeN, the sequel to 2018's Deliver Us To The Moon. A galaxy-spanning sci-fi tale of an entire planet facing imminent doom and the tense relationships of a dysfunctional family zoom in tightly. On a technical level, this may not necessarily surprise you. In fact, even those who have just thawed out after going into hypersleep in 2017 have probably seen the Unreal Engine paint visuals that look jazzier than this. But like an indie stage production that makes clever use of a small prop cabinet, "Deliver Us to Mars" moves forward at such a constant pace that one rarely notices that it is supported by gaffer tape and prayer.

Though a direct sequel, the story stands on its own, this time with a different voice. You experience it all through Cathy, the friendly, unassuming protagonist, played in a stunning voice by Elise Chappell. She doesn't furrow her brow or chew the scenery during every cut scene, but neither is she in the mute first-person perspective that appeared in the previous film. She is unlike most central characters I have played, always downplaying important scenes, internalizing trauma, and letting her emotions leak out in small micro-movements instead of bellowing.

The same goes for the father, Isaac, convincingly and oppressively played by Neil Newbon. Perhaps that is what makes this family drama work so well. They lie and say everything is fine, out of concern for each other's feelings and a desire not to cause a scene, even when the literal fate of the planet is at stake. For a Dutch studio, that is decidedly British.

But there is a sense that much of the actors' sensitive performances are lost in translation by the time you see them performed by slightly dead-eyed character models. The unconvincing faces are probably one result of the limited budget and the epic story.

You run through Cassie's childhood in the prologue, through her most painful memories and idyllic moments made tragic by the passage of time, and you are all grown up. A qualified astronaut who has passed all her exams, you finally have the opportunity to leave Earth's atmosphere in search of the ARK colony ship from which your father and the Outward Scientist rebels escaped so many years ago. Along with your sister Claire and a crew of brave astronauts, you venture out of your familiar surroundings and eventually reach the barren surface of the Red Planet.

I was completely swept away in the opening hours. It's not easy to avoid clichés when it's a science fiction story about a mad scientist playing God and an earth-destroying scenario. Now we're in the third-person perspective, moving around the massive Cape Canaveral facility on a platform. Then, from a first-person perspective, you take the controls of a space shuttle and fly away from the surface. Oh, now there's a section where you climb with a nickel.

Not much different from the interactive storytelling of Quantic Dream, with one crucial difference. The interactions may not be deep or particularly sophisticated, but they always feel contextual and in line with the premise of the game. Even if, after two hours, you're still not quite sure what game you're playing.

Ultimately, Deliver Us Mars boils down to a combination of third-person platforming, an odd amount of nickel climbing, energy beam puzzles, bot piloting in confined spaces, and my personal favorite, first-person laser beams. Once these concepts are all in place, subsequent chapters find new ways to combine them to create larger set pieces and increase scale. Early on, lasers are used to remove debris blocking the path of energy beams at Cape Canaveral. An hour later, outside the spacecraft, they are repairing the spacecraft by removing debris stuck in the thrusters. Deeper still, they are opening the energy beam emitter case and solving a huge multi-beam puzzle.

There is a lot of variety for a game that focuses on storytelling, and all of these modes follow a story theme. Cassie acts like an astronaut on a spaceship or on an alien planet. However, by the midpoint of the nine chapters, my mechanical tastes had become clear, and I found that boredom built up each time I was asked to pick my way along another climbing wall or to aim the beam in a given position.

Neither is a bad implementation. In fact, compared to the pick climbing in Tomb Raider, this is "Asset Corsa Competizione". You can move fully while on the wall, and you can slam your nickel into any climbable surface. Cathy never switches from one canned animation to another.

The aiming of the energy beam is not particularly flawed either. The puzzle increases in complexity at an appropriate rate, and everything is sturdy and physically convincing, except for the refracting prisms that dawdle underfoot. However, the payoff does not escalate with the complexity. Whether moving two beams in a simple arrangement or drawing a vast wireframe of electricity, it almost always just opens a door to the next area or turns on an elevator.

Laser cutting doesn't increase the payback either, but it doesn't matter because I find laser cutting intrinsically satisfying. Honestly, this game could have been nine hours of just guiding white-hot energy into soft metal. Your tastes may differ.

However, recalling the comparison with Quantic, "Detroit" is not something to be enjoyed based on how accurately you can press the X button.

If we are talking about a simple plot, a lot happens in a relatively short time. You grow up with Cathy and watch her fascination with underwater diving develop into a different kind of otherworldly exploration. You experience the same formative period of your life as a series of flashbacks, each time painting a different picture of what happened afterwards. Then there is the actual mission of tracking down the outwards, understanding their mission, exploring their work, and guiding them closer to their own desire to be reunited with their father. There is a different tension between the evolving sibling relationship with his sister Claire, the tense rivalry and tender closeness, and the older, more experienced fellow crew members on the mission. There are a vast number of plot points, many of which are presented in a moving way.

So you are left with a battle for your attention and enjoyment between a well-crafted story filled with subtle and poignant scenes and a technical level that sometimes almost pulls you away from the experience. It's not just the lifeless faces that are misshapen, but sometimes the environments as well. There are moments of visual spectacle when camera angles, texture work, and lighting are perfectly aligned for a few seconds, but there are also a few places that feel like cardboard cut-out movie sets with no life beyond the horizon. Early on, when you follow your sister into a government facility on Earth, you approach a strangely small building from an eerily quiet courtyard. No matter how invested I want to be in the idea of eavesdropping on my sister, it's hard to get past the "this is a game" message my brain receives from this scene.

That said, I don't doubt for a second that these lacks of directorial brilliance are simply a byproduct of telling a far-reaching story on a modest budget: there will be no 15th beam puzzle or laser cutting that we learned in Deliver Us Mars, but the brilliantly understated protagonist and the unusually human family drama in which she is caught up. This is, after all, a game about home. The home planet Cassie desperately wants to leave, the new house her distant father built on inhospitable Mars, and the home she can never return to-the memories of her childhood-are brought back again and again to haunt her. If you're a stickler for story-driven single player, this is a journey worth taking, even if the technical direction is underwhelming.