The Message from Deep Space

what a fascinating concept, executed perfectly. the entire thing could genuinely happen. this game has you slowly learning an alien language that starts with nothing but numerical call-and-response. no assumptions about grammar, biology, culture or anything arbitrary that might not hold true for extraterrestrial life. this is what we should've sent into space instead of the golden record. one caveat i have to admit: you gotta know your math and science. i don't think it touches anything beyond middle/high school stuff, and it has a reference in-game with all the info you'd ever need, but recognizing concepts made the game quite enjoyable. without that, i imagine scouring the resources to find something that roughly matches up might be tedious. either way, try the demo! it's genuinely a lot of content and worth checking out for free.

tl;dr - I cannot emphatically recommend this game enough. If you liked Chants of Sennaar, if you liked The Witness, if you liked Outer Wilds, if you liked any kind of game that starts you with nothing and makes you build meaning from the very start... you will love this game. No puzzle element ever outstays its welcome: when things start getting too cognitively burdensome, the programmer will build a feature to circumvent it. There's a reference section so it doesn't matter how much you know externally, the answers are available. Hard science in the same way as the Martian or Project Hail Mary, if you were fascinated by the Voyager discs and just how we planned to communicate with something beyond our own understanding... try this game. I'm barely a tenth of the way through and I'm utterly hooked. The only sad part is that I know it must end at some point. Oh, and it runs on a system with integrated graphics, so no excuses there. Fair warning though, there is a good amount of math, at least at the start. That said, I have dyscalculia (number dyslexia) and I've handled it quite well. If you're able to mentally track multiple unknowns from something like programming (or maths itself), you'll do fine. There's a built-in notepad, but you could also just use physical pen and paper like I have. An online tool that might help intermediary puzzles: [spoiler]Desmos is a graphing calculator that can visualize points accurately.[/spoiler]