The Message from Deep Space

My brain is not braining. I like it.

This game is fascinating and very good at what it does... but also deeply flawed and frustrating in some very specific ways. As a result, I would recommend it to some specific people, but I can't blanket recommend it. Since this game is about discovering a message from deep space, it is most interesting the less you know going in. So, I will try to explain my issues in vague terms first, and get more specific (and spoilery) in subsequent paragraphs. You are receiving a message from aliens. It is to be expected that aliens do not think, or talk, exactly like we do. And the aliens who crafted The Message do not - that is a good point of the game! However, it is expected that they will think/talk/act in *consistent* ways, especially as they are specifically trying to communicate with someone else. Moreso, if there are inconsistencies, one would expect them to be on the part of the aliens, as opposed to introduced by the game itself. These inconsistencies are the core of my frustration. More specifically (slight spoilers for things introduced in the first ~30 minutes of the game): At the beginning of the game, you start communicating via mathematical concepts. It quickly becomes apparent that the aliens use octal (base-8) instead of decimal (base-10) to represent numbers. By itself, this would be a good point showing how they think differently than us! Unfortunately, to smooth the experience a "base conversion" feature is introduced to (theoretically) allow the message to be translated to base-10 and your base-10 responses to be converted back to base-8. This is unfortunate, because the way the puzzles (and, later, UI) is implemented makes it obvious that actually, everything has just been switched to base-10: there is no "translation" happening. If you attempt to solve certain puzzles as if there really is a translation layer, you will get the "wrong" answer and won't progress. This kills the immersion (for people like me), because it brings the flawed existence of the game itself front-and-center, instead of letting you submerge in the illusion that you are translating a message from aliens. There are other examples, but that is both the one that appears the earliest, and the most concrete one to explain. If you read all this and thought, "what's the big deal," then perhaps this is a game for you.