The Message from Deep Space

Project Hail Mary

My brain hurts :(

so so so much fun for nerds, but be warned you will seriously be doing psets for like 15 hours

Amazing. The core concept is so well done.

Absolutely loved this game. Satisfying, appropriately challenging puzzles, worldbuilding, and an amazing amount of storytelling for the format. Wish I could play it again without remembering how it goes!

Great concept for a game, done by someone who clearly has a lot of love for science, math and languages. The sheer amount of work and love put into this game is what ultimately determined my rating here, but honestly if I could give this a "neutral" recommendation score, I would. The thing that bugs me most, and greatly detracted from my enjoyment of quite a few puzzles, is how little payoff there is in solving them. I could imagine some ideas of how to make that better, for example maybe the aliens need your help in some way, and as an Earthling you are in a unique position to communicate some type of helpful information to them. Maybe as you continue your communication, various events unfold that actually affect what's happening on their side, and they give you updates about them (perhaps even cutscenes, though that may be too much technically). Of course implementing such ideas may mean somewhat reducing the hardcore realism of the game (the aliens are actually many light years away, sent the message a long time ago, may not even exist anymore, etc.), but I think all of that can be worked around. But as it is, it's just frustrating that all you get in return for your hard work is more speculative dialogue about what you've just solved. To make matters worse in that regard, at some point (somewhere around the middle of the game I think) the "REFERENCE" part of the game stops updating, so you can't see the accumulated knowledge you have gathered about the aliens so far, which up to that point was a really nice thing to have as at least some form of payoff. All that resulted in me tending to rely more and more on an external guide when I got stuck, after the ~500th transmission or so. Although even after that point, some of the puzzles were still kind of fun to work out on my own, and gave some neat insights. Also, don't get me wrong about the dialogue: a lot of it is really engaging, clever and amusing as well. The characters are really great and have a lot of depth to them as well. It's just that it isn't enough of an incentive, imho, to keep the player motivated and engaged. But I guess ultimately, that won't matter too much if you're more of a "hardcore puzzler" than myself, but I thought it might be useful to express how I felt about this aspect of the game.

An awesome demonstration of that popular first-contact idea that you can build a language from 0 (literally) as well as just being a great puzzle game. It had me completely hooked for 2 weeks until i finished it. The beginning is pretty dry and you'll be doing a lot of highschool geometry and balancing chemical equations, so a pen and paper will come in handy. There were 2 or 3 times where a vague or confusing puzzle would have me stuck for literal hours, and when that happens good luck finding a guide because every word and symbol in the question is your own personal assignment. But that touches on the whole joy of the game, and a good reason i kept coming back. Building out and refining your own dictionary is so much fun. I was constantly wondering what it would be like to compare mine with someone elses. Some words have cut-and-dry associations but others, especially later on, will have you mashing words and coining your own original terms to accommodate truly inhuman biology and culture. And when those words finally "click" for you and you "get" what you're reading, the emotional weight of some transmissions will punch you in the gut. There's a quirky cast of other scientists, but frankly their personalities were all way too hammy for my liking and I was mashing skip on their constant interjections by like chapter 2, but that doesn't matter because the real heart of the game is your own journey toward making contact, and understanding exactly who you're making contact with, on both a species and individual level. big thumbs up especially for 15 bucks.