The Message from Deep Space

If you wonder how far can they possible take this concept, the answer is very far. There are some very powerful moments to be found here that no other medium can provide. Absolutely amazing experience and I'm probably not even half-way through yet.

ts is the best nerd game ever

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W game

I always had a small gripe with media skipping the actual process of establishing the human-alien communication, or greatly oversimplifying this process I don't think that there is, or will be, anything like this game. Actually going through the translation, establishing what they mean, building layers and layers of meaning and abstraction. It's wonderful and I enjoyed (almost) every second. Honestly, some late game things didn't click that much for me, and I felt frustrated at times, but the joy of discovery pushed me forwards

This game is everything I've ever wanted from a translation game. Other than the hypotheses from the other researchers, you are entirely on your own. The game will never outright tell you what a word actually means. It's up to you to assign meanings to radio frequencies, one by one, and decrypt transmissions that start as simple coding/math problems, and slowly evolve into more abstract topics. It is immensely gratifying, and the ending had me quite emotional. I wholeheartedly recommend.

Chants of Sennaar meets Arrival. Absolutely incredible hard sci-fi puzzler with inspired worldbuilding. The developer has put significant thought in minute details that could be significantly different between us and an unknown species. Think of viewing the area of a 2D shape as the same thing as the volume of a 3D one (which does make perfect sense, in a way). The game does an excellent job of making you feel smart. There's transmissions that'll have you stumped for ten minutes, then there'll be ten in a row that you instantly get. The characters are just alright. I absolutely love the way Doppler is characterised, but particularly the way he's animated. A few negatives: -The mathematics gets pretty deep considering the constant syntax translation at play constantly slowing you down. You need at least a basic understanding of STEM to get through a good chunk of the early game. -Hints from your coworkers are often less than helpful, I'll be stuck on what's being asked of me and the first hint in 10 minutes will be "THE PLUS SIGN MEANS YOU MIGHT NEED TO ADD, DO THE MATH" -Syntax is a bit of a pain and inconsistent. Sometimes you're provided parentheses, sometimes you need to provide them. Sometimes spaces seem to matter, sometimes they don't. Sometimes significance is specified, sometimes it isn't and you're left guessing.