The Message from Deep Space

1 VERY 0 GOOD GAME 1

What an extraordinary experience, after 15 hours. For the hard scifi fans who wanted to be the linguist in Arrival, or love inter-civilization contact episodes of Star Trek (eg Darmok). Charming, challenging, and thought provoking.

确实好玩，非常推荐，有一说一外星人又软又怪，真可爱吧

Really a wonderful little puzzle game. I never thought that so much emotion could be packed into such sparse language. The end of the game genuinely made me tear up, with words that I was coaxed into defining myself. If you thought Rocky from Project Hail Mary was cool, this game is Rocky on steroids. "Amaze amaze amaze" has nothing on the final transmission from the meteor. At points it genuinely made me feel like I myself was contacting another species. Some of the best (and hardest) hard sci-fi I have ever experienced. A must play for anyone who loves puzzles or sci-fi or language or any combination of the three.

It's an addictive puzzle game

Fantastically well thought out and thought provoking game! I loved the gameplay loop and characters, and by the time the game was wrapping up and my fellow scientists were reflecting on their time with the translation, I felt just as touched as they seemed to be. Definitely not for everyone, but if this game seems like the right kind of nerdy for you, then I 100% recommend trying it out!

This game is not a game. This a dream come true for me. In all media where some communication occurs between species it always goes something like "we started with math since it's the language of the universe, and then made our way up *cut* we now use interlingua." And it has always bothered me. Here, no shortcuts are taken, and that is an incredible undertaking. The meticulousness, the realism, the "no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" approach is astounding, and how do you mean i get to do it for real myself! Sitting before those two old screens has been my reason to wake up and not to sleep at night. When after hours of figuring out their numbers and math you read into the thickets of self-inflicted weird wordings, and recognise that now they mean something, they reference something beyond simple pattern-rule recognition has made me gasp, cry, scream and beg the game to never end. The youtuber i learnt of the game from has said "the 4 digits on the transmission meter worry me" and at the time i agreed, like who would want to do that much... Yeah, that person is me. This is a journey where your actions do indeed matter, where your resoning skill and ability to recognise meaning echo. And not for some arbitrary in game system checker, no, for your own ability to progress. You got the word slightly or quite off? You will probably have to return to its definition later to redefine it. No game had made me scroll through the logs and history with a genuine need to figure something out as much as this one. All the progress feels personal, because it is. You were the one standing behind every signe thing you understand now, and that feeling is miraculous. At last, my stem degree, years of lectures on random topics including linguistics, teaching natural sciences has paid off in a game where all that knowledge is actively needed to progress. Simplified, of course, but makes sense - the aliens need to lay the groundowrk and progress, not discuss set theory or chemichal reactions beyond whats nesessary. Naturally, I have some criticisms. the painful calculator did not have to stay so painful. scrolling in the whiteboard would have been amasing, the "autolog" message before transmissions is mad annoying and redundant. But overall none of it really matters, since this is a gem made with so much love to all the sciences, with so much respect to the mind, and a very good approximation of a realisctic scenario where communication has to arise from nothingness, that i struggle to imagine what could be better. I am struggling to convey my amazement to my friends, they seem to not be as aroused and alerted by the premise not the gameplay, yet i strongly recommend it to try for every single person. This is a product of great love and passion and at least for me it won it's place in the pantheon of most impactful media ever.