First Contact

Curious and delightful game. Feels like a port of some forgotten 1980s classic, complete with slightly clunky UI (watching your character sslloowwllyy walk into the room *every* time you enter a room). But the core puzzle/adventure gameplay is good fun. It's a mix between "go and talk to people to advance the story" and the content you're here for, the language and radio astronomy puzzles. It's a bit annoying how hand-holdy the tutorials are; we had one moment on the astronomy machine when we'd found exactly the picture we were meant to find in the recorded transmission, but the tutorial wouldn't advance until we set the parameter to some incorrect value first to "get a feeling for" what the right values should be. The language interpretation is the most fun bit, but in the end you're choosing between four guesses about what a symbol means, and in some cases several of those meanings are very close to each other ("Ocean" and "Sea" as "different" options? really?) We found it more fulfilling to bring up Task Manager blocking out the four spoilery multiple-choice solutions, and just page through all the symbols in an alien language forming our own guesses first; only once we felt we had a good feeling for most of them did we then minimise Task Manager and see the spoilers. It's also disappointing when some alien races send you their full language data right from the start so you can communicate with each other perfectly. Overall, recommendation, as long as you know what you're in for. It's short and fun in a retro way.