The Message from Deep Space

I was quite happy with the first third of the game involving math and science, then surprisingly I was greatly disappointed by the second half of the game after it introduced grammar. TLDR - math and science puzzles are well-defined and good, word association puzzles are inconsistent and frustrating. Overall I think the game concept is great. You decipher words by starting with the universal languages of math and science, building up a dictionary before crossing over to ideas more specific to the aliens. Math puzzles were "learn a word by figuring out a pattern, demonstrate your understanding by extending the pattern". Cool. Math is precise, only a single answer ever makes sense, and it was quite satisfying to [spoiler]have this lead up to graphing and 3d images.[/spoiler] Science puzzles were "learn a word by recognizing the scientific concept being implied, demonstrate your understanding by applying formulas to new examples". Great. The provided reference pages listed the potential scientific concepts one might come across, and math and images related to science are reasonably recognizable so I never felt lost. It was satisfying to obtain words for advanced concepts [spoiler]like the speed of light, and to derive concepts like an alien-meter based on light-speed-lengths. [/spoiler] Then grammar was introduced, and language puzzles were "learn a word through word association with old words". I don't think this is intrinsically problematic, but my frustrations with how these puzzles were implemented began about halfway through the game and ruined my experience with the rest of the game. Specifically, first, the puzzles don't strictly adhere to the grammar they themselves define. Words defined as nouns will get used as verbs and vice versa. Word order is flexible, for example [spoiler]"swim big capable" (T806) and "small capable swim" (T808)[/spoiler]. Sentence syntax is regularly ignored to omit terms and use fragments. I understand that real life languages can be like that, but the inconsistency caused ambiguity, it felt careless, and it spurred the unpleasant practice of brute forcing answer variations. Even if real languages have those quirks that doesn't mean they should be used when introducing a language. Second, the word associations really rely on intuition, which I find causes too many "either you get it or you don't" puzzles. And with so many puzzles in this game, you're likely to encounter multiple frustrating ones, leaving you again to brute force the recent words you acquired or permutation of words you encountered. Worse, I often felt certain puzzles were intentionally confusing just to stretch the definition of a new word into more puzzles. For example, [spoiler]we're told a new word is related to "seeing bad life", "seeing small", and "being in hot water", and that it's the opposite of something, so what is that something it's the opposite of? (T865-866)[/spoiler]. This withholds the old word that we've already covered a hundred transmissions ago from the definition of the new word in order to have the definition require additional intuitive steps. Unfortunately I felt this was bad communication rather than a good puzzle. Third, a huge amount (possibly a majority?) of the language transmissions reduced to "0 = 0", tautologies, and other trivial logic ("If A then B. If not B then <blank> A". "If A then B. If B then C. If A then <blank>"). I assume this serves to emphasize a point, but the information presented in these statements often felt repetitive, felt like they were belaboring the point instead, and stopped being satisfying for me to complete. Combined, I stopped getting any sense of reward for completing these puzzles. It was disappointing to have to brute force answers. There was a slow drip of interesting alien lore, but for me the immersion was broken repeatedly by the feeling of carelessness in the puzzle design (there's still a duplicate transmission at the time of this writing) and the feeling that the aliens were communicating very poorly, as if they couldn't decide if their messaging should be obvious to hammer in the point or obtuse so the listener has to figure things out. To be clear, there are a lot of good things about this game. The concept is great, I enjoyed the soundtrack, and I enjoyed the simple feel-good story and the characters. But the game is somewhat long given the simple story, and the languages puzzles are too weak to carry it. I think I would've enjoyed the game a lot more if it strictly followed the grammar or simplified the grammar. I also would enjoy a shorter (than a average 40 hour completion) game such that information is less repetitive. Thanks to the developer for making this game.