The Message from Deep Space

Still have a long way to go, but I'm already comfortable giving this a thumbs up. The game nails the experience of how first contact with a genuine alien species would go, and while the information you learn comes in trickles, the way it builds up and finally pays off makes it all worth it.

If you can get through the first few math heavy chapters, a really excellent translation game rests underneath. Highly recommend.

This game was a really, really cool idea that captivated me for the first two hours. Unfortunately, the next two (and from what I gather, the 50 after that) are almost entirely solving high school algebra and geometry problems by hand. If that sounds like a good time to you you should play this game. It was not a good time for me.

ALIEN BRAIN IS BIG -> ALIEN HA METEOR MAKE CAN DESU

The puzzles aren't overly difficult (although you may want to be sure that you remember your high school level physics, chemistry, math, logic, and a bit of grammar), but the difficulty is just right to make the narrative very satisfying to uncover. I really enjoyed my time with this game, it even made me feel a few feelings. Now this may be a fairly niche thing to mention, but I'm very particular about the narrative content of the media I engage with. To put it bluntly, I've got political "PTSD" and I can hardly play or watch anything these days without being annoyed by the inclusion of half-baked political propaganda of one flavour or another, whether I agree with it or not. I found this game very refreshing because, without spoiling anything, the narrative touches alien cultural issues that are truly alien and have no connection to any contentious human cultural issues you might be sick and tired of hearing about. This game really is about learning about aliens and not a thinly veiled excuse for the writers to tell people what they should think. I'm very grateful that some truly creative people are out here making such unique and interesting games, who are actually dedicated to exploring the extremes of what it could mean to live as a species that is significantly unlike us. Great work, bravo, I look forward to whatever this developer may create next.

Ask friend: "Are you good at math?" Proceed to get stumped at a transmission that prompted you to ask in the first place. Agree to just start over a new run so you can both go through the game together, seeing as you are still pretty early on into the game, and all. Start out adding to the dictionary with an air of seriousness. Go through everything with logic, generally basic calculations, etc. "ADD, .DEC, MIN, MUL, DIV, VAR, ..." "Let's call this one..." Start derailing the definitions. "SEAL, FLOUR, LIES, FRIES, MOVIES, SKITTLE, BALD, ..." Get dialogues like : "They're just lumpin' a bunch of BURGERS's together." Get amazing comms like : "Okay, so they're SAUCE... and we're PASTA..." Go through each transmission while using the butchered dictionary with a straight face. yep. this has become my life for the past week. good game

Stunningly thoughtful game. It occasionally lacks a bit of polish but only in minor ways and this is almost certainly a simple consequence of the resource limitations inherent in an indie title of this caliber. If you enjoyed learning (or want to learn) the foundations of math and science in school, this game is absolutely worth your time and money. It can be quite challenging, particularly in the beginning and ~85% of the way through, but it is also very rewarding.