The Message from Deep Space

I don't really do reviews as I figure my opinion as a nameless rando on the internet doesn't really matter. But this game is something special and deserves all the attention and praise it can get. In this game you take on the role as a translator as a part of a team that is trying to decipher an alien message being broadcast from a meteorite that landed in Alaska in 1973. You start with some very basic arithmetic and math to create a foundation, and from there work your way up to ever increasingly complex topics. That said, nothing ever really goes beyond high-school level, so I'm fairly confident in saying most people shouldn't have to worry too much about not being able to make it through the game. Over 95% of the game is spent staring at two 70s-era computer monitors inputting simple words or short sentences, yet this game has managed to make me feel more emotions than most other media over the past decade or so. It is a surprisingly positive and hopeful game that celebrates human achievements and all the kinds of cool stuff we've built and done over the ages. It also helps that the other members of your team are all lovable nerdy goofballs. Special shout-out to Doppler's 'animations' during the in-between-chapters segments which are just the right kind of comedic to be charming, but not so over the top that it breaks the vibes. Now, the game isn't perfect. While your teammates do regularly offer their hypotheses and thoughts as a stand-in for a help system, they don't do so for everything. So from time to time you will likely end up in a situation where for whatever reason you've hit a wall with no real way to progress other than to hit up the (very friendly and helpful!) community over on discord. If the game would at least tell you how many inputs it expects for the answer that would likely already help immensely, but there's also a risk that might trivialize some questions, so I can understand why it doesn't currently. Some answers also don't feel consistent with previously established ones, but that might just be due to the aliens' syntax being unfamiliar. But none of that matters as The Message from Deep Space is up there with the likes of Outer Wilds with how much satisfaction you get from just learning things. Because that is what this game is all about. Learning. There is no action, no spectacle (other than the bombastic OST which has no right to go this hard), no epic bossfights to brag about to your friends. Just the satisfaction of learning about something new, something alien. Something oddly human. Also this game is only 9 bucks which is downright criminal.

Read Project Hail Mary and loved it? just buy it.

this is one of the best puzzle games i have ever played in my entire life

I'm still just scratching the surface of this game, but I'm already having a blast. Never knew I could have this much fun doing geometry again. A billion bonus points for the Project Hail Mary reference ('Do they have five legs? Do they eat heavy metals? Do they speak in chords?').

An incredible game! If you have a love for math*, logic and language you will absolutely love this. It is incredibly satisfying because you start only with one number and from there you construct every single puzzle in the game. I highly recommend you don't spoil yourself and enjoy it. *a fair warning: you need a good understanding of at least highschool level math!

Really fun game, and the progression from the humble first transmission all the way to the last is really cool, without (as i think) any leaps of logic Still got stuck in certain transmissions because of my dumb ass though It might run on old laptops quite slowly, but i don't think it's a really big problem for this particular game

Really unique puzzle game. If you like hard sci-fi like Children of Time or or The Three-Body Problem, or if the premise just sounds interesting, give it a try. I like that the game never tells you the "right" interpretation of any word, it's up to you to understand the message. And by the end it's super satisfying to be able to read full complex sentences using only the vocabulary you personally defined. I like the music and other members of the translation team. Their occasional ideas and the weekly meetings make it feel like you're actually part of a science team decoding the message. I'm not too big on the low-poly, glitches, and scanlines art style, but it wasn't too distracting. The whole game could be just text so whatever. It has kind of a reverse difficulty curve, where you spend the beginning doing math and chemistry problems, but it eventually gets easier as you define more words. But that's just the nature of the problem I suppose.