The Message from Deep Space screenshot
Image: Applesinmypants

It's a rare thing when aliens in games just want to have a friendly chat, so let's indulge them in The Message from Deep Space, an ambitious speculative sci-fi puzzler (from amusingly named indie studio Applesinmypants) that launched at the peak of the Steam Summer Sale, but has found moderate success and high praise nonetheless.

Playing as a scientist—part of a team that has discovered an extraterrestrial comms signal coming from a passing meteor—you've got to figure out what our talkative celestial neighbors are saying. Easier said than done, of course. As the trailer below shows, it's a call-and-response game, starting with just pinging back the same numerical signal that you received, to puzzling out a basic mathematical linguistic framework, to more esoteric problems involving chemical elements, geometry, and observable cosmic phenomena.

While I've yet to dive into the full game, Steam user reviews are glowingly positive, with one from a professional chemist and amateur astronomer praising it as "the perfect puzzle game for science nerds". It's a rare piece of serious, optimistic sci-fi in games, and a substantial one at that. The game's store page boasts an impressive 30+ hours of narrative puzzling to work through, and given that I've heard some people spent hours just getting through the demo (which in itself was highly praised during the last Next Fest), I've no reason to doubt that claim. So, a surprisingly beefy game for just £8.50/$10, with a 10% launch discount running until mid-July. I might just have to snag this one myself.

The Message from Deep Space is out now on Steam, along with a lengthy demo.