Game Report: The Message from Deep Space
Aug. 16th, 2026 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indi_timberpathWhen I was little, our house had a big black clothbound, full of lots of words and pictures about space. I never read the whole thing through, but there was a picture I was obsessed with, a lot of dark and colored squares representing a message that was sent into space. I spent a long time trying to figure it out. I'm reasonably sure it's part of how I learned to count in binary.
When I was just starting high school, I read another book by the same author as that one, which included a very detailed description of a much more complicated message sent to Earth using a lot of the same principles. I spent a long time imagining what it looked like. I'm reasonably sure I covered several notebook pages with my interpretation of parts of its message.
A couple years later, I saw the movie version of the book in a fancy theater downtown. It was the first movie I ever went to see entirely by myself, no friends or family or anyone. I loved the movie (though I was a little disappointed that all the cool details about that alien message were condensed down into one simple scene.) I used a quote from that movie as my email signature for years. I'm reasonably sure it's the movie I've rewatched more times than anything else.
All of this is to say, it feels like The Message from Deep Space is something I've been waiting for, for my entire life.
The Message From Deep Space consists almost entirely of typing. You could literally call it an over-20-hour-long text adventure. It requires some amount of skill at math, several sciences, linguistics, and quite a bit of lateral thinking. It made me feel incredibly dumb, and incredibly smart, sometimes simultaneously. Playing it, I got to know more than I expected about both alien species, and four individual humans.
The game made me laugh, often at the sort of playful bickering that I'm very familiar with from real-life experience being in a small room with others trying to make sense of something inscrutable on a screen. It made me cry, feeling something like the sensation of being at the edge of a mesa, looking down over the vastness of a living desert… or of peering through the wall of a spacecraft, witnessing some celestial event.
I'm not sure there's much more I can say about it. It's like nothing else I ever played and I wish it wasn't over. If any of this sounds appealing to you, try it out. Struggle through it. Maybe it'll be a bit much for you; it was for me at points too. But there's a whole community out there, and I guess I'm part of it now too. Understanding is a strenuous task, but we have each other.
When I was just starting high school, I read another book by the same author as that one, which included a very detailed description of a much more complicated message sent to Earth using a lot of the same principles. I spent a long time imagining what it looked like. I'm reasonably sure I covered several notebook pages with my interpretation of parts of its message.
A couple years later, I saw the movie version of the book in a fancy theater downtown. It was the first movie I ever went to see entirely by myself, no friends or family or anyone. I loved the movie (though I was a little disappointed that all the cool details about that alien message were condensed down into one simple scene.) I used a quote from that movie as my email signature for years. I'm reasonably sure it's the movie I've rewatched more times than anything else.
All of this is to say, it feels like The Message from Deep Space is something I've been waiting for, for my entire life.
The Message From Deep Space consists almost entirely of typing. You could literally call it an over-20-hour-long text adventure. It requires some amount of skill at math, several sciences, linguistics, and quite a bit of lateral thinking. It made me feel incredibly dumb, and incredibly smart, sometimes simultaneously. Playing it, I got to know more than I expected about both alien species, and four individual humans.
The game made me laugh, often at the sort of playful bickering that I'm very familiar with from real-life experience being in a small room with others trying to make sense of something inscrutable on a screen. It made me cry, feeling something like the sensation of being at the edge of a mesa, looking down over the vastness of a living desert… or of peering through the wall of a spacecraft, witnessing some celestial event.
I'm not sure there's much more I can say about it. It's like nothing else I ever played and I wish it wasn't over. If any of this sounds appealing to you, try it out. Struggle through it. Maybe it'll be a bit much for you; it was for me at points too. But there's a whole community out there, and I guess I'm part of it now too. Understanding is a strenuous task, but we have each other.
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Date: 2026-08-18 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-24 04:38 am (UTC)