On November 2, the puzzle game Message From Aliens was released on the Steam games store. According to the plot, in 2058 a vast message from space arrives on Earth, and it is up to the player to make sense of it. The game's distinguishing feature is that it contains not a single hint in human language: everything, from dialogue to menu items, is written in alien symbols.
Some players complain in discussions that they accidentally quit the game, since even the exit button is labelled only with glyphs. This is part of the design by the developers at Artless Games. The game contains more than twenty thousand characters of text, and the language itself consists of just over a thousand hieroglyphs. The player must decipher them through logic: looking for patterns, assigning meanings and testing guesses. The player assigns meanings to each symbol independently. The game even includes a built-in dictionary, which, of course, is also written in the aliens' language.
The writing in the game is not random: each symbol is built from several elements, and the whole system is designed to be more logical than human languages. The playthrough begins with a number system, then introduces the culture and way of thinking of the aliens, and in the finale invites the player to translate their poetry and jokes.
To reach the end, translating everything is not required. For those who want to understand the language in depth, there are mini-games and secrets. Early player reviews are positive: by the evening of November 2, the game had received 97% positive ratings. Message From Aliens builds on ideas from games such as Chants of Sennaar and Heaven's Vault, where players also have to unravel an alien language, and it recalls the film Arrival, in which a linguist learns to understand aliens.
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