Picked this one up on a whim with zero expectations and holy shit this is one of the best deduction games I've ever played, Obra Dinn and Roottrees Are Dead tier. Much better than this year's Incident at the Galley House, which ended up being a massive disappointment, and miles better than Blue Prince, which was rancid dogshit.Picture Chants of Sennaar, but very autistic and focused on recreating what real alien contact might look like, starting from simple addition and subtraction, through more maths, chemistry and universal constants, to recreating alien grammar. All through simple signals where (you) have to assign meaning by manually defining each signal's meaning in a dictionary.The hints system being tied to your character being a part of a team is also genius, it's great for loreplaying and keeping you immersed. There's a bit too much story, cutscenes should play every 100 puzzles, not every 20 (there's nearly 1000 puzzles in total), and the characters are reddit as fuck, but who cares when in terms of game mechanics it's among the best.
>>749066239I played the demo and did like it, but it's a game that you have to be okay with being entertained by what's going on in your head rather than what's on the screen. For most people, that's not possible.
>>749066239Gotten into it a week ago as well and I can only echo the praise. Only worked through a third of all puzzles but one of my friends had to already endure a multiple-paragraph long essay on why this game might be my GOTY.Even the group of colleagues has somewhat grown on me and the bantering luckily doesn't bother me too much.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU9ZTr6JoG4
I'm about 800 transmissions in and as much as I admire the way the game teaches you concepts and builds on them - which is really very impressive - I also can't help but feel that it's heavily bloated. Eight fucking hundred messages is a lot of messages, man. Why are they spending so much time telling us about their emotions or social philosophies and zero time teaching us new science? How are we meant to send them the reply they want so badly when we don't know how and we don't know where? It feels like the game is spinning its wheels and not going anywhere. Its been a while since I've gone "oh wow, holy shit" like I did at earlier points in the game.
Does this require you to have a PhD in physics to enjoy?
>>749068575Nah, it covers fairly basic high school level physics/chemistry/math and comes with a reference guide to everything you need to know.
So is it a deduction game like Obra Dinn and Roottrees? Or puzzles and corridors like Myst and Blue Prince?
>>749066239My biggest gripe is the early game clearly got the bulk of the polish, I'm in the 800s and the team barely talks and lots of puzzles have no hints at all, even if you know what they want you just have to fuck around trying to work out what specific syntax they're looking for.I got stonewalled on this for an embarrassing length of time.
>>749072126Oh hey that's exactly the same one I'm currently onJust cleared it, the logic wasn't difficult but yeah it can be annoying how finicky it is with the answers it accepts
>>749072915There is just a fixed list of responses it will accept for each puzzle, there isn't a complex logical evaluation system behind it. I was disappointed when I found that out.
>>749066239They got rid of IP counts on each thread so hiroshima nagasaki could let advertisers pay for permission to have """organic""" threads not get nuked without it being obvious it's one brownoid samefagging
