The Message from Deep Space review: how hundreds of math puzzles build a symbol system for talking to aliens

The Message from Deep Space is a puzzle game about decoding alien radio signals, in which the player leads a team of an astronomer, a linguist and a programmer to confirm the signal's existence through back-and-forth number exchanges. The first roughly 10 hours contain over two hundred math, geometry, logic, chemistry and physics problems that eventually yield words such as connect, meteorite and signal and build a usable symbol system. On Steam the game holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with more than 1,800 reviews, has no official Chinese support yet, and some Simplified Chinese players already call it their game of the year.