Message From Aliens rules
I started playing Message From Aliens this week, and I've been absolutely blown away. I love translation games and have played a lot of them, and the translation gameplay in this one is REALLY good. It doesn't have the thematic and artistic context that Heaven's Vault has, and it doesn't have the weird puzzlebox quality that Epigraph has... but it has a fuck ton of words to translate, an extremely compelling framing, and some GREAT aliens.
The game looks like this:
I don't want to say too much about this, really, because the game is very spoilable. For example, I cannot show you any of my screenshots because they are full of my translations!
If you like translation games, though, this one is insanely good. The trouble is that you will have to do a lot of math. I am not a huge fan of doing math... but the amount of math in this game was achievable for me, and the rewards were good enough that I put up with it. You gotta get through the math before they let you start translating texts about alien homeworlds and biology!
Anyway: can't recommend this enough. It's really, really good. I'm not done yet but I'm in the back half of the game now and I've having a tremendous time. There really is nothing better than going through an imaginary dictionary and translating every word. If I could play games like this all year long, I would.