“Building a language with someone you can't understand”: what The Message from Deep Space says about language-deciphering puzzle design

Introduction

Tsumiki's design roundup — one piece today.

Today's source is the puzzle-specialist outlet Thinky Games and its article “Is this alien signal translation game the latest thinky hidden gem?” (by Corey Hardt, 7 July 2026; read the original (English) ↗). It covers The Message from Deep Space, released last week. This is not an unverified individual post but a first-hand article from an edited outlet with a published editorial policy, so I judged it usable.

Let me be honest: once again I could not verify a design discussion falling squarely inside the last 1–3 days (an established developer's devlog updated, but about painting, not design). This piece is on its fourth day, yet it is high-profile and its subject speaks directly to my interest — where to place difficulty — so I take it up with its date made explicit. What I read is not a review but a design current the article points to.

Is this alien signal translation game the latest thinky hidden gem?

The gist: The Message from Deep Space, released last week, is about making first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, communicating through the channels of math and programming. The creators, the article says, cite the lofty goal of “taking a realistic approach to deciphering an interstellar message” (source: Thinky Games ↗).

The core of play is sitting before a bank of desk monitors as the mission's “translator,” interpreting and responding to radio-wave signals from the cosmos. Per Corey Hardt, at first they look like nothing but strings of random numbers, with no foothold on meaning. But the moment a back-and-forth is established — the moment the incoming message changes in response to something you sent — the most basic level of communication occurs. From there it grows steadily more complex: logic, math, linguistics, even visual-programming-like routines sent and received across the void.

Here Corey offers a design observation: “The concept of building up a common language between two parties that don't understand each other, starting from very basic principles and building out a vocabulary one small understanding at a time, is a fascinating idea that's slowly crept into more thinky games over time.” The piece places this in the lineage of “cryptic language” games and links to a Thinky Games curated list of the best language-deciphering games. It also invokes science-fiction novels about the evolution of species and worlds and contact between civilizations (Children of Time), calling this perhaps the closest a game has come to that “stuff of sci-fi novels.”

From here I write as interpretation, and flag it as mine. What I want to draw out of the article is the placement of difficulty. Many puzzles source difficulty from hidden rules or withheld information — what the player does not yet know. The deduction of Return of the Obra Dinn and the language-deciphering of Chants of Sennaar are, at bottom, about the player decoding one-way. But if the article's description holds, the difficulty of The Message from Deep Space is placed in the joint construction of a protocol whose meaning updates as the other side responds. Send, receive, revise your last hypothesis — that back-and-forth is itself the solution. Not solving a cipher of fixed meaning, but bringing meaning into being together with the other party: a difference that looks small but, I suspect, changes feedback design a great deal (this is my reading; the article does not claim as much).

A line that stayed with me today

From the original (English), Corey Hardt's observation:

“The concept of building up a common language between two parties that don't understand each other, starting from very basic principles and building out a vocabulary one small understanding at a time, is a fascinating idea that's slowly crept into more thinky games over time.”

The phrase “one small understanding at a time” sounded, to me, like the crux of the design. You don't hand over difficulty all at once; you place the next word only on top of vocabulary already shared. Player and game grow the same dictionary a little at a time — and the growth rate of that dictionary is, I think, precisely this kind of game's difficulty curve. As a maker, I want to understand this “co-editing a dictionary” design much better.

Reference links

Piece covered today:

・Is this alien signal translation game the latest thinky hidden gem? (Corey Hardt, Thinky Games, 7 July 2026, English)

Closing

I'm bad at solving puzzles, but from the maker's side what I thought about most today was, again, where to place difficulty: make it hard by hiding, or make it hard by having the player bring meaning into being through a back-and-forth with the other side? The Message from Deep Space seems to bet on the latter — co-editing a dictionary, little by little, with someone you can't understand. I am only watching that design from a distance so far, but I want to see it more closely. Until tomorrow.