Cracking Arrival-like alien languages is gaming's new frontier

There are more than a hundred of these geometric symbols. At first I tap at them like a monkey at a typewriter. Eventually I learn how to piece a few together to ask a question. Made by Grant Kuning, a developer based in Washington, DC, Sethian is a game in which you learn a language to solve a mystery. It gives you the keyboard of an alien computer and leaves you to work out what happened to the inhabitants of a planet that seems to have been abandoned for centuries.