Media in Review: Chants of Sennaar

16 Sep, 2024

A hooded man awakens from a tomb(?) and finds himself in a great tower. With nowhere to go, you begin to climb the tower, and quickly get in contact with the locals. They need help with...something, and it's not entirely clear what, but you do your best to help them out. Not because figuring out what they need is hard or obtuse, but on a more literal level - you can't understand anything they're saying. This is the hook for Chants of Sennaar, and it's a damned good one. Each of the five floors of the tower has their own language, and your goal on each floor is to learn that language, figure out what the main puzzle for that floor is, and then solve it to move on to the next one.

For being as basic of a puzzle/adventure-ish game as it is, Chants really wrings a lot out of its five¹ languages. The short puzzles and murals do a good job of getting the gist of a concept across, and translating between the different peoples was a really neat way to test if you actually understood the grammar and sentence structure of each language. It does mean that there's a lot of overlap between the languages (words like "help", "go", and other common verbs are in every set), but at least there's a little bit of spice when the game has different languages refer to the same thing in different ways. The Warriors refer to the people above them as the "chosen ones" and the ones below them as "the impure", where those people refer to themselves as the Bards and Devotees respectively.

Aside from the point and click stuff, there's some light stealth that's mostly uninteresting, but thankfully is never more than a screen or two aside from a bit at the start of the Warrior's section that overstays its welcome. It mostly makes sense when it's used, but it's not very fun and is definitely not what anyone playing the game is here for. Also, the entire top floor feels extremely phoned in. It's very small (basically a 3x3 grid), has the smallest set of glyphs, and generally there's nothing to do there aside from starting the endgame sequence.

All in all, its kind of a shame I didn't finish this in 2023, because it definitely would have been on the Top 3 for the year (I'm retroactively giving it the silver medal and bumping Paranormasight down to #3). If you like language puzzles, it's a really great game, and it gets to the point a lot faster than something like Heaven's Vault. And honestly? It's a great pick for something that'll get you through a weekend and then be done.