Outside ofHeaven’s Vault,it’s hard to think of many adventure or puzzle games built around the concept of deciphering language. There may be the occasional puzzle that involve a bit of such translating, but not much in the way of entire games exploring the concept of language as a whole. But now here come developers Rundisc with Chants of Sennaar, a game inspired by one of the most famous stories of language, the Tower of Babel. It’s fertile ground for a truly unique adventure, but does it deliver the equivalent of an eloquent, stirring speech, or is it little more than a mess of gibberish?
Chants of Sennaar sees you playing as the Traveler, a mysterious robed figure that emerges from a mysterious underground tomb of sorts in a massive tower, where the peoples within have split up into different cities and cultures, having not spoken to each other since ages ago. Your ultimate job is explore each locale and finally unite everyone again as you ascend the tower, with only various language barriers in your way…well, language barriers and the occasional guardian that hunts you down in stealth sections. But yes, mainly you’ll be working through the language barriers in order to decipher different languages in order to bring everyone together again.
The meat and potatoes of the gameplay in Chants of Sennaar is coming across various glyphs, either through spoken dialogue or discovered on various objects, and trying to figure out exactly what each glyph means. The intro starts out easy enough, as you look at a few levers with labels that clearly mean “open” and “close.” Then you meet your first citizen of these lands, who waves to you while speaking a glyph, so you’re likely to interpret it as “greeting.” Then through the glyphs you’ve learned so far, you solve a simple puzzle where you drain waterways in order to help your new friend cross. Easy stuff so far.
But then you start heading past a few murals depicting what appears to be a history of the tower, and the sentences start getting more complex, with glyphs you haven’t seen before. At any time, you may switch to your in-game notebook, where all the glyphs you’ve officially encountered are recorded so far, and type in a guess for each one as to what it could be. But at that point, guessing is all you can do. You have to pay attention to conversations (or the echoes that helpfully get left behind), actions, body language, surroundings and everything, noting what you’ve figured out for each glyph so far. And as you do, glyphs you encounter in the real world – spoken or otherwise – can be hovered over and translated with your findings so far. If you have nothing for a glyph, you get ellipses. If it’s just a guess, your guess is shown, highlighted in grey italiacs. Validate, it’s bold and in white. And until you confirm everything, you’re basically looking at a jumbled sentence.
It’s a simple concept, but a brilliant one, even if the moments where you get to validate glyphs seem random, as the Traveler pulls out the notepad at times and adds drawings to it to match glyphs with. Sometimes the times or sets of glyphs feel random, and there’s still one instance where the trigger for a final set of glyphs to be validated still hasn’t come up yet (luckily, it’s not needed to beat the game). But that doesn’t take away from all of those wonderful “Eureka!” moments you get when you successfully figure out what a glyph is, especially when the “figuring out” is where the true fun lies. Part of that is through each group of peoples in the tower, each with different cities and cultures inspired by the likes of real-life cultures such as Norse and Middle Eastern. This also lends itself to striking visuals and sounds, especially with the splendid color schemes, structure designs and even little details like shading and clothing designs that invoke the likes of comic artists such as Moebius. More importantly, they give each in-game culture their own unique personality, which includes their language. Not just the glyph designs, but the way of speaking and how sentences are formed.
Fitting the theme of unifying divided words, Chants of Sennaar requires the player to notice the common threads between languages, but also the various ways they differ. For example, your first experience with plurals just simply involves placing two of the same glyph together. The next group of peoples, though, have their own separate glyph for plurals, though where it’s placed in a sentence is another thing entirely. What one group of people refer to as a “scientist,” others call an “alchemist.” In one particular moment I loved, I had most of one sentence being spoken by someone figured out, but there was one glyph left that didn’t make any sense, until I looked at the structure and it hit me: this is the only group to have a glyph representing a question, or question mark! Again, it’s the moments like that that require analysis and attention that feel rewarding (moreso when you actually get chances to translate conversations with two different languages).
Notably, each group of people also have their own particular role to play in the tower as a whole, such as warriors or artists, and as such, you also soon realize that they each have larger concentrations of glyphs relating to their occupations. Notably, one later society uses numbers as part of their work, which come into play when you have to operate machinery in order to solve a puzzle. In fact, there are quite a few puzzles to come across, and deciphering the instructions is the key to getting through them. They’re well-designed and offer a perfect level of challenge, adding to the mystery and intrigue when you eventually decode their purpose. Those mysterious statues in the cemetery may seem confusing at first, but after taking the time to relax and study things, it soon becomes clear.
You will be wandering about for a while, though, which does lead to one notable complaint I do have with Chants of Sennaar, and that’s how maze-like things can feel at times. It doesn’t help that a few parts basically do have you stuck in actual mazes, including one aggravating underground sewer where everything looks the same. It can make backtracking annoying, especially if it means having to sneak around enemies again. Yes, as mentioned earlier, there are a few stealth section scattered in, though they’re easy to control, just selecting a highlighted spot by a wall and moving to it. At the very least, it shakes things.
But while the maze-like designs can feel aggravating now and then, you’ll likely bring it upon yourself by wanting to explore every nook and cranny, wanting to see every part of this imaginative world and each culture within, especially as you begin to uncover more of the story behind things. Even just going back to a previous person and getting to finally hear their previous conversation with full clarity, complete with proper punctuation and context, feels enjoyable. Most importantly, Chants of Sennaar feels like a truly unique experience, taking the framework of a classic graphic adventure game and adding a masterfully-crafted gameplay mechanic built around language on top of it. It’s one of this year’s most creative games, and that alone makes it worth a look.
Closing Comments:
An immensely clever and unique game, Chants of Sennaar expertly captures the power of language through its well-crafted cultures and its intricate and perfectly-challenging puzzles, turning the art of translation into a captivating bit of gameplay. By the time you’ll have validated your last glyph, you’ll still be left wanting more, but what we have here still makes for a terrific journey that is not to be missed out on.
Chants of Sennaar
