Chants of Sennaar Reviews

Beautiful game, strained my brain a few times like any great puzzle game should. Very satisfying to figure things out, i did have to google things once or twice, phenomenal game, the art style is gorgeous and very interesting. Took me 11 hours, I bought it on sale but I think it's worth the full price, I've never play a game like this, it won't be for ever one but I nearly failed all my language classes in school and even I had an amazing time playing this game and discovering everything it had in store, also in that 11 hours I 100% the achievements, which always feels good. If you like unique looking, very well designed ceribral puzzle games, this is definitely a must-play.

One of the best games i've ever played! A unique concept with a great mix of puzzles and story

Incredibly well crafted language systems combined with a gorgeous soundtrack and visuals. The story falls a little flat towards the end but I never felt bored once.

great design. great puzzles. GREAT STORY. 100% recommend- if u like puzzles or are stuck at home: play this!

I bought the game for the great use of shadows and cross-hatching in its art style, since I feel that artistic care in lighting is very rare in videogames these days. But I enjoyed the language puzzle enough to stick around and 100% the game. I do recommend it. It's not perfect. Some of the puzzles require leaps-of-logic from the player. Getting stuck can happen and it's tedious. It's often unclear if you missed a key detail, or if you just haven't explored enough. This leads to a lot of re-treating the same territory, when really your best bet might be to do some brute-forcing on translations. Beyond that it's pretty slow to move around the environment, and there's no map so it's easy to get lost, so this compounds some of the tedium in its puzzles. These issues are unfortunate because I really think the rest of the game is beautiful. By that I mean to include the experience that the game offers. It's a metaphorical landscape that I enjoyed discovering. It doesn't shy from making critiques of aspects of society, but does so without being mean-spirited. Depending on how you interpret what it presents, you might come away with a very different message than I did, and that is probably a good thing -- one could argue that's what the whole game is about. Despite its flaws I think this is probably why it's getting that Overwhelmingly Positive rating. Cool game from France.

Cool concept for a puzzle game of deciphering the languages, however, there is so much filler that I can't recommend it. The most challenging part of the game is finding all the semi-hidden areas or slogging around the map trying to find where to go next. It is fun getting to a new stage and dealing with a brand new language, but usually you get a few gimmies so it's not really a challenge. Can only recommend if you're looking for a slightly more involved point and click game, rather than a true puzzle game.

[spoiler] The fifth language and the ending feel a bit rough and slightly rushed [/spoiler] but a great game overall

Probably the best puzzle game i have ever played. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in or looking to get into puzzle games. It has a good balance of easy and hard puzzles and a great tutorial to get you into the swing of figuring out the first language of the game. The visuals and sound design are also great, the simplicity works great for the kind of game this is given how often you need to rely on visual context clues to work out words. The story keeps with the theme of also being fantastic and dosent just hand you all the clues instantly. It lets you put the pieces together and get every groups side to the backstory of the game before wrapping the story up in a nice little bow with a fantastic little twist that had me worried i messed up my run, no spoilers though :). Highly recommend.

family sharing is wack, so the following is offered on behalf of my partner. chants of sennaar is a competent puzzle game, but it is not the game i wanted it to be. i am still Recommending this for what it is, but if i knew sooner what this game was -not- i probably would not have taken interest in it. picking up a game like this, i am looking for a linguistic puzzle that is going to challenge my deductive reasoning and ability to infer foreign contexts of meaning, purpose, and grammar. technically, this does all those things. however. the obstacles that were most prevalent and challenging in this game were -not- ones of linguistic intuition. they were more pedestrian. the game gives you a book of illustrations to compare the glyphs to, and to check your work every few steps a la obra dinn. this is a good system... but because you only discover each set of illustrations as you explore the world, the -real- challenge of the game is finding all of the triggers so that your character can starting writing their own notes. also, sometimes it's hard to figure out what the illustrations are supposed to even represent, but like... i don't really fault the devs for that. i also don't know how to draw the concept of "Has". i think they did the best they could there. and then there's the stealth sections. in and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with the stealth sections in this game. there are checkpoints. you can usually figure out what you're meant to do easily enough. it's acceptable. it's just... not what i wanted from this game in particular. i'm not trying to play assassins creed or whatever, i'm trying to play a fun language puzzle game. every time i get to a stealth section, i feel like, man, i just wanna get back to the fun part of the game. it doesn't ruin the game, but it does hamper my enjoyment. to its credit, i did enjoy the translation challenges near the end. and the consequences that has on the game's world were a delightful surprise. it also has some creative check to make sure you're on comprehension par. i want more of those. i want more esoteric and creative rules of grammar to puzzle out. i also think that might be beyond what the average player is looking for. ultimately this game -is- accessible even to those players who might be less confident in their puzzling skills or less gung-ho about roughing through a language. so maybe i'm in the minority there. if you want a good puzzle game with a few stealth speed-bumps, this is a good pick. but if you want a good -language- puzzle game, i would recommend Tunic over this.

What a phenomenal game. I found myself wishing it would go on forever. Being a translator myself, I was really impressed with its linguistic design; not only because the languages often had different words to describe essentially the same concepts, reflecting differing ideologies of the peoples of the tower - which is very realistic - but also because they differed in syntax, and all those differences had to be taken into account when translating one language into another. I give this game a gold star for capturing the "fun puzzle" aspect of translation extremely well! I really hope the creators will consider making a similar game in the future!