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!

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.

I was a little confused at first being a stranger in a culture I didn't understand. But as I experienced more I began to understand the people's values and their similarities. It was very rewarding piecing together language and connecting the tower. Such a cool concept and important message about making an effort to communicate with each other.

Pretty good and unique game. I loved trying to figure out the languages and their connections. Wish the puzzles had a bit more depth and the awful stealth sections didn't exist.

Had high expectations going in given the crazy high reviews and focus on language but in the end the game was not as compelling as I expected. In this game, you play as a mysterious robed figure and ascend a tower populated by separate, castes I guess?, deciphering their languages and solving puzzles and other challenges as you go. The strength of the game is in its linguistic puzzles where you decipher symbols that you find in each level of the tower - the implementation of these puzzles is unfortunately greatly lacking in both depth and challenge. On top of that the game piles on a lot of other aspects that detract from its core language puzzles and leave the game feeling unfocused and hampered. The way the language puzzles tend to go is that you'll enter a level for the first time, be presented with a lot of unknown symbols in NPC dialogues, inscribed on walls or in objects, or wherever else. Through contextual clues and exploration, you figure out what each symbol means. And I feel like this aspect of the game was handled really well - the experience of appearing somewhere new and having no idea what's going on, and gradually making guesses at what particular symbols mean, revising those guesses as you experience new things, and going back to earlier places and understanding what previously made no sense to you feels great. There is also variance in the syntax of the languages you find which makes the process of translation feel fresh, though I felt the bard language was the only real standout unique language. Unfortunately I think the single mechanic that sets this game back the most is the journal. Every so often as you play, you are shown a page in a journal with images on it and some of the symbols you've found that can be paired with the images - if you make the right pairings, the game will confirm them and you'll be granted with the "correct" english word that corresponds with the symbols you've discovered. Just like that, the process of discovering things for yourself, the feeling of uncertainty, the process of working through and revising the conclusions you've come to, are wiped out?! It would be a lot like if after solving one puzzle with a new mechanic in The Witness, you got a sticker and unlocked a dictionary entry that told you the ins and outs of how it worked. It also imposes on the player's own self-made definitions and kind of ignores the flexibility and ambiguity of language by giving you a correct way of seeing things. There are also a lot of gameplay mechanics and sections unrelated to the game's main language puzzles that take momentum away from the game's main thrust and end up feeling like filler. The game's stealth mechanics are a lot like this. Really, why does a puzzle game need pointless stealth sections? They don't integrate in any way with the language puzzles, are mechanically crude and unengaging, and fail to progress the game thematically or narratively, so basically they feel very out of place. At the very least they could have been made easy, buuut they aren't. Most of the game's other non-language puzzle sections are okay but require a lot of backtracking and wandering through the same large areas and long hallways over and over to find the one thing you missed to solve the puzzle or reread some clue, which takes forever at the protagonist's snail's pace. Also, for some reason, for the final level's language, the game throws away the entire process of exploration and deciphering the language gradually and instead gives you a bunch of weird circle-spinning puzzles to solve? which just, translate the language for you? Yeah, okay. The game does have impressive visuals, and every area of the tower feels visually distinct and reflective of its inhabitants. The protagonists running animation looks pretty awkward though. The game narratively has a sense of vagueness like in a fable - people are caricatures, the storyline is mythic and vague. There is a charm to that but you will be disappointed if you're looking for an in-depth storyline or strong characters. Chants of Sennaar has a good foundation but I feel like it plays it way too safe and tries to play down its linguistic aspects to conform more to the conventions of a typical adventure game. However, it doesn't execute that well either and ends up feeling like a half-baked infusion of a puzzle game afraid to let the players feel uncertainty and the familiar stealth and puzzle mechanics that you see in non-stealth and non-puzzle games to pad out the playtime. At the risk of sounding like I want to impose something on this game that it wasn't ever meant to be, I still feel like if the game looked towards The Witness and left its players alone with its languages and its world and the theories and speculations that they could come up with on their own from these it could be something unique among puzzle games.

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!

I have very specific tastes in games - I don't enjoy combat or time pressure. Normal life is stressful, I don't need that in my games too! This is the kind of game I love, exploring and solving puzzles, but not puzzles just for the sake of it, ones that are integrated into the lore of the world with a pretty unique premise. There are a few little bits where timing matters but they are mild enough that even I can do it without getting stressed or frustrated. Absolutely brilliant. I actually got goosebumps near the end.