Review: Chants of Sennaar

So I’ve had this interest for constructed languages ever since I’ve read Project Hail Mary. Chants of Sennaar was one of the games that came up in my search of games that also did something with learning and discovering new languages. The other two I’m still interested in, but will have to be looked at later are Heaven’s Vault and The Edifice.

Anyway, in Chants of Sennaar you’re a nameless speechless character where everybody is just desperate to speak to you and communicate, ignorant to the fact that you don’t speak their language, or any language really. As far as immersion goes, this hasn’t really been addressed in the game’s story. Many games have main characters that never utter a single word, but in a game that is focussed around communication and language this was a bit ironic.

All characters talk to each other using unique glyphs. Where each glyph equals a word. You collect all these glyphs in a small compendium. Whenever you have investigated enough points of interest in the game, the book unlocks a new page with a couple of drawings, where you have to couple them with the correct glyphs. If all glyphs are correct for the current page the meaning of the glyphs is permanently unlocked and is visible as translation when talking to the different inhabitants of the tower.

Before unlocking the glyphs, you have the option to assign a word to a glyph with your keyboard. Which makes it easy to keep track of assumptions and guesses. Some glyphs were bang on the money immediately and didn’t pose much of a challenge. Others I was way off for a while. I think I had the most trouble when entering the third level of the tower. I was bombarded by a whole set of new glyphs and it took me the most time to translate the glyphs and find their meaning.

What was somewhat frustrating is that after finding new glyphs, I immediately jumped to the notebook to translate the glyphs to their supposed meaning. You can do this action during a conversation or examination of a POI. Jumping out of an examination or dialogue triggers the unlock of a new page with drawings to link your glyphs. My eagerness to immediately note my findings in my little booklet felt wasted as I would be unlocking their confirmed meaning just a few moments later.

Another small gripe, which I have to admit I am guilty of, is guessing the last glyph of a page. There were a couple of times I was extremely sure of two of three glyphs I had to link to a drawing and just went through the remaining glyphs one by one for the final unlock of the page. It’s not pretty, and I’m not sure the developers should have addressed it, as it is just laziness on the player’s side. And even though I knew it was deriving me from the full gratification of unlocking the glyphs using my own brainpower, abusing the system was just too easy and allowed me to progress faster. Which in the end was the aim of the game, right? Translate, explore, rinse and repeat.

Learning each language in isolation was pretty fun, and fairly straight forward. The languages themselves could have been more diverse from each other, the only real core difference between languages was mostly how words are pluralized. If you do some research into modern languages you find plenty of different constructs that could have made every language feel more unique instead of just a new set of glyphs. Nevertheless finding out what each glyph meant and putting it all together was still an engaging and gratifying activity.

What wasn’t fun was the stealth gameplay sprinkled in. There are a couple of segments in the game where you can’t be seen by the inhabitants and you have to stealth your way to the next screen. It felt out of place in an otherwise very enjoyable game. I’m sure this is a personal thing, it wasn’t particularly hard, but I still dreaded these segments. I guess they’re just not my cup of tea. I am thankful to the devs for providing many savepoints throughout the stealth segments. I would have been a very frustrated camper if I had to restart every stealth segment.

A bit further into the game, you had a chase scene with another AI-driven character. I really liked that, there were clear “rules” to the chase. Lighted areas couldn’t be entered and you had to work your way through without it reaching you. There was a bit of stealth here too, but due to the clear restrictions it felt more like a puzzle traversing the screen. Instead of just waiting for patrolling guards to turn their backs and moving at the right time. The latter providing no real challenge, just a tedious waiting game.

In order to fully complete the game, you have to make the inhabitants of the different floors of the tower understand each other. You do this by translating one set of language glyphs to another. This is another small gripe I had with the game, but is mostly forgiven. Which is that you can’t really take long breaks from the game. Leaving too much time between play sessions, will result in forgetting the grammar rules of language x or y, which makes translation all the harder. The game provides you with the little book which is a vocabulary of all each language. But if you have forgotten the grammar, you’ll have to go back to talk to people to remember how it was meant to be spoken. Since it’s a short game, this isn’t a huge problem as I could reach the end in little over a week of sporadic gaming.

I’ve had some minor irritations with the game, but would still recommend it to anyone who likes a puzzle game with some interest in linguistics. The constructed languages could have been made more diverse, but the core gameplay of learning each language and translating for different denizens of the tower was fun and I would love to see a game expand on this some more.