Chants of Sennaar - A Language Barrier
- Reuben Levine
- Feb 17
- 8 min read
Chants of Sennaar is a 2023 adventure video game developed by solo dev Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment. It is a puzzle game at its core with aspects of adventure and exploration. This game is heavily inspired by the Tower of Bable story. Throughout the course of the game, you will travel further up a monolithic tower, discovering groups of people who all speak different languages. You will do your best to decipher what they are saying and eventually translate for them all and connect them together.
The gameplay itself is simple, with buttons to move, interact, and edit your massive journal of symbols. Occasionally, you will be afforded the opportunity to guess which words mean what and get a definite answer if you are right. This will also unlock the ability to understand how those words are being used grammatically.
The Good
Undirected free-form puzzle solving is the absolute piece de resistance of the genre. Most games will pit you in a linear series of rooms and make the puzzles obvious and separate from the core mechanics of the game. Only truly amazing titles, like Superliminal, are able to mix the core mechanic with the puzzles that they create. Chants of Sennaar is able to take this one step further and mix its core mechanics with its storytelling, its worldbuilding, storytelling, and the puzzles themselves. This free-flowing mix of puzzle and game allows for an invigoratingly powerful sense of immersion. You begin to meld with the game and act, just as it does, as a single entity. Your small character dutifully traverses the massive set pieces and tactfully learns the different strange languages that surround you.
The sense of being a microscopic part of a larger machine is prevalent throughout the entire game, and the luxurious and monolithic buildings that surround you only add to this. Really, the power of this game comes from discovery. There is no exposition, no explanation, no expectation of what is going on around you, but slowly, you are able to discover the world around you. Even within the tutorial, you are shown archaic paintings with runic symbols that hint towards the lore of the game. You don’t know it yet, but those symbols are part of a language that you are about to learn, and these paintings are crucial to your understanding of that language. The sense of discovery, alienation, and assimilation is permanently prevalent as you try to insert yourself into the problematic society of the spire.
Playing this game makes you feel like a rouge explorer from a nation far away. You don’t speak the same language as anyone, and most of the time, you're guessing as to what people are saying to you. You have to figure it out, though, or else you will not be able to progress. Being plunked in the middle of a foreign place is hard enough, but when you don’t speak the language, it’s even harder; Chants of Sennaar does this to you four times, with each level of the spire requiring previous knowledge on top of the new language. Sneaking your way around dangerous areas, exploring your way to the exit, or finding the key to let you out of whatever level you are on is exhilarating and fascinating.
The stand-out part of this game is its puzzles. The sheer range of puzzles that are presented makes this game outstanding alone, but the quality of them expounds this. The puzzles all interact with the unknown languages in one way or another, and many times, the answer is spelled out in front of you, you just can’t understand it. This means that you are combining the inference that you have gathered from seeing symbols in certain places with the puzzles themselves in order to get a clue as to what to do. Piecing together every available artifact of information that you have is a mental puzzle that will have you cracking a smile every time you solve it. Being forced to use every ounce of information the game throws your way makes you feel attentive, smart, and like the great Sherlock Holmes, even if
you are struggling.
Truthfully, the satisfaction of solving puzzles in Chants of Sennaar is like no other. It is an absolutely sublime and ecstatic feeling that takes over after each minor puzzle is solved. As you slowly progress through the game and learn more of the languages and culture of the people around you, you begin to acclimate and adapt to the individuals that you meet. You are able to understand what you are witnessing and get a grip on the story that has been in front of you the whole time.
At the very beginning of the game, you will come across a few people talking to a group of armoured men who are standing in front of a recently closed gate. While you can’t understand anything that is being said, it is obvious that something is wrong from the body language and tone of the small crowd. It takes a sizeable portion of the game before you are able to understand the language of the crowd and the guards, and even longer before you can understand the context behind what they are saying. While this might sound like a critique, this emergent storytelling takes place throughout the entirety of the game and blends seamlessly from plot point to plot point.
Discovering Chants of Sennaar is the most powerful thing that it has to offer as you carefully explore abandoned mines and converse with frustrated strangers. As time goes on, you approach your final goal of uniting the people of the tower. This feels insurmountable, to begin with, but quickly, you understand the importance of your task. As the story builds to a crescendo and you can see the problems that face every section of the tower, you are told to use all the knowledge that you have been dutifully accumulating to solve the final puzzle of fixing the relations between the communities. Importantly, you can see the physical changes that happen to the world after you communicate with each person, for example, the gate I mentioned before is opened, and the crowd is free to move as they please.
I can rave about the incredibly satisfying feeling of completing puzzles in this game, but, just as I said in the beginning, it's how the puzzles interact with every mechanic of this game that makes them so good. Nothing feels like it was added just to extend the run time, and nothing feels cheap. The game is exactly what it was designed to be, and that is something incredibly awesome.
The Bad
I like to think that I’m good at puzzle-solving, it is one of my favourite genres of games, after all. However, I would be lying if I said Chants of Sennaar is easy. I’m all for a challenging puzzle, and I recognize how hard it is to strike the balance of easy to impossible, as finding that difficult sweet spot is challenging. For somebody linguistically challenged (as in they struggle with new languages), this game can be incredibly difficult. The fact that the mechanics are so intertwined with the puzzles means that if you are bad at one part of the game, you are bad at the whole game. Chants of Sennaar is unforgiving, and its puzzles are ruthlessly hard. There is no hint button or helpful little spirit to guide you in the right direction. Having an option not to do the puzzle allows for an easy cop, which is something you want to avoid however, due to the difficulty of some of the puzzles in this game, it might be necessary.
On top of the insurmountable puzzles, I found the occasional language quizzes to be extremely confusing. Every once in a while, you're able to match symbols to images, and if you are right, you will get the actual definition of the word confirmed. This is a great mechanic and an excellent way of affirming player knowledge. I did find, however, that the images were very confusing and sometimes, even when I knew what a word meant, I didn’t know what drawing it equated to. This was incredibly frustrating and sent me to the internet more than once to affirm knowledge that I had, which defeats the stratification of solving the puzzle yourself.
Mechanically, this game is very strong. It relies a lot on typing, so it does not suit some of the consoles that it is sold on, but I did not find this to be too much of an obstacle. I struggle to find things to complain about as all of the mechanics work as intended, even if that is a little frustrating at times. In one very particular puzzle, I found that the answer I put in was determined as wrong, despite the fact that the online guide told me I was right. I’m not sure if this was a bug or if I missed something earlier, but this was incredibly annoying.
The Other Stuff
To quote Cog Connected, “Every frame of this game is art.” The art style of Chants of Sennaar reminds me of games like Journey, which is critically acclaimed for its sheer beauty. The levels are incredibly visually distinct, and the setpieces between them are outstanding. The sense of scale that you get from the tower is immense. One of my favourite parts of games is simply walking through the world when getting from A to B, and this never fails to be enjoyable in Chants of Sennaar. The characters in the game all blend together thematically, and the bold colours add to the strange sense of fogginess that is infectious throughout the game.
While the music isn’t anything to write home about, I think that’s what makes it so amazing. It never takes attention away from the beautiful art or challenging puzzles but instead enhances whatever emotions you're feeling at that point in time. For example, when you step out onto a ledge and get to bear witness to the massive expanse of land below the tower, the music swells responsively. Chants of Sennaar had a grip on every sense of mine from beginning to end, which really helped make it an incredibly strong game.
Anyone who is looking for a challenging puzzle or a beautiful piece of art is going to have a fantastic time with this game. As long as you're not expecting anything ridiculously easy, I think this will absolutely be the game for you. While it is challenging in places, I think with some applied thought, anyone will be able to crack even the most complex of puzzles. Being able to feel so smart from cracking the codes in this game is a really powerful and enjoyable feeling and one that I think anyone could have.
We will be giving Chants of Sennaar a Gold rating as it is absolutely something that you should play at least once in your life. If you like feeling smart, solving puzzles, or witnessing sheer beauty on your screen, this is the game for you. This is a raw gem of ideas, inspiration, and exploration that should absolutely be considered for your collection.
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Reuben Levine
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