I said do you speak-a my language?
Whenever I go on social media, I always see some new word that baffles me to the core. The other day I saw someone call Mountain Dew “Goyslop”. Their profile said they were in mourning over a “goonicide”, and one of their tweets mentioned they were using Turkish chewing gum for “looksmaxing”. I didn’t know if I was having an aneurism reading all that, or if he had one while writing it, but braincells were lost somewhere in that exchange. None of those words are in the Bible.
If you want to experience that kind of confusion in a safe environment, you can play Chants of Sennaar. A game all about looking at squiggles and thinking “what the hell is he saying?”. The biggest difference between learning the words in the game and the ones on social media, is that the ones in Chants of Sennaar won’t make the English language weep.
Gameplay
Chants of Sennaar is a point and click puzzle game where you learn language. Instead of collecting items to slam together, you get words. These words are in the form of glyphs, tiny little symbols that represent words, which you don’t understand. Not at first. As you travel through the area, you see the glyphs in different contexts and eventually figure out what they mean.
At first you’ll be deducting the glyphs’ meanings through clues. You see one repeating in sentences, and assume it must mean something like “man”. After you gather enough information, the game gives you a series of drawings that represent the glyphs. You match the glyph to their respective drawing, and if you’re correct, they become “validated”, which gives you their real meaning. Now you know words, and can use them to solve puzzles.
The game is divided into several worlds, each with their own language, theme, and puzzles. You arrive at a new location, investigate things and slowly but surely discover the words needed to understand what you’re being asked to do. It has a very natural flow that does a good job capturing the feeling of studying and learning (in the best way possible).
Along with that there are a few stealth sections and some variety puzzles where you do some light math.
I know what you’re thinking, but this game is fun! I swear!
Puzzles
In point and click adventure games, there are different kinds of puzzles. Ones where you need to find a key to open a lock, ones where you solve a riddle, hidden object and the infamous moon logic. Those are the ones where you have to get a key by rubbing two sticks together to light a fire to scare a gorilla into knocking down a box with the key inside of it. That’s moon logic. The kind of puzzle that was either designed by a fourth-dimensional super genius or a complete psychopath. I’m happy to say that Chants of Sennaar is free of these leaps of logic. Since its focus is on language, its puzzles follow clear, logical rules.
Each area has the tools necessary to solve each puzzle. There are signs with pictures, or on shops, that you can use to infer the glyph’s meaning. You go to a storage area with a ton of bottles, above it there’s a sign with a glyph, so you assume that it means “bottles”. Then, when you go talk to a character and they say that word, you know what they want from you, then the puzzle opens up and you can continue. This progression feels very natural. Things become clearer as your understanding of the language grows.
The game has some clever ways to help the player navigate this mess of unknown squiggles. Each glyph you discover is added to your journal, which you can check at any time. Here you can annotate each glyph with what you think it means. If you see a glyph next to a music shop, you might infer that it means “music” or maybe “guitar”. You open the journal, select the glyph and write down your own guess. Then, the next time you see that symbol, you can mouse over it, and you’ll see your note. This also works in conversations and sentences, where the unknown glyph gets replaced by your guess. There, you can see it in context and find if it works or not. Maybe you guessed that a glyph means “Open”, but when you see it in context, you find that it means “up” instead, so you change your notes and get a better understanding.
This system of personal note-taking adds to the feeling of being an explorer, deciphering these languages. You’re using your wits to come to your own conclusions, and helps a lot with figuring things out. It makes every discovery feel like something you earned, which is very important when it comes to these kinds of games.
Another aspect of puzzle games I think is very important is frustration. This might sound a bit counter intuitive, but I think a puzzle game should frustrate the player to some extent. The feeling of discovery when you finally solve a puzzle is a lot more satisfying if it comes after a few minutes of pulling out your hair and getting completely stumped. The downside to this is that it might make some players quit if they hit a wall they find too high to climb, or it could make them look for a guide, which trivializes any fun you might have.
Personally, I like it when a puzzle game makes me slam my head against the desk for a few hours before finding the solution. Chants of Sennaar has some tough puzzles, but nothing that made me feel completely lost, which is a weird good and bad thing. It’s good because games are supposed to be fun, and getting frustrated isn’t fun for most people. It’s a bad thing, because I like racking my brain over a puzzle. It forces me to think outside the box to come up with a solution.
That’s not to say that what’s here isn’t clever. Not at all. There are some wonderfully constructed riddles here. There’s one where you have to watch a play, which gives you the rules to follow for an upcoming section, and figuring that whole thing out is a multi-step process that combines language puzzles, riddles and inventory puzzles, and it’s a ton of fun.
When the game isn’t making you do Duolingo, it’s trying to get you to do math or other brain-teasers. There’s an admittedly tough slide puzzle near the start of the game where you have to move carts to get a ladder. Then there’s my favorite puzzle in the game, the Alchemist’s riddle. It’s a long, multi-step conundrum where you have to figure out how to make a key using a specific formula of three elements. This involves learning how to use a special calculator to convert the numbers in the formula into weights on another machine. It’s obscure enough to require a little thinking, logical enough to figure out, and complicated enough to make you feel like a genius once you solve it. It proves that the developers know how to make a good puzzle.
My favorite type of puzzles in the game were the translations. In each section there are these little stations that serve as save points and teleporters. Here there is a screen where there will be two citizens from different parts of the tower trying to talk to each other, and you have to translate for them. What makes these bits great is that normally, you’d just mouse over a sentence and see it translated to English. That’s easy. For these, you have to form sentences in the language yourself.
For example, you see something in the warrior’s language, and you understand it, sure. You have all the glyphs validated, you know what they’re saying. Then you go to form that same sentence in the Bard’s language, and… wait… where does the verb go again? What’s the sentence structure here? Do you put the plural before the noun or after it? It forces you to think in that specific language and demonstrate that you understand it. These are incredibly satisfying to pull off and they make you feel like you’re really working with a foreign tongue. It has that same feeling of satisfaction as learning a new language and being able to say “Where’s the bathroom?”.
My only gripe with the puzzles is that I would have liked to see more of these kinds of translation challenges. There are some more at the end of the game, but they’re very simple. Short, basic sentences like “The man looks at the plant”. Maybe there could have been some more complex translations left as optional challenges for completionists/nerds.
Another slight misstep is the lack of big, boss-type puzzles to cap off each area. When you complete an area, you validate all the glyphs and just sort of go on to the next one. There isn’t some big, complicated puzzle you have to do to open the way forward, or some neat little challenge to complete. This would have made completing each section feel more impactful, and less like “Oh the door opened. I’m done here, I guess”. Something that put everything you learned up to that point to the test. The last puzzle of the Bard’s section gets close to this, where you have to watch a play to understand what to do next. It tests your understanding of the language and how to use a specific item, but that’s just in one section.
An idea I had for a more involved puzzle was something where you have to guide another character to do something. Give them instructions like “go up, then push the red button”. It would make for a great test of your grasp of the language and it would be a fun challenge. This would also remedy the lack of back-and-forth communication in the game. It’s all about language but there isn’t any bit where you have to answer someone and make sentences with them. You’re always getting talked at. Sure, the protagonist is mute, and I think they were going for some symbolism where the only one that understands all the languages is mute, but it’s a game about language and you never talk to anyone? It’s a weird omission.
This could be considered a slight spoiler, but I’ll keep it very vague: the last area is a bit of a disappointment. Instead of figuring things out organically through puzzles like in the other parts, for this one you fiddle with some machines doing very simple matching puzzles to translate the language. It’s very hands-off and goes against what the rest of the game sets up. I found it very bland, especially considering it’s the last part that’s been hyped up all throughout the game.
This disappointment is then made worse by how cool the last language is. Its glyphs are made up of smaller symbols, like Chinese characters are. You combine the symbol for “not” with the symbol for “life” and you get “dead”. This is shown to you in an admittedly fun and clever puzzle, but this comes after you’ve validated most of the glyphs using the machines. Figuring this out and then piecing together the symbols on your own would have been a fantastic puzzle if it had been the focal point of the whole section. Instead it’s more like a neat thing they show you at the end.
This last, cool language is also sorely underused. It’s mostly spoken at you, but you hardly get to decipher it yourself, see it in context or use it in translations. It’s sort of there.
Stealth
The other side of the coin is stealth. For some reason, the devs decided that their fun little point and click game about learning needed stealth sections. I will never understand why some game makers feel the need to inject weird gameplay styles in their game for the sake of variety. The game already has enough variety with the different types of puzzles, you don’t need a crappy stealth mechanic.
There’s no way for me to sneak around this one. The stealth kind of sucks. You could consider it a puzzle, since the solution to each section is very linear and limited. You have to do a specific set of things in a specific order. Sneak behind this guard, then throw a rock at that corner to distract the guard, then continue. These aren’t as clear as the other puzzles. You have to do these things, but you can only figure them out through trial and error, so instead of thinking and feeling all smart, you’re repeating the same three seconds of gameplay trying to figure out where to throw a rock.
Another massive, glaring issue with these parts is that there are no cones of vision. You have no way of knowing where the guards are looking. Sure, you know they can’t see you if you’re behind them, that much is obvious, but did you know that there was a guard off-screen looking at you? No? Of course not, since there’s no way of knowing. That’s another thing, guards can be off-screen, but they still have their peepers trained right on you.
The worst part of these is how often they occur. There’s one in most worlds, and the final stretch of the game has you sneaking past guards to get to some switches. The worst offender is the second level, the Warrior’s section. Here you will get caught by any warrior, so you have to sneak around for the first third of this floor. Then you can disguise yourself as a warrior and walk around freely, but until then you have to sneak around while studying glyphs like a mouse doing Duolingo trying not to get seen by a cat. I mentioned frustration earlier, and this bit provides some, but not in the good way. I think the game could have been a lot better without the stealth mechanic. The core language gameplay is strong enough to power an entire game, we didn’t need the gimmicks.
Presentation
Chants of Senaar’s graphics are very striking. Its flat, bold, solid colors and black outlines give it an illustrated look, like a french comic. Each area has a color palette limited to around four colors: A primary hue, a secondary and one or two accent colors. The first area, for example, is mostly orange, with some reddish secondary colors and some greens for accents. This makes each section of the tower look distinct. The dark, gray, black and red tones of the Warriors’ section gives them a cold, domineering, militaristic feel that contrasts well with the Bard’s brighter, white and yellow color scheme, which signifies how they’re more playful and cheery.
The only downside I see with the graphics is the camera. It tries to frame each scene is a specific way, which makes them look nice, sure, but sometimes leads to some odd angles. There are some areas, like the Alchemists’ section, where the camera will point in different directions when you enter a new room, but the angle makes it look like you were going in another direction. For example, you go east and you exit from the north. This makes some areas a bit annoying to navigate since you can’t put each room in space mentally and it leads to some sections feeling non-Euclidean. The library in the Alchemists’ floor was like this for me. That weird Lovecraftian building seemed to wrap around the entire area in impossible angles, which I still can’t comprehend. I’d exit the building and walk away from it, only to find myself facing another part of it. The lack of a map also makes navigation a bit iffy.
These camera angles can trip you up in the stealth sections, too. Sometimes you want to click on a piece of wall to hide behind, only to find that the camera angle makes your cursor interpret your command as “go to the opposite side of that wall”, which leads to getting caught. It’s a minor inconvenience, but it’s an inconvenience nonetheless.
The sound is good, too. A soothing, atmospheric soundtrack with a very ancient and mysterious sound to it. It uses an eclectic mix of instruments, from the more typical violins and oboes, to didgeridoos and mongolian throat singing. Each area has a musical theme that characterizes it, giving each level its own flavor. They loop in the background, but they don’t interfere with your puzzle solving. It sounds lively and varied, with different sections of rising and falling, instruments coming in and out, but it’s not distracting, even when trying to figure out where the verbs go (for fun!).
Conclusion
Despite all the negatives I listed, I still really liked Chants of Sennaar. Its language-based puzzles are really unique and intuitive. Once you figure out the rules, they’re really fun to solve. Each discovery is made using context clues to infer the meaning of words, which you then use to learn sentences, then you understand instructions and other things. It’s very smooth and has it develops in a very organic way. The puzzles are logical and fair, and the information you need to solve them is readily available. I never felt the need to use a guide throughout the whole thing.
The stealth bits could have been cut out entirely. They’re annoying and have a lot of inconveniences attached to them. The lack of vision cones means you sometimes have to guess where you can stand and not get caught from off-screen. Sneaking around in any game that isn’t purely stealth focused is never fun. Splinter Cell and Mark of the Ninja can get away with the slow, sneaky gameplay because they’re fully fleshed out stealth experiences. If I suddenly had to break out Rosetta Stone and try to learn French while sneaking through a military base in Splinter Cell, I’d be a little pissed, too. I’d prefer it if the game did one thing and did it well instead of trying to shoehorn in random mechanics for variety.
That one thing the game does, it does spectacularly well. The puzzles are the star of the show, and they can carry the whole game on their own. My only complaints with the puzzles is that there could have been more. I liked what I played, and had a lot of fun with it, and went for 100% completion, but I still wanted a little more. The systems that the developers came up with are excellent, and they could be pushed further. There could be more complexity to the languages, mess around with sentence structure more, add languages where you have to conjugate verbs, throw in some prepositions. What is in the game is explored well, but it also serves as an extremely solid base for expansion.
I’d love to see a sequel where you wrestle with more difficult language puzzles. It doesn’t even have to follow the same story line. You could be an astronaut communicating with alien civilizations, trying to decipher what words they use and how. It could be about an archaeologist studying dead languages and solving Indiana Jones-esque puzzles in ancient ruins. Maybe make it a really complex game purely about studying language and math, and put in a busty anime teacher so the zoomers don’t get bored.
In short, I recommend Chants of Sennaar, with a few caveats. If you can look past the annoying stealth bits, there’s a fun, engaging puzzle game for you to solve. The other caveat being that, it’s obviously a puzzle game, so there’s not much in the way of replayability. Once you get through it once, you know everything. Unless you do some weird challenge run where you don’t mouse over any glyphs and read them as is, but that’s an issue with puzzle games in general, not just this one.
Play this game, and don’t use a guide.
Wait until you see the sequel. It's a rougelite deck builder pixel metroidvania with no weapons and is entirely comprised of stealth sections.