Indie Game of the Week 402: Chants of Sennaar

Playing The Case of the Golden Idol last month has given me a craving for more abductive reasoning logic games and it just so happened Game Pass had another one on there by way of 2023's Chants of Sennaar by French studio Rundisc. Biblical scholars might recognize Sennaar, or Shinar, as a location featured a few times in the Old Testament as the southern part of Mesopotamia where the city of Babylon once stood: it is, in fact, referring to the Tower of Babel from which legend states all the world's many varied and diverse languages were spawned after God cursed the Tower's builders for their insolence. (Big guy doesn't seem to have minded all the skyscrapers built since though.) Chants of Sennaar is about language and linguistics as a result, with much of the gameplay focused around taking the lexicons of the five groups occupying the game's tower location and translating what all those symbols (or glyphs, as the game calls them) mean.

The language translation part is pretty cool. Much of it you'll be piecing together from context clues and confirming it later once you have enough solid information to go on: your protagonist will then pull out their journal and jot down some images (or possibly glyphs learned on an earlier floor) for you to insert the glyphs you've just pieced together, or at least are now in a position to do so. Once you've attached the right glyphs to the right pictures, they become "confirmed": prior to that, you're free to attach any guesses you might have. From conversations, books, scrolls, graffiti, signposts, and other texts you can eventually glean the entire lexicon of the current floor and also append any odd grammatical rules that might be relevant. For instance, the flowery and indolent Bards of the third floor all talk in a syntax that goes object, subject, verb (similar to Yoda) which is important to note when you're learning their language from conversations or else need to communicate with them. Likewise, the floors have different rules for plurals: some require an additional glyph before or after the noun to be pluralized, while the devotees at the bottom level of the tower simply repeat any noun to indicate a group. The scientists/alchemists, given that they're integral to their work, have a significant portion of their lexicon dedicated to the digits 0-9. It's a very streamlined process of what actual paleolinguists go through (one assumes; not like I have a degree in that shit lying around) but rewarding to ascertain, especially when you talk to someone again after your first meeting and their frantic gibberish now makes more or less perfect sense.

Beyond these language barriers to overcome, Chants of Sennaar also has some more traditional puzzle-solving as well as a few stealth sequences. Each of the game's screens uses a forced perspective which can (but not always) help in the latter by keeping all the patrolling guards in frame, though more often than not the line of sight isn't always immediately apparent until you've been spotted and need to restart the sequence. The stealth also allows you to stick and move between cover or else go "free", with the added risk that the cover becomes more unreliable. It's not the most elegant system but fortunately, beyond the warrior's fortress (the second level of the tower), stealth becomes less and less a factor going forward. Other puzzles might involve creating something by configuring a machine just so, navigating mazes, or else using the glyphs you've learned to solve riddles. Nothing too challenging if you make sure to check every place you can go: even some innocuous dead end might have a mural with some useful translations on it.

Visually, the game has this wonderful cel-shaded style with stark contrasts between light and shadow that reminded me of Journey more than once (and not just because they share a sandy setting) and the fixed perspective means they can do some fun stuff in the foregrounds and backgrounds, such as lizards scaling the walls above your head or legions of soldiers marching in formation some far distance below your perch. Each floor has their own apropos visual language too: a color palette (the militaristic warrior fortress is mostly gray with some red tinges, for example) and architecture that reflects the vibe of the current floor's society as well as emphasizing the ideological distances between the five tribes. It's only towards the end of the game where you're able to start building links and helping them overcome their language blocks does the world start getting a little more homogenized as the various floors' denizens start meshing. The look of the glyphs, too, have a certain logical consistency to them that might give sharp-eyed players a head start on figuring out their meanings: the glyph for "man" or "person" in the devotees' language also appears in a bunch of their other glyphs too, such as those relating to people in specific roles like their "preacher" leader or the glyph they use to refer to themselves and the other tribes.

I appreciated how smart Chants of Sennaar is and how it expands on that by respecting the players' intelligence in turn, letting them confirm glyphs at the earliest possibility not just to help them understand that they should have all the information at their fingertips by that point but to make things easier for those that are already well ahead of the curve. If the game has a failing at all it's those darn stealth sequences, but even they're not particularly egregious or difficult at the end of the day. That confident, cinematic (dare I say, Chahi-an) presentation combined with those puzzles both linguistic and otherwise made for a pretty compelling adventure game that, despite having five different languages, wasn't quite as inscrutable as I might've dreaded. Alas, I don't think my hankering for more logical deductive puzzles has quite abated just yet. Maybe I should try Heaven's Vault next? Or Rise of the Golden Idol? (Or I'll just keep playing even more picross instead, which seems the likeliest possibility.)

Rating: 5 out of 5.