Connecting people through the power of language

September 27, 2023 9:52 AM

Chants of Sennaar [Launch Trailer] “Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz (20 comments total)

That sounds amazing, putting in on my Steam wishlist now!
posted by Rhedyn at 10:06 AM on September 27, 2023

But I think fun is the wrong metric for this game. Is viewing ancient Egyptian sculpture fun? Is reading Ovid or Virginia Woolf? For that matter, is learning a language? Sometimes. But we do these activities to experience a different kind of pleasure: accessing a shared understanding of what it means to be human, across barriers of time and interpretation.

Psh, nah. Who cares about what it means to be human, I just wanna feel smart and accomplished without having to do any actual work


Sounds like it might be fun to play with kids. I think mine might be too young to enjoy it on their own, but maybe fun to sit together as a family and figure it out/adults drop hints until the kids figure it out.
posted by Baethan at 10:25 AM on September 27, 2023

This game rules - I gulped it down over the course of like five days. Something about it just lights up the exact right parts of my brain.
posted by Ragged Richard at 10:43 AM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

GMTK also reviewed this very positively.

I've got it on my Steam wishlist as well.
posted by allegedly at 10:47 AM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

This looks like it's at the intersection of Sable and Heaven's Vault - both of which you should play - and I am fully invested.
posted by mhoye at 12:00 PM on September 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

This looks right up my alley. Heaven's Vault scratched a very specific itch (I've been meaning to replay it, but I get easily distracted (it's Starfield at present)), and it looks like this game might scratch that same itch, too.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:18 PM on September 27, 2023

Heaven’s Vault is really, really good and is worth replaying a lot, I’m intrigued by this as well! Give me all the language puzzlers!
posted by corb at 1:18 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Heaven’s Vault is really, really good and is worth replaying a lot,

I finished it recently, and it was a mood, but it's so slow for something so big, even the first time through, I'm not sure I can face it again. And even though I was trying to carefully explore all the things, I apparently missed bits because I didn't X while a specific Y was happening for arbitrary reasons, no backsies, which always annoys me (though I'm fine with missing events because I chose to do something else)

This, though, this looks the biz.
posted by Sparx at 2:29 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Happy to see this on the Blue - I stumbled over it browsing the Switch e-shop a couple of weeks back and subsequently played the whole thing in a couple of days - it’s comfortably the best puzzle game I’ve played in years.

The linguistic part of it is really neat - not only do you learn the story of what’s happened by decoding the languages, you understand the cultures of each group of people by the way their language is structured and the word choices made, and the way they related to the other people groups and their languages. It’s incredibly well thought out and it manages that elusive trick of making the player feel smart and empowered as they solve the puzzles and piece together the bigger picture. It genuinely feels like you’re uncovering it all for yourself rather than solving a series of disparate puzzles (looking at you, The Witness).

Really strongly recommended.
posted by parm at 2:59 PM on September 27, 2023

Oooooh, I gotta try this one.
posted by humbug at 3:48 PM on September 27, 2023

Heavens Vault had serious problems. One playthrough didn't give you enough language to read the final inscription. This meant that in order to actually understand what was going on, you had to play at least twice. And the final inscription didn't offer the autotranslator interface that the entire rest of the game trained you on, basically just because Fuck You as far as I can tell. That second playthrough was painful, because while yes, I made different choices, I still had to sit through so much boring sailing. And it wasn't clear how to use my choices to affect the story. The second time through, I would have liked to try to [do a thing], but I somehow screwed something up early that affected my relationship with the appropriate person such that I couldn't even ask the question that would have let me try.

Also, the main character wears a headscarf and it's totally unexplained. Like, it would be one thing if she just happened to be part of a multicultural universe and we could infer that she's an observant Muslim or something similar. But this takes place in a small, relatively homogenous culture. The MC is the only character who is shown with a headscarf. A fictional religion is a part of the story, and as the main character, you have the option of responding positively or negatively when it comes up -- but not the option of saying, "there is no god but Allah", (or whatever) which is what a religious person might say. It just seemed half-assed: a gesture at multiculturalism without actually considering what it might mean for a character to wear a headscarf.

Also the language of Heavens Vault is English. Just with funny orthography. Most egregiously, future tense uses "will"+"be". Yow. This sort of thing can work -- The Gostak (Muckenhoupt) is delightful. But the The Gostak doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is (how could it? The whole thing is written in Gostak).

It wouldn't be so bad to decide encoded English if you did so using logic. But instead, you just find random objects with random inscriptions and the game gives you a few choices for each word. If you get it wrong, eventually the game lets you know -- but not, like, diagetically you suddenly find a statue of the water goddess with the word you thought was "fire", but just some text, "wait, that can't be right". Basically, translation was fake.

So I am very reluctant to try another translation game unless someone tells me that it avoids the flaws of Heavens Vault.
posted by novalis_dt at 4:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sounds like a more fleshed out version of the alien-number-systems puzzles in the museum in Rama
posted by one for the books at 4:57 PM on September 27, 2023

FYI there's a brief demo on Steam. (No demo on Playstation that I can see.)
posted by neckro23 at 5:45 PM on September 27, 2023

I played the demo of this and thought it was kinda neat but it really annoyed me that once you have put a set of words into the correct spaces in the Notebook of Translations, whatever you have typed into the word-holes is replaced with the official translation. I was enjoying putting my own spin on the word choices.

It's on my wishlist; I'll probably get it when it's on sale.
posted by egypturnash at 6:02 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I play very few games, but after reading the Polygon review, this sounds fascinating! Could someone who's played weigh in on how doable the stealth sections are for someone with absolutely no experience and very little skill at that type of thing?
posted by eponym at 8:22 PM on September 27, 2023

I play very few games, but after reading the Polygon review, this sounds fascinating! Could someone who's played weigh in on how doable the stealth sections are for someone with absolutely no experience and very little skill at that type of thing?

You will probably find them a little annoying, but they're also extremely short. Generally speaking, you'll be sneaking through a room or two, and they make up a pretty small portion of the overall game. And, like the review says, you get to try again immediately when you fail.

Personally, I'm terrible at stealth in games - right now I'm playing The Last of Us, and I'm supposed to be sneaking around but I just end up in a brawl every five minutes. I found the stealth sections in this game to be pretty manageable. Note also that the full game already has walkthroughs posted online, so you can watch a video of someone getting through these rooms if you're getting stuck.
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:55 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

So I am very reluctant to try another translation game unless someone tells me that it avoids the flaws of Heavens Vault.

Apparently I'm just selling this game today! I've never played Heaven's Vault, but from your description, Chants of Sennaar does not have any of those specific flaws.
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:57 AM on September 28, 2023

This reminds me a lot of my old favorite, Captain Blood. I'll have to check it out, thanks!
posted by MrVisible at 10:14 AM on September 28, 2023

hnnngh, Colonel, I'm trying to decode a set of glyphs but I'm dummy thicc and the clap of my ass cheeks keeps alerting the guards
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:21 PM on September 29, 2023

...seriously though this is kinda bullshit
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:57 PM on September 29, 2023