Chants of Sennar is a beautiful, elegantly designed game, and everyone should try it out.

I don't want to oversell it, but novelty in gaming is really, really important to me. Chants of Sennar goes for something completely unique and absolutely fucking nails it on the first try. It is a sort of modernization of the puzzle/adventure genre, except the main puzzle is deciphering the language of the world by seeing glyphs, guessing at their meaning, and then filling out contextual diagrams in your diary to lock them in and populate the world with the translated version. Locking in words is so damned satisfying, particularly when you find out that your assumption was right on the money. You can kind of brute force stuff sometimes, when you know most of the clues, but even that's satisfying.

At first, the world feels really enigmatic and opaque, but Chants of Sennar guides you perfectly and almost imperceptibly through the story. There are some adventure and stealth elements, which are decent, but nothing spectacular on their own. However, the beautiful, Moebius-esque artstyle, silky animation, and iconic storytelling really help to put them over.

I don't want to spoil any more, but Chants of Sennar is truly outstanding. If you're looking to play something fresh and different, give it a shot!

*coughs* You misspelled it.

Anyway, this seems intriguing but... is it OBTUSE? I can't do obtuse games!

I was pretty interested in this game until I read Tyler Glaiel's review of it:

'Tyler Glaiel' said:

Chants of Sennar is a puzzle game where you are exploring a society where you don't speak the language of the society. Characters will talk to you in a language you don't understand, signs will be posted in the same language, and you have to learn what the symbols mean via context clues, slowly building up an understanding of the language these people speak so you can use that to solve puzzles. You can type your best guess for any given symbol, and then that guess shows up under it, and seeing it show up like that on other dialog boxes or signs can help you understand if your guess was correct or not. Like hey, I thought this word meant "hello" but this guy just said that to me then walked away? Oh maybe its like "Aloha" where the same word means both hello AND goodbye depending on context? Or hey, maybe I guessed this word wrong and just had to live with the incorrect guess until it really stopped making sense? Wait, was this whole language right to left instead of left to right? Double meanings, wrong guesses, inaccurate translations, it's a really cool thing to uncover on your own the more context you find.

Here's the thing though. I kind of lied. The game I described is not what Chants of Sennar is. It's *almost" what it is. And if it actually was that I'd be putting it up there with Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn as one of the best adventure puzzle games of all time. But it fucks it up entirely with ONE mechanic: The notebook. Shortly into the game, a notebook pops up and makes you match symbols to pictures. If you correctly match all of the pictures on a page, it confirms that those symbols mean that picture, and locks them in and corrects whatever you typed for the symbol into an official, canonical translation. As soon as this happened I basically shouted NOO0O0 at my computer. Don't do this! The game didn't NEED that! This isn't Obra Dinn, the confirmation that you translated the symbols correctly is the ability to actually solve the overworld puzzles! All of that stuff I mentioned about living with mistakes or letting me be confused as to why my best guess translation didn't match up exactly... gone. That never happens. The game confirms that what you thought was "hello means "greetings" and then the next thing that happens is you see someone say "goodbye" using that symbol and walk away. When you get to an area of the game that features a right-to-left language, it literally never even lets you be confused about that, the notebook immediately opens and it immediately confirms that the language is right to left with the first page of symbol matching, before you even have a chance to be confused about it.

So the game kind of just ends up being a generic puzzle game that is aesthetically about languages, but actually just about matching symbols to pictures and then solving generic adventure game puzzles. It's a shame since it's so close to being amazing. It just needed to not get in its own way like that.

I've seen other people say it's good though!

Zero said:

*coughs* You misspelled it.

Anyway, this seems intriguing but... is it OBTUSE? I can't do obtuse games!

God damn it. I blame my declining eyesight for the misspelling. It's not really obtuse. It just initially seems obtuse. (See below)

Secret_Tunnel said:

I was pretty interested in this game until I read Tyler Glaiel's review of it:

I've seen other people say it's good though!

Well, if you really want to try his dream game, you could just NOT fill those notebook pages. You can attribute your suspected meaning(s) to each symbol without it, and the notebook shouldn't be required to solve puzzles. Maybe the game gates some kind of progress behind them, but it doesn't seem to me like it does.

The notebook is cheese-able (that's what I was referring to with that brute force comment above) and a very game-y mechanic, but it's also what makes the game accessible and breezy. It might actually be interesting to try to beat the game on just assumptions, but getting a few things wrong might get really frustrating, as one incorrect assumption could easily snowball into more. A chosen few would love it, but the vast majority of people would probably just stop playing the game or look up the solutions. And it's still satisfying to confirm that you actually WERE correct with the notebook.

I don't think Chants of Sennar is, like, the way forward for all games. I just find it to be a clever and unique puzzle adventure game. It provides me with a new type of fun, which is pretty rare.