What is Chants of Sennaar?
Chants of Sennaar (Chants for the remainder of the review) is an indie puzzle adventure game released on September 5, 2023 for the Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, and GeForce Now. I played it on PC through Steam and it took me a little over 8 hours to beat the main story. It costs $19.99 currently. In Chants you play as the Traveler, a hooded figure, who has to ascend a mythical tower by deciphering 5 different languages and uniting the peoples of the tower.
Game Review:
Indie games that stretch our imaginations with their puzzle design and thoughtful detail are some of my favorite games. Chants hits all those high marks. Similar to my review of Tunic, this game is full of mystery and intrigue. You don’t really know what’s going on at all and you need to piece it together as you progress through the game. As you play you will meet characters and beings that you aren’t sure to be trustworthy, but you can’t really communicate so you need to experiment and observe to see if they are friendly or not. You will encounter puzzles that have instructions with unfamiliar words, so you have to go to another area and work out what the words mean before you can return. It’s a game that masterfully blends the mystery of its story with its gameplay so that they are intrinsically tied together.
As I mentioned, the gameplay mostly consists of language translation. In this game there are 5 languages you will have to translate, all of which have different hieroglyphics. Each people group in the tower has a different language and in order to progress up the tower you will need to use knowledge and tools you learn from each group. It may sound like a lot but know that there are a ton of contextual clues that will help guide you. For instance, one of the first puzzles in the game brings you to a lever next to a door with a symbol at the top and bottom of the track. You pull it one way and it will close, and you pull it the other way and it will open. Through this you can piece together that the first symbol means “open” and the second symbol means “close”. The puzzles do get more convoluted as you progress but there are environmental guides placed throughout the world.
The way that Chants lets you experiment and take notes with the words and symbols is so intelligently done. You can write what you think each word means so that when you look at a piece of writing in the world it will show what you think it means. And then to finalize and lock in what a word means is to pair a word with a picture that will generate in your notebook at certain checkpoints through the game. Once you have it paired with the correct word, the game will properly translate that word in the notebook and all future writings that include that word. The game doesn’t let you lock in a word incorrectly however, which is helpful because there were definitely moments when I had my words mixed up and confused with other words. If the game didn’t have safeguards in place, I probably would've become exponentially more and more wrong.
I also loved how the hieroglyphics and vocabulary choices matched the people groups you were interacting with. The warrior people group has a very harsh and choppy language while the bards have a flowing, poetic language. These are subtle details that I think make Chants so good. Some of it however does make it more challenging. Such as the different people groups have different grammatical sentence structures. The bards in particular were tricky for me to translate from the other groups because their sentence structure was just so different. So be prepared to think about grammar as well while playing through Chants.
Puzzles also play a big role in this game. Not only is the language translation a puzzle itself but then you need to use that newly acquired knowledge and apply it to other puzzles. Some of which are genuinely difficult. One example later in the game is one where you have to decode an entire numerical system which I was not prepared for. That (along with several other head-scratchers) sent me looking up a guide on how to get through them. So if you are not usually a puzzle person, I would recommend looking to guides for help because this game is not easy.
Language translation is not the only form of gameplay. There are a number of stealth sections where you have to correctly time your movements to avoid the gaze of enemies. The stealth sections weren’t my favorite because your character is pretty limited in terms of movement but these sections were a nice change of pace.
This game is playable with a controller or mouse and keyboard. I played mostly on mouse and keyboard because I preferred being able to type with a keyboard, but there were several puzzles and intractable items that I couldn’t quite figure out with the mouse and keyboard. When I switched to my controller in these situations, the solution and way to interact made more sense. I still played mostly with mouse and keyboard after that, just because typing is such a major part of this game.
The story in Chants is very unique. You spend most of the game knowing you need to get to the top of the tower but don’t know why. There’s a bunch of cryptic messaging and the different people groups have different superstitions or beliefs about the reality of things. This all culminates with a bizarre twist at the top that makes you rethink everything you just learned and recontextualizes it. It’s a great story that has a good message about reconnecting and how people should be unified.
Family Friendliness:
Chants would be an awesome game to play with older kids as they can practice analytical thinking and problem solving. I also think it would also be great for kids interested in linguistics. It is a bit complex for littles and there are also some scarier moments in the game where a monster chases you and you have to avoid it. But other than that, there isn’t really any mature content.
Features for Parents:
Chants utilizes an awesome autosave feature. Every time I closed the game, it would say that it autosaved in the previous minute. There aren’t a ton of accessibility features but most aspects of the game don’t require quick reflexes or great manual skill. This is a game that is more about how good of a thinker the player is and I think that’s pretty inclusive to people.
Final Verdict:
Chants of Sennaar is a hidden gem from 2023. It’s one of those games that won’t get a ton of buzz because of its indie status and how niche it is. But it’s one of the best games that came out in 2023. It would’ve made it on my top 5 had I played it during that calendar year. It is a must-play for people who love puzzle games.
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