Video Game Review: Chants of Sennaar
My review of a puzzle game that mimics the thrill of language learning
Since my review of The Forgotten City was released, I have been looking for other works in the medium that would fit the focus and scope of this blog. Instead of limiting myself to the time period, I wanted to push the boundaries as soon as possible to determine the extremes of what I intend to cover in these reviews. There are some aesthetic elements borrowed from the classical period in Chants of Sennaar, but the main focus of the gameplay is the transmission and comprehension of foreign languages.
You play as a hooded figure that traverses 5 levels of a structure reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, each with a different method of speaking. For my money, this experience is the closest example to the thrill I get from translating without actually having to sit down and put a thousand hours into Duolingo to learn a new one. Most puzzle games that involve language in one way or another approach this emotion, but Chants of Sennaar has a few tricks going for it that push that connection to the next level. Some of the tribes that occupy these environments use constructs reminiscent of languages similar to ours, others don’t. Like Spanish, one tribe surrounds their questions in punctuation. Like Chinese, other tribes have characters that indicate a plural form (unlike our common enclitic form of the letter -s). Then again, one tribe uses the OSV sentence structure, which linguists regard as the least common seen across all known languages. Players learn to discern these attributes through a variety of inscriptions, dialogue, and aspects of the written characters themselves as they progress through the environments.
On top of the gameplay, the beauty of the world is a sight to behold. Each tier on the tower gets its own color palette and architectural design that mimic the culture of their respective tribes. The abbey’s glaring yellows and deep crimsons conjure images of the desert landscape on the other side of the walls of the tower. The futuristic Anchorites that dwell in countless skyscrapers at the top of the tower, on the other hand, are bathed in muted blues and purples. This works both as a hyper-realistic image of a cloudy city lit up at night and as a symbol of how they are the only ones who understand and lament their isolation from the other tribes of the tower. In order to fill out some of the more sparse parts of the map, all forms of critters and creatures occupy out-of-bounds areas. If the player stumbles on a crevice that the tower’s inhabitants have overlooked, occasionally whatever animal (typically a John Woo-esque flock of pigeons) has taken up residence there will be startled by your presence. This detail fills out the world masterfully, and justifies the player character’s idle animation that stares in awe at the ceilings above him.
The biggest bone I had to pick with the game was the player’s lexicon itself. Some of the pictograms were incredibly unclear for what they were meant to convey. The one for “to be,” for example, has what I perceived as a worrying grimace, which I thought was supposed to mean something along the lines of “sorrow” or “dismay.” I also struggled with the picture for the word that the bards used to describe themselves because I encountered it at the same time I uncovered the word for monster, and assumed that the masked figure was the one wearing the caricature of the mask. There are a couple of examples of this that cause frustration and dissatisfaction early on, but they did not subtract from my overall experience. Really, the greatest disappointment of the game is that it does not take full advantage of the disconnect between the inhabitants of the tower. There are some postgame areas where the player is expected to utilize the grammar rules of the languages to translate conversations, but these exercises only establish existing knowledge. I would have liked to have seen the developers push the concept to its limit. There are many examples of bilingual inscriptions across the game, but they occur sequentially and with earlier knowledge contributing to later knowledge. If we had seen inscriptions in the bard’s language around the abbey that could only be understood on the third floor, it would have given the player more incentive to explore and immerse themselves in the world. None of this would have had to be necessary to complete the game, but instead it would add an additional level of challenge that devoted players could return to after finishing the main story.
I finished this game in just under 10 hours, which I would guess to be about average. I may have had a natural advantage over the average English-speaking person going into it, but I also got stuck in a number of places because I broke my play sessions up over 2 weeks. Not only did I not fully search the sewers in the third world, leaving some glyphs ambiguous in meaning, but I forgot about the “hint” mechanic that revealed that the fruits were able to be picked to unlock the organ grinder monkeys. This really is a piece of art that can be experienced on a higher level than the last video game I reviewed, so despite the similar costs and playtimes I would wholly recommend that it be purchased even at retail price. From an aesthetic perspective alone it verges on justifying the $20 price tag, and the prospect of a spiritual successor or sequel that includes a case and/or conjugation system covers the rest. It’s much too recent of a release to truly anticipate any future developments, but for now I’m eagerly awaiting Rundisc’s next release. I give Chants of Sennaar 2 out of 3 stars.