Chants of Sennaar Reviews

I’ve never written a review before but since I’ve played and beaten this game 100% and no other reviews exist, I thought I’d give it a go.

Chants of Sennaar is a wonderful puzzle / language translation game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. You travel through a variety of levels and civilizations that all have different languages and your job is to understand each language and facilitate communication between the societies.

All the languages have distinct grammar rules and the puzzles make sense. There’s no weird leaps of logic when solving puzzles which I really appreciate. The worlds have enough detail to feel alive but not too much to overload the player to parse through all the information to find what is relevant.

The story ties into the languages and puzzles so as you progress through the game you unravel the story.

You can tell the developers took great care when creating this game. I encountered 0 bugs or crashes and there’s a bunch of tiny QoL things I noticed during my playthrough.

Achievements were all pretty simple to unlock and none are missable provided you do everything before the end of the game.

The only thing I wasn’t too high on were the stealth sections scattered throughout the game. None were too difficult but they also didn’t seem to fit.

Overall I give this game a 4.5/5.

Have you ever been in a situation where you barely understand someone else, but can kind of get the gist of what they're saying, and the little bits you can make out already make you a bit upset? Like, when you are around some guy who says a whole lot of stuff, but the best you can guess is that they're saying "plant plant dead", and they're really upset about it, and you get it, because obviously plants dying is bad, and it makes you sad. And you want to tell them things will be better. But you can't. Because you lack the common language.

This is exactly the kind of puzzle game I've been looking. It's language puzzles! As you climb the figurative Tower of Babel (where the languages are confounded and people can no longer communicate), you discover different groups of people and their different languages and how they work. This makes it a very interesting puzzle experience and I totally loved every second of it.

I love the low-scifi setting that is present throughout - scifi elements get more pronounced later on in the game, but it's not jarring, it's as if the technology level keeps getting higher as you go up the tower. I also like that the game goes for cel-shaded euro-comic aesthetics. Top notch graphics design, pretty good music too. What I particularly appreciate is just the level of worldbuilding and narrative design on display here. Bloody brilliant.

The only mild thing I can think of as a negative is that this is a puzzle game... but also a stealth game. Now, I'm good at both, I guess. Not sure if the flavours go together too well. But I didn't actually have much problems.

Achievements? No missable achievements as far as I can tell, though people tell you should be doing all the tasks if you want to 100% in the first run. (And even that part is actually pretty much telegraphed.) Well, I 100%d in the first run, barely looking at the guides, and I'll be more than ready to go for another playthrough one day. And I have to say, the last part of the game was absolutely riveting. I wanted to hold back, but I just had to do the last part of the game.

Price? I had no problems with the 20€ price tag, to be perfectly honest. I tried this on GamePass, pretty quickly decided I want to buy this thing, no problems. If you're unsure and just want to go with GamePass, definitely go for it.

My score: 5/5, because I'm a language and eurocomics nerd like that. ...4/5 if you're just a puzzle nerd.