Chants of Sennaar (2023)

Chants of Sennaar (2023), developed by rundisc, published by Focus Entertainment

As is so often the case in games, you wake up. You wake up in a sarcophagus of sorts, but not in darkness. Instead, you're in a pillar rising from water, surrounded by high rock walls and yellow light. There's nothing to do but walk forward, over a narrow path to stairs, until you finally find a room with a gate, a lever, and signs in an unknown language.

As you approach, you move the lever. The gate opens. You move the lever again, and the gate closes. Having done this, you now know what the three words you've seen mean, and write them down in your journal. In the next room, you see a man signalling you. His words are a mystery to you, but through his actions, you soon learn their meaning, marking them down.

You are in a tower, starting from the lowest level, and your goal is to reach the top. This task is made difficult by your inability to understand the denizens of the tower levels, but bit by bit, your vocabulary grows, and what was once nonsense begins to make sense.

 

After finding a way to the second level, you'll soon notice the language changes. The people on the upper levels speak different languages, so you'll need to learn them as well. Luckily, you can get some help from old signs with the same text written in both the language of the current level and the previous level, but there are still a lot of new words to learn.

The biggest puzzle of Chants of Sennaar is its languages. This also affects how the story is presented. You are shown things, but when people talk, you don't understand. To understand the world and the people in it, you'll have to solve the puzzle of language before you can properly proceed to solve any of the other puzzles. At times, it can be as simple as the first door puzzle; at times, it's a bit more complex, requiring you to find an item, which can then be used to figure out words relating to it, but only after you've found a keyword from some other place.

Another thing that becomes quite evident soon enough is that the people of the tower aren't communicating with each other. For a long time, they've been suspicious of one another, so any real discourse has disappeared, even though they need each other, be they the devotees of the lowest levels, the warriors of the second, the bards of the third, or the alchemists of the fourth level. This is another thing to fix and can be partly achieved by using the communicators located in the transporters to translate discussions between the people.

 

On a couple of occasions, you are presented with stealth sections. These sections are actually puzzles as well, asking you to first observe what is happening in the environment. Where are the covers, and how are the people moving among them? These sequences are some of the few that are not directly tied to the major puzzle of language. Some might not like them, but they aren't overly complex and can be played through quite fast. Even when they do have fail states, the game is very generous in terms of where you restart after a failure, and progress is not tied to reflexes, only understanding what is happening.

Chants of Sennaar is among the best adventure games I've ever played. It greatly breaks the mould of what an adventure game should be and reforms it into an intriguing mystery, not only of the tower you are in, but also of how to use language as a puzzle in a game. This is something it does extremely well, so much so that it should be used as a benchmark for any game that is following suit.

If Chants of Sennaar sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can get it from GOG and  Steam. It's also available for consoles.