Chants of Sennaar (2023)

A well constructed puzzle game where you journey through language, and a tower. There are no 'aha!' moments where the solution clicks like one might get in a traditional puzzle game but a still enjoyable and pleasingly organic process of exploration and inference, with some latitude for educated guesswork.

The visuals are stunning. The fixed, quasi- isometric views recall Monument Valley, but the environments are more tangible and real. The art style has the clean outlined geometry and bold flat colouring of Sable or Rollerdrome, but executed better and more boldly. Combined with the religious iconography, and there's a real sense of grandeur to what is, at heart, a very focused game.

Environmental storytelling, or reading notes left scattered is a bit of crutch in games, set dressing being shootouts, but here it's vital to progress, and thus, enthralling. It captures beautifully how language is a lens through which one can understand culture. By turns whimsical and touching, it's a special game.

Fantastic puzzle game where you have to decipher the dialogue of alien civilizations through the books and visual cues you discover around the world alongside other elements like machine functions/signs and character expressions.

This is the best puzzle/adventure game I have played for the last decade. Rarely have a played a puzzle game where progression felt so satisfying but with visual rewards but more importantly how much more it unveils of the story and the dialogue between the characters and its world. Going the extra mile and 100% is also the most rewarding I’ve seen in a game in a long time where most games will just give you a new uniform or a godmode/option unlock this game actually gives much more story/lore and visual treats like changes to the world and cutscenes.

9.0/10

So far I'm really enjoying this and it felt super unique. I couldn't help thinking of it as a mish-mash of Myst and Obra Dinn with both the positives and the negatives of both. I just hope that it doesn't get stale, I just finished the second section. A few of my nits:

• I ended up having to do a lot of backtracking and it was not the enjoyable type
• I wish there was a better journal feature to go back and look at conversations
• The stealth sections were completely unnecessary

Still need to work through some of the biggest titles of 2023 before I settle on a GOTY, but this is definitely a strong contender. Gave me some of the same feels as Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn.

I didn't mind the stealth sections at all but I actually like stealth and play stealth games soooo....yeahhhh. Also I think those sections are much easier with a mouse and the game in general feels like it was designed with mouse and keyboard in mind. Controller works fine, it's just kinda clunky and slow in comparison, especially when you're trying to do all the language stuff.

Oversimplified opinion: Return Of The Obra Dinn but for linguists

Sub-genre: Puzzle game, walking simulator, Obra Dinn-like, biblical story

Favorite part: Acting as a translator between the 2 different tribes.

Rating: 3/5

Review: Another one in the books for my love of puzzle games where you have to clear chunks of info at a time. Overall the gameplay loop was calming, engaging, and cute. Didn't feel too easy, nor too hard. In a rare turn for me I did not have to google solutions once. So a tip of my hat to the designers.

Sound and visuals wise though, it left me wanting more. I typically find these type 'low-poly-Unity-like' games to be graphically boring. Easy each level had an incredibly distant color palette that I enjoyed (even the pee rivers haha) but other than that it left me sleepy. As well the music and sound design was pretty unobtrusive, for better or for worse I do not remember a moment of it already.

In case of the story, it was quite thin and the non true ending really did nothing for me. Truly the story to me only existed to service the gameplay loop. Not to say more could've been done for it, but it fell totally flat.

Long story short: it's a fun puzzle game!