Chants of Sennaar

I have to start with a little premise: being graduated in foreign languages myself and a linguistics fanatic when I saw the game was basically becoming a Rosetta Stone aiming to unify 5 different populations I couldn't believe me eyes! This game, apart from the superb Mobius inspired visuals, is the big task of learning 5 languages and make everyone understandable to the other. To do this, you'll have to survive many stealth sessions (annoying, but not too hard luckily) and you'll have to squeeze your brain quite enough, because it's not that easy to be honest. But the satisfaction of finally making the world-tower better and being the grand unifier.. is sincerely great. Also, the music score is always on point and makes your travels a dream journey. If like me you like linguistics and languages and don't mind some stealth.. here you will find a pure gem, something that today is very needed and very meaningful. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3754858799

i would def recommend this game, although i had a few issues. spoiler free review with a couple of general tips. it took me 20 hours to do everything but i'm slow, so i'd trust other reviews more for playtime. i was determined to beat it without a walkthrough and spent an embarrassing amount of endgame play time searching for a couple of hidden things that i just kept walking right by. and i just kept getting lost in the sewers! warning: do not rely too much on holding shift to show interactable things. they have a few cleverly hidden areas/things to interact with. meanwhile the actual language translation was not too hard, because the "languages" are just pictographs. it was still fun to solve it, and i probably would've struggled with something truly linguistically complex. the most cool part, both story wise and puzzle wise, is the goal to learn multiple languages and translate between them. to me, this justifies how simple each language is. a couple times, i correctly guessed the word meanings, but then struggled to guess which journal picture corresponded to which word. i found this mildly annoying, but it honestly became funny that i was that bad at it. if you have my same problem, you don't actually need the journal solution to progress! just go back to it later if you're really confused. the game's story is about helping different groups communicate and resolve issues. i saw it as more metaphorical than trying to address real international relations. it's simple, but quite hopeful and uplifting. however, not all of the problems were due to translation issues, and knowing how some of these people canonically treated each other, it feels odd that things wrap up so neatly without any hurt feelings. i would've preferred a happy but more realistic ending.

Fantastic puzzle game. Highly recommend giving it a go even if it's not your usual play style. The 'tower of babel' style language puzzles, memory games and strategic thinking really make this game shine. With a wholesome and complete story to go with it. However, if you don't like running around like a hamster trying to find a clue, don't play this game. You'll feel like a headless chook at least once during your time in the tower.

I have added it to my list of favorite games. Everything amazing in this game, from music to puzzles. It is unusual for the game to perfectly combine mechanics with the story, but developers did a good job and succeeded in it. I wish learning languages in real life were also as fun as in this game. From the negative side - sometimes it was too much walking and stealth levels were a little bit annoying, but it is really forgivable compared to how well done the other parts. Just play it ;)

I think this game hits "good," for me, no more, no less. Its aesthetics are wonderful and each language is fun to pick at - I think having several languages does have some benefits as a core design choice because it allows for each step of the learning process to be enjoyed multiple times over. Having said that, it's not really a game about learning languages so much as it is a game about decoding; having free access to English at all times means you don't really spend all that much time actually observing these characters once you've solved them. Level design is often very spacious, and movement is very unexciting, which leads to a somewhat excessive amount of dead air. The stealth sections are, bad! And only tolerable because they are aggressively checkpointed. I'm coming away from this one still fairly positive on it, and most of the time I spent with it was still quite good, but I think it loses steam pretty severely in the last 60-90 minutes, ending with a pretty thoroughly unexciting setpiece moment that fell flat for me narratively. Not the worst way to end it, but probably could have been a lot better.

Got this after seeing a recommendation for if you're searching for a game like Outer Wilds. Heartily recommend to anyone who enjoys exploration and puzzle games. Love the translation mechanics, hate the third language. It is very interesting how various languages were formed, the structure of the letters and the sentences, and their differences. The story is rather simple, and for most of the game you are feeling completely lost as none is given at the start, but it's not bad for a game like this.

Una gran sorpresa. Estamos ante un juego de puzzle point & click en el que nos situamos en una especie de torre de babel y para avanzar tenemos que ir aprendiendo el idioma correspondiente. Por fin las clases de sintaxis servirán para algo. Me ha parecido una aproximación original y adictiva. Sumado a su estilo artístico que atrapa desde su presentación, es una opción ideal para echar 2-3 tardes. Además, el juego tiene un mensaje potente en el que la comunicación es el eje central del mensaje.

游戏者，我所爱也。 巴别塔，佳作是也. 震撼，我之感触也 TT

Solving puzzles is hard when you cant read or understand anything so you gotta figure out languages from context clues and such. Theres different languages with like ~30 words each or so. The game lets you fill in whatever you want as soon as you get a new word and as long as its not solved (with a sorta Obra Dinn "get 3 right" method) everything will talk back in your own jumbled word fragments. Can be pretty funny and somewhat amazing when youre kinda off but it still somewhat works. Visually striking, good music Puzzles overall are good and make sense, theres some math but its bearable. Got stuck once because it wasnt entirely clear something could be interacted with in a certain way, coulda used an extra button prompt but thats about it.

Absolutely loved this game. I don't play many puzzle games, but the combination here of exploration, puzzles, language puzzles in particular and the beautiful art just did it for me. Must play if you like puzzle games or if, like me, you did not know there were language puzzle games out there.