Chants of Sennaar

awesome

[b]“↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A”[/b] [i]-Cheat code understood by any language[/i] [hr][/hr] [b]Chants of Sennaar[/b] told me to push a lever and somehow that was an enthralling experience. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] On the surface it’s a very simple puzzle game where you just push levers, place items in certain spots, and input codes derived from books or environment, but… [h1]X-Factor[/h1] …the main draw of the game lies in its language interpretation mechanic, whereupon hearing or reading new words/symbols you obtain such symbols and can immediately add your own interpretation to them based on the context you’ve heard them or through deduction/induction of the symbol shape relative to other symbols you already know. Each civilization has their own language to understand, each with their own grammatical differences, how they use plural forms, how they build a phrase, how they use interrogatives and negations. One more thing that's quite neat is how the game has huge swaths of color and a very cell shaded look to achieve a certain simplicity, while also uses a crosshatching shader to put some uniform texture back in it that unifies the whole look in the game in a cool way. [h1]Story[/h1] You are a lone figure with no understanding of language who climbs this tower and, in the process, learns the people’s way of speaking and hopefully uses this knowledge to mediate between civilizations that can’t understand each other. Story itself is simple, told exclusively through gameplay and environments. [h1]Downsides[/h1] Navigation doesn’t feel too good, between the absence of a map, camera angles for each zone at different orientations, and no relation of entry and exit points, makes it confusing to get around, especially since you’ll have to wander through the area multiple times, also there’s no way to speed up the process once you know where to go. At some points you’ll be offered pages with a sketch of some action where the game asks you to complete them with words you’ve been collecting, this is very good to avoid you completely wander off-meaning, despite taking away a bit of whimsy from the game but the 3 to 5 symbol validation means it’s VERY much abusable to get the meaning of something you didn’t figure out yet by just imputing the few remaining combinations of symbols for a free solution. [hr][/hr] Good game that focuses on language deciphering in a satisfying way, nothing transformative or that invites very deep discussion but a very neat title nonetheless. It IS just 10-ish hours of content that doesn’t have any replay value so you may want to wait for a discount on the 20-dollar pricetag to get the game despite how good it may be.