Chants of Sennaar Part 5 – I’ve been waiting for this. What lies at the top of the tower, and how can I unite the peoples of Babel forever? Stay tuned for more puzzle games, you know it’s good for you.
Edited by: Dan White and Ben Ranger
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*VIDEO SPOILERS BELOW*
Chants of Sennaar review:
The beauty of a single focus game, with one major gameplay loop, is that you can mold the ordinary into the extraordinary. You will not get this unique experience from games that diversify their appeal. Platforming is ordinary, yet Celeste makes it feel divine. Grid puzzles are ordinary, yet Can of Wormholes inspires awe from puzzle design. Language translation is ordinary, yet Chants of Sennaar creates a truly special gameplay loop. However, when given the chance to go all in on what it does best, Sennaar declines and chooses to lose focus.
The main gameplay loop is simple but genius. You see objects, there are glyphs nearby, and you find the meaning of the glyphs from the objects. You often see the same glyph multiple times and form a pattern to determine its meaning. Using pattern recognition in the glyphs’ shapes also helps categorize them. This rapid fire of pattern recognition is sweet sweet nectar that cannot be found in any other game. On top of that, using your newly learned words to affect the world itself is downright euphoric. The language translation theme makes the puzzles feel more meaningful, even though the language translation itself is a front.
Chants of Sennaar is a pattern recognition game masquerading as a language translation game. Defining 30-50 words hardly counts as translating, it’s more comparable to learning the bare minimum when vacationing in a foreign country. You never learn adjectives, conjugation, possession, and more because the game automatically gives it once you fill out the notebook. The developers correctly realize that translating without the notebook is less fun and instead cheat to create a more enjoyable loop. The more the game leans into the rapid fire pattern recognition, the more fun it is.
This loop was so much fun that I wasn’t close to sick of it after four floors. I felt ready to take on more complex languages with adjectives, conjugation, possession, and word orders like subject object verb. Translating to reunite the tribes felt truly beautiful, and I couldn’t wait to finish what I started. I felt so ready to save the world that even the stealth sections couldn’t kill my enjoyment.
Many people said the stealth sections tainted the game. Sure, the stealth was mediocre and boring, but it wasn’t this game’s greatest failure. Stealth made thematic sense in the fortress because you were a trespassing impure. It also retroactively made sense in the caves because the alchemists later asked the warriors to fight that monster (though this plot could still work without the boring stealth). The stealth at the end, however, was a complete waste. You could remove it from the game and nothing would change. This was one of the climax’s many flaws.
More egregious than the stealth sections is the departure from the gameplay loop on the top floor. You stop using context clues, instead you’re handed words in chunks from ring puzzles. You’re not using pattern recognition, in fact you’re not really doing anything at all. The part where you combine words into new words is short and neat, but afterwards, the game becomes terrible. Sennaar took the things that made the game great and threw them out the window.
First, you have to annoyingly backtrack to reach these special doors. I don’t care if you have a pinging locator, this much backtracking is always awful. The language puzzle to open the next set of doors is fine, but it would’ve been more satisfying to have more puzzles follow instead of stealth. The greatest disappointment comes after the stealth when the connections between the anchorites and the other tribes are just handed to you. At this moment, you’re so heavily on rails that it feels like someone else is saving the world instead of you.
The ending sequence is also on rails, and the whole part’s pacing is way off. At least the ‘identify this picture’ puzzles are good, but the rest consists of cheap tricks we’ve all seen before. I’m sure the final scene was touching, but at that point, I simply did not care. They lost me. Upon later review, the final scene was nice, but it does not justify the hour of slop that came before.
In a vacuum, the fifth floor and ending aren’t uniquely offensive. It’s the departure from the incredible single focus that hurts the most. Having a second focus is fine when the two focuses harmonize throughout the entire game. This felt more like a last second 180 for reasons I will never truly know. Maybe they thought they needed to advance the story, but the inception of a good story is great gameplay. Maybe they thought people would be tired of the gameplay loop, but if so, their lack of confidence hurts. Even if they didn’t realize that they had something special, I did, and I will remember how special that loop felt for a long time.
Overall Rating: 8/10 (Great)
If you enjoy puzzle games and are new to the channel, stick around! I have a massive backlog of great puzzle games and am excited to play The Talos Principle II coming soon! Until then, you should check out the Can of Wormholes series I mentioned earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5vQzOlVG7E&list=PLIwiAebpd5CLJC6Mv6zhrmCV9nXn6KmjO
27:40
Devotee:god
Warrior:duty
Bard:beauty
Alchemist:transformation
Fairy:exile
This shows how each tribe sees god the devotees sees god as the god the warriors sees it as their duty the bards sees beauty in the god the Alchemist sees it move in different directions like something transforming and the fairies know god split their languages which is like exile
I enjoyed thegame, but i personally had issues with the alchemists. Like they used word i didnt expect, like formula, gold, and silver to say. I also skipped grabbing the letters at the bottom mural and the fact that both texts had plural when only one was plural.
I really like this game. Apart from the puzzle-solving part, my mother language works as how the language in the game works. This is really fun as I can think about language what I use to do. I have play the game once first then watch Tyler's video.
Can you continue doing Poly Bridge 2 steamtown? Bc it updated steamtown challenge mode with 2 bonus worlds but you don’t do that:)
aww it’s ending now
this game is epic
Man this game was really cool, wish it had more than four levels though
That chase sequence could have used more pop music, doors that warp you from one end of the room to the other and it could have finished with unmasking the true identity of that monster…
Chants of Sennaar ended too soon.
Eggs Aisle lmao
Hopefully, like Golden Idol is to Obra Dinn, some other cool games with similar concepts end up coming out
amazing 🙂
I wish the final problem was you got dyslexia
funfact: the ending prism forms the words
god: because the people of the abbey believe in god
duty:because the warriors civilization was built upon the duty of pushing back the impures (people of the abbey)
beauty:because beauty is one of the main pillars of the bards society
transformation:because transformations,chemical reactions,testing thats all the alchemists thing
and exile:because the anchorites were living forever in a constant state of exile in their little 5 fps VR world of horrible stealth based puzzles,buggy shooter games and D A V E chase sequences
so yeah all of those important pillars of life inside the tower were secretly the friends we made along the way all along
For those who didn’t see the words at the end it was: God, Duty, Beauty, Solution, Exile
Edit: the science one may not be the exact word but it is the general thing
Honestly this ending… is faulty at best… they took everything they did in the first part and completely threw it away… however one thing that I did enjoy was that they made it so that you had to decipher what was supposed to be said when you didn't have the symbols to help. It gave you a final test of your skill at the end of the game. Otherwise the ending… didn't land at all. I honestly would've preferred it if they did indeed keep the cycle with the last language or heck gave you the language of a race without anyone you could talk to and had you figure out their language from writing rather than speaking. That would've been an amazing final language to do.
For those who don't know, the glyphs at the end all translate into what that species(?) holds in the highest regard, for the Devotee's, it's God, for the Warriors, it's Duty, for the Bards, it's Beauty, for the Alchemists, it's Transformation and for the Anchorists, it's Exile. The 3d shape thingy coming together to show all of these words (this is my own interpretation) is possibly meant to show that what they truly love the most, is connection and talking to one another
And now I've binged the playthrough, some things I did faster, others you did faster. I struggled a lot with the bard's language so it was interesting to see how you quickly learned the word order and general terms from the glyphs with all the other languages too
tyler seeing the thing that lets you translate it and ignoring it because he thinks he needs to know it already only to do one the proper way and say he did it by accident later is really funny
1:12 12:05 24:50
WOW IM SO LUCKY I MANAGED TO CHANGE THE LIKES WHICH ARE 8.9K INTO 9K
The 3d shape is representing what is "most important" and each group saw it from a different perspective.
The devotees saw god
The warriors saw duty
The bards saw beauty
The alchemists saw transformation
And finally the anchorites saw exile
It is not a game about languages, it is a game about what languages are about – connecting people