Chants of Sennaar

Developer: Rundisc | Publisher: Focus Entertainment | Release Date: 5 September 2023 | Genre: Puzzle Adventure / Exploration | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

Most puzzle games teach players a set of rules and then gradually ask them to apply those rules in increasingly complicated ways. Chants of Sennaar does something considerably more unusual: it gives players several completely unknown written languages and asks them to work out what the words actually mean.

Inspired by the myth of the Tower of Babel, the game follows an unnamed Traveler ascending an enormous tower whose inhabitants have become divided into five distinct Peoples. Each civilisation occupies its own section of the structure, has developed its own culture and technology, and most importantly speaks and writes in a completely different language. The Traveler’s task gradually becomes less about simply reaching the top and more about understanding these groups well enough to reconnect them. It is an exceptionally clever premise because translation is not merely part of the story. It is the central gameplay mechanic.

The Traveler begins knowing absolutely nothing about the glyphs appearing on signs, objects, and dialogue bubbles. Someone might point toward a door while displaying several unfamiliar symbols, allowing the player to make an educated guess that one means “door,” “open,” or perhaps “go.” Another character might greet someone using the same glyph encountered earlier, gradually narrowing down its possible meaning.

Every discovery is automatically recorded in a notebook. Initially, players can manually assign whatever meaning they suspect to each glyph. Once enough contextual evidence has been discovered, the notebook presents groups of symbols alongside illustrations. Correctly matching the glyphs to those pictures permanently confirms their translations. The game contains five interconnected languages, each with its own vocabulary and grammatical peculiarities.

This system is wonderfully satisfying because the game generally allows you to reach conclusions yourself before confirming them. Seeing an unknown sentence gradually transform into something intelligible as more words are identified feels like genuinely learning a language rather than solving a conventional substitution cipher.

Some vocabulary is naturally easier to identify than others. Concrete nouns such as “door,” “weapon,” or “plant” can often be inferred from nearby objects, while abstract concepts, pronouns, verbs, and grammatical structures require considerably more deduction. Different Peoples also structure their languages differently, forcing players to think about sentence order instead of merely replacing one symbol with one English word.

The notebook prevents this from becoming overwhelming. Every confirmed glyph is automatically translated whenever it subsequently appears, while tentative guesses remain visible until validated. This allows a sentence containing six unknown symbols early in an area to eventually become fully understandable without requiring players to memorise dozens of fictional characters.

The puzzles surrounding the languages are equally clever. Signs provide directions, books describe cultural beliefs, conversations reveal relationships, and machinery may require understanding instructions before it can be operated. Environmental puzzles therefore regularly intersect with translation rather than existing as unrelated minigames.

The Tower itself is divided between five societies with dramatically different attitudes and surroundings. One civilisation might define itself through religion, another through military discipline or artistic expression, and these differences influence both their vocabulary and how they perceive the neighbouring Peoples. Each floor has its own architecture, technological level, and culture.

Much of the story therefore emerges naturally through language. You don’t simply learn what someone is saying; you learn which concepts their culture considers important enough to have specific words for, and how they describe outsiders. It is an excellent example of gameplay and narrative reinforcing each other.

Exploration takes place through fixed-camera 3D environments. The Traveler walks between screens while the camera automatically chooses a particular viewpoint for each location. There is no manual camera control, allowing Rundisc to frame scenes almost like individual comic panels.

The results are frequently beautiful. One moment may show the Traveler as a tiny figure surrounded by gigantic architecture, while another looks almost directly down from above. Small touches can make otherwise ordinary scenes memorable, such as entering an overhead view while a lizard crawls prominently through the foreground. The fixed camera emphasizes the scale of the Tower and highlights the differences between the different floors.

Unfortunately, those interesting angles contribute to one of the game’s biggest problems: navigation. Moving right from one screen does not necessarily mean entering the next from the left. The camera can rotate dramatically between locations, making it surprisingly difficult to maintain a mental picture of how rooms connect. This can be quite confusing, particularly in larger sections where similar environments and shifting viewpoints make orientation difficult.

The game desperately could have used a proper portable map too. Some areas contain physical maps that can be inspected as part of the environment, but there is no general map interface the Traveler can consult whenever required. This becomes increasingly frustrating when trying to return to a particular puzzle or character several hours later.

There are also plenty of screens where virtually nothing happens. You enter, walk across the environment, and leave through another exit. These spaces are useful for establishing the scale and architecture of the Tower, but repeated backtracking makes them increasingly tedious.

One clarification is worthwhile regarding fast travel. It can initially feel as though the game has none because there is no conventional map-based travel menu, but the terminals scattered throughout the Tower do function as limited fast-travel points once activated. The problem is that there are relatively few of them, they are not always conveniently located, and you still need to remember how to reach one. So while not completely absent, the fast-travel system is rather sparse and awkward. 

Those terminals eventually become important for more than transportation. Part of repairing the divisions between the Peoples involves translating conversations between different groups, requiring knowledge of both languages. These later puzzles are a clever payoff because they test whether the player truly understands the vocabulary accumulated throughout the journey rather than merely solving each language in isolation.

The adventure also occasionally leaves linguistic deduction behind for stealth sections. These involve studying guard patrols, hiding behind scenery, and crossing dangerous areas when enemies are looking elsewhere. They are timing-based rather than mechanically elaborate and feel noticeably less sophisticated than the translation puzzles. Fortunately, failure is extremely forgiving. Getting caught generally places the Traveler immediately back at the point just before the mistake, so very little progress is lost. So while the stealth sections are rather weak overall, the checkpoints are thankfully very generous. That generosity prevents the sections from becoming seriously irritating, but they still feel unnecessary. Chants of Sennaar is at its best when asking players to observe and think, not wait for a guard to turn around.

The worst offender arrives much later with a maze-like chase sequence near the conclusion. Without spoiling the circumstances, the game suddenly expects quick navigation through confusing spaces while something pursues the Traveler. It sucks. This, mercifully short, sequence takes several of the game’s existing navigation weaknesses: fixed perspectives, confusing connections between screens, and the lack of a useful map, and combines them with time pressure. It is a bizarre choice for a game whose best challenges allow players to calmly analyse information.

Outside these sections, difficulty is generally well judged. There were several occasions where we temporarily assigned an incorrect meaning to a glyph, only for a later conversation to expose the mistake. That process of revising assumptions is part of the fun rather than something the game punishes.

There is also a useful interaction highlighting feature that can expose objects worth examining in the current scene. This prevents the adventure from deteriorating into pixel hunting and keeps the focus on interpretation rather than searching every decorative object.

The story becomes increasingly interesting as the Traveler ascends. Each civilisation initially appears isolated, often possessing distorted ideas about the others because they can no longer communicate. Understanding their languages allows these misconceptions to become obvious in ways that would be impossible through ordinary exposition.

There are both good and bad outcomes depending on how thoroughly players fulfil the Traveler’s wider purpose. Rundisc itself has explicitly described the incomplete conclusion as the bad ending and the fully connected outcome as the true/good ending. Thankfully, completion does not require committing to another full playthrough. Achievements are not permanently missable, and the game allows unfinished objectives to be addressed rather than forcing players to repeat the entire linguistic journey.

Visually, the game is stunning despite using relatively simple geometry. Its minimalist style combines flat colours, bold outlines, subtle hatching, and architecture influenced by European comic art. The restrained character models work particularly well because faces are rarely the focus. Clothing, posture, architecture, symbols, and colour all communicate cultural identity instead.

Each section of the Tower has its own palette. One area may be dominated by warm yellows and stone, another by deep reds or cooler industrial colours. Moving into a new civilisation therefore immediately feels like crossing a genuine cultural boundary.

The lack of manual camera control could easily have felt restrictive, but the developers use it artistically. Dramatic overhead shots, enormous staircases, partially obscured foregrounds, and carefully framed architecture regularly turn simple traversal screens into striking compositions. Occasionally those compositions work better as artwork than navigation spaces, but aesthetically they are excellent.

Sound design is similarly impressive. Thomas Brunet’s soundtrack combines orchestral instruments with musical influences chosen to complement the different fictional cultures. The official score includes live violin, cello, oboe, English horn, flutes, clarinets, and vocals. The game also knows when not to play music. Some areas rely predominantly on footsteps, ambient environmental sounds, and the echo of enormous empty spaces. The developers have discussed deliberately avoiding constant music so the world could feel tangible, and that restraint pays off beautifully.

Controls are straightforward whether using a controller or mouse. Movement and interaction comprise most of the physical inputs, while glyph selection and notebook management are simple enough that the interface rarely gets in the way of deduction.

The slower walking speed becomes more noticeable during repeated backtracking, though. Once a puzzle solution is understood, having to cross four or five otherwise empty screens simply to reach the relevant mechanism can feel unnecessarily drawn out. Still, those frustrations rarely outweigh how original the central idea feels.

The game is at its strongest when an incomprehensible conversation suddenly becomes obvious because one newly understood symbol changes the meaning of everything around it. Few puzzle games provide quite the same sensation of genuinely having learned something.

Its weakest moments occur whenever it forgets this and tries to become something else. The stealth is tolerable largely because failure costs nothing, navigation becomes unnecessarily confusing without a proper map, sparse fast-travel terminals do not completely solve the backtracking, and the final maze chase is an irritating blemish on an otherwise thoughtful conclusion. Those are substantial complaints, but they surround a central mechanic that is clever enough to carry the entire experience.