A puzzle game where you decipher languages

Recommending Chants of Sennaar

Hey, Mark here! Welcome to a new series called "Weekender", where every now and again I'll recommend a cool new indie game that you can play and complete in a weekend.

The idea is to highlight clever, inventive, and innovative new releases... that you can finish in about 5 hours. And I'll explain why they're rad in about 5 minutes.

So, the first game I want to talk about is... Chants of Sennaar.

This is a point and click adventure game about solving puzzles, exploring locations, and chatting to people... but there's a catch: you don't speak the language.

All of the text is written in some inscrutable foreign lingo, made up of cryptic glyphs and symbols. But many of the puzzles require you to read this unknown language - meaning that if you want to proceed in this game you'll have to decipher the text, and figure out the meaning of these strange glyphs.

Like, for instance, take this super early, tutorial-style puzzle. You need to fiddle with a bunch of valves to lower the water level but the only clue is this sign that's written in an unknown language (above, left).

However! Those same pictographs are present on a sign next to a lever that opens and closes a door (above right) - so maybe they mean open and close?

And if you apply that logic to the valves... hooray, access!

And so that makes up a lot of Sennaar's gameplay: you come across some inscrutable text, and then explore elsewhere to figure out the meaning of those glyphs using clues and context.

For example... various characters seem to use the same glyph when greeting you - so maybe that one means hello? The symbols on these shop signs probably describe the object they sell.

You can even look at the glyphs themselves: you might notice that all the verbs share a similar characteristic. So do glyphs denoting certain types of people, or locations.

It's a really fun gameplay loop, and the developers found loads of different ways to hide the meaning of these pictographs behind clever deduction-style puzzles. Including a whole numerical system, descriptions written underneath paintings, glyphs that denote social rankings, and so on. It's full of satisfying puzzles and a-ha moments.

Now I would recommend playing Sennaar with a pad of paper next to you, to help with some of the puzzles. But when it comes to translations the game actually has a wonderful built-in interface to log your guesses and hunches. You see, all of the glyphs you come across are stored in a database - and you can then bring up a keyboard to type in your guess.

And now, when highlighting scraps of language around the world you'll see a rough translation with the words you've guessed.

But the game actually goes further than that. When you've spotted a certain number of characters our hero will doodle a bunch of images in a notebook - like this person doing various hand gestures (above). You can then assign symbols from the database to each image and if you're correct - it will lock them in, and replace your guess with an official, correct translation.

It's clever because you have to correctly fill in an entire page to validate your hunch - which massively discourages just brute forcing the answer by trying a bunch of wild guesses. This was likely inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, where the game will only move on if you've correctly deduced the details of three different murders.

But it can also give some of the puzzles away: I was sometimes prompted by these pictures to make associations that I hadn't yet figured out myself. And at other times the official translation was actually quite different to what I had assumed. Perhaps the game would be tediously difficult if the game refused to provide an official translation - but I'd also quite like to play a version of this game where I was left to rely on my own intuition alone.

Anyway. Just when you think you've got to grips with this game's language... it throws a curveball at you. You see, Sennaar is set on a gigantic tower - like, the Biblical tower of Babel - and each level is populated by people who speak a completely different language. Which means you've got to throw away everything you just learned and start afresh.

This turns out to be a really smart idea. It breaks the game up into manageable chunks you can tackle in separate sessions, rather than giving you an impossibly large language to decipher. It allows the game to play with different types of glyph, and grammar, and sentence structure. And it leads to some tough puzzles where you have to translate a message from one language to another - which really puts your knowledge to the test.

It also ties nicely into the story, which I won't spoil here.

Now look: this is not the first game about deciphering language. There's Inkle's archeological adventure Heaven's Vault, and the cryptic sci-fi game Sethian. Plus there are alphabets to unpick in games like Fez and Tunic. But I think Chants of Sennaar is my favourite take on the concept so far.

You see, I think some of these games end up being overly complex because the devs have tried really hard to make a robust fictional language that stands up to scrutiny. Chants of Sennaar is certainly not doing that: each population only speaks about 30 words and the same symbols are somehow used in both written and spoken language.

It's illogical and utterly contrived. But it doesn't matter. The game is just using the idea of translation as a stepping stone for a set of video game puzzles that make you feel smart. And it totally works!

At least... when the game is focused on what it does best. Because sometimes it turns into a sliding block puzzle, or a tedious stealth game. I've talked before about the danger of suddenly shifting genres so I won't blather on. But for the most part, Chants of Sennaar is all about language. And when it's at its best this is a really satisfying game with a clever central mechanic, a terrific set of puzzles, and a wonderful story to tie it all together.

It's definitely one of my favourites of the year so far, and at about 6 or 7 hours to finish everything... it's a cracking way to spend a weekend. You can get it on PC, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation - and there's a free demo on most platforms.