Chants of Sennaar
In this award-winning puzzle adventure game, play as the Traveler on a quest to reunite the Peoples of the Tower. Observe, listen, and decipher ancient languages in a fascinating universe inspired by the Myth of Babel.
Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle, adventure and singleplayer game
developed by Rundisc
and published by Focus Entertainment.
Released on September 05th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 14 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Latin America and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 18,385 reviews of which 18,084 were positive and 301 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.6 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 12.99€ on Steam and has a 35% discount.
The Steam community has classified Chants of Sennaar into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: AMD FX-6300/Intel Core i3-6100
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB VRAM, Intel HD Graphics 530
- Storage: 601 MB available space
- Additional Notes: 30 FPS average, 1920x1080 with High preset
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Alright. Chants of Sennaar is done and dusted. This is an interesting isometric adventure set on an enormous tower where all the world's people seem to live and yet are separated via six levels of said tower. Each level represents a society, be it a religious society, a warrior society, a society of builders, of bards, of scholars, or, well, something else. Each society has its own unique language which features different runes to represent words, as well as different sentence structure in some cases. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3357573204 You play as an unnamed heroine, who wakes from some sort of crypt and whose goal is to reach the top of the tower. In order to do so though, you must learn each society's language and rules. And unfortunately, each society/level of this tower is separated from the others via policies of fear that keeps them divided. There is certainly quite of bit of subtle social commentary to be found in this premise, and one which feels important for people to acknowledge. As you learn each society's language, you will use this to solve a number of puzzles in order to breach through to the next level, all the way to the very tippy top of the tower. In some areas, this takes the form of simple item puzzles, in others, you will play cat and mouse with enemies while still also trying to find necessary items. Some of the puzzles can actually get somewhat complicated. In order to learn these languages, you will need to speak with everybody possible and read everything possible. You will then begin to associate certain runes with certain meanings. These will all be stored in a journal. The game allows you to type in your guesses, and there will be multiple times in a level where you will be given a journal puzzle wherein it shows you various images that can be associated with various runes, and you need to correctly guess or surmise which rune is needed for which image. Completing these puzzles will reveal the actual meaning of each rune used in these puzzles. There are ways to find enough of these puzzles to solve every rune's meaning for each language. It is also possible to miss some of these, and so being thorough is your key goal for each level. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3358324082 You also will find ancient terminals that are/were used to communicate between levels. These have three features. First, they serve as a fast travel system, and you can freely travel between any of these terminals you have found. Second, they serve as an essential story unlock system if you intend to see the game's true ending. Third, they each also feature a puzzle which unlocks...something important. Some of these puzzles will be correctly translating and matching runes from two languages to complete a conversation stored in the terminal. The other puzzles are more complicated and require you having reached a certain point in the story to access them. I thought the level design in this game was particularly well thought out. The devs really put a lot of thought into sensible interconnectivity, and it shines throughout the game. The story itself, as mentioned, is all about reconnecting people who are divided by fear and hate and a lack of understanding due to language and cultural differences. In so doing, people have a chance to do something better with their world. Visually, this has an almost cel shaded appearance. It's a lush and vibrant world filled with really cool and distinctly different levels/societies. The vistas as you enter new levels can be simply stunning and do a great job of showing off the sheer scale of this tower. the actual lives in areas make you wish you could visit them IRL. The graphics style is reasonably unique IMO, and everything is done by incredibly talented artists. The audio tracks are likewise well done with very believable sounds provided by living breathing societies and a soundtrack that is always perfect for the moments of the game it represents. When at certain points, people are laughing, it kinda made me chuckle, lol. I encountered zero technical issues while playing this game. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3357766991 Personally, I thought this was a fantastic and challenging experience where words are central to everything. Very cool, very well thought out, and a lot of fun. I received this as a gift, but it 100% earns its $19.99 asking price. And I'd say there is nothing else quite like this game on Steam. Definitely worth a look. If you found this review helpful and would be interested in supporting my Curator group, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32549618/]Robilar's Reviews , it would be appreciated. Cheers. Also follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/]IndieGems for more reviews like this one.
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Perfect game. Wish the endgame was a bit longer, felt like it ended right as you achieve mastery. I was itching to do more full translations. What am I supposed to do now with these languages I've learned.
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9/10 When peoples cannot understand each other, they cannot trust each other. Can you learn 5 different languages and help people communicate? What is it: A mixture of point & click adventure, deduction, stealth and puzzles. You wake up in a tower-of-babel kind of world, meeting people with strange languages, and you have to piece together different kinds of clues to translate 5 very different languages. The story: Not to spoil too much what's going on, the setting is inspired by the Tower of Babel story. There is a big tower with 5 different kinds of people in different sections. They each have their own language and writing system, and cannot understand any of the other people. And you start the game not understanding any of them! Little by little, doing some good linguist/detective work, you start understanding a few words, then more, until you become fluent in all of the languages, and realize that the 5 different groups need each other, and you act as a translator to help open the doors keeping them separate. The gameplay: This is a fantastic game! The core mechanic is a point & click adventure game, you navigate around by clicking where you want to go and what you want to interact with (but the game works just as well with a controller). Unlike a true p&c game, there aren't that many objects to find and use, just a handful, instead what you need to do is find written text to read, see what other people are doing, and try to talk to them. Each new word you discover is added to your journal, and you can write your own translation guess for it. Then, whenever you see/hear it again, you'll automatically have it translated, as in "XXX YYY ZZZ", when hovered, will show a hint like "You ... Me". Of course, your guess may be wrong, in which case the translation could be misleading. But when you discover a group of related words, you draw a story in your journal and if you correctly place the words as annotation of the actions in your drawing, they get their true translation. And here is where the game shines: the way you discover these stories is very well done in a variety of ways. Sometimes you find text written next to a mechanism you have to use, like "AX" and "BX" on a lever next to a door, and you notice that pushing it up opens the door, pushing it down closes the door, so you guess that maybe "X" is "door", "A" is "open", and "B" is "close". Sometimes you have to figure out what people are doing, like this guy that approached me in a secretive manner and signed me to come. Does that mean "you follow me" maybe? Does he have a secret to tell me? And then I find him, he says two things and runs away, and he does this a few times, until I realized that we're just playing hide and seek, and what he's saying is "you seek me" and "you find me". There are murals and statues showing stories, with labels either in one or two languages, and there are papers, and many other ways you can learn and decipher some new words. And from not understanding a thing people are saying, slowly you piece together the whole language. And a lot of care went into designing the languages. They're not just made up words in the Latin alphabet, but new graphical systems with different styles and different grammar rules, well thought out. For example, after deciphering half of the first language, I noticed that symbols in a square refer to places, symbols with a c on the left refer to objects, and since that symbol means "garden", or "place for plants", so that inner symbol means "plant" and that symbol with a c means "plant pot". Part of the language design is also culture and relations with other peoples, for example the first people name themselves "devotees", but the warriors call them "impures". Devotees' language has words for tools and plants, Warrior's language is centered on duty, Scientists' deals a lot with numbers and chemical elements, etc. Near the end of the game you can compare words in all the languages and see similarities and differences, trends and commonalities. Once again, well designed languages and cultures. Other than point and click and text deciphering, there are other aspects to the game. There are a bunch of minigames to solve to retrieve some things, one group hates you so you have to play stealthy and not get noticed, there's a monster that cannot stand the light, and a few logic puzzles. All in all, lots of things to do. How hard is it: Moderate, with a bit of logic anyone could finish it. How long is it: 5+1 different sections, quite big, should take 10-15 hours to finish. Level design: Great, a very good variety of means to learn new words, different architectural and musical styles for each section and different designs for each language, good puzzles. Quality: Very good. Excellent graphical presentation, an old book illustration style in a 3D environment, immersive ambient sound and some good music, good UX, plenty of settings, multiple save slots, good Steam integration with cloud save, good achievements, trading cards and Steam Deck support, no bugs encountered. No "wrong moves", any action is safe, and mistakes just roll back a bit of time, e.g. when the monster catches you. Worth the price: Yes. Most positive aspect for me: Deciphering languages. Most negative aspect for me: Not having an index/glossary of past conversations/texts, if you want to talk/see again a piece of text you have to go back to where it happened. What would make it better: Add a way to see past text other than going physically back to it. Add a map. Add more voice acting, not just basic grunts, but invent actual spoken words. Make it harder/longer to decipher the last language, don't cram everything in just 3 terminals. Make the Abbey doorman not chase me away after I literally became the savior of the world. Add more interactions with the people at the end. Also consider: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/774201/Heavens_Vault/?curator_clanid=25928931]Heaven's Vault , language deciphering. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113690/Senna_and_the_Forest/?curator_clanid=25928931]Senna and the Forest . deduction puzzles but in English. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1219020/Kilis_treasure/?curator_clanid=25928931]Killi's Treasure and [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186690/Timpus_treasure/?curator_clanid=25928931]Timpu's Treasure , point and click adventure+deduction puzzles, shorter and easier. For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group .
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i generally dont leave reviews, but there are a couple things about this game that i believe can be improved. overall, it's an enjoyable, unique, and novel concept: theres a bunch of different races in the tower of babel and none of them speak the same language. you must translate all of the languages by hand, solve some relatively light puzzles, and get to the top of the tower. the core gameplay of how you go about translating the languages is fairly engaging; you start by guessing what each word in a language means based on context alone, but eventually you can verify your guesses to see if your assumptions were correct. however, there is some room for improvement. one of the issues i have with the game is how the difficulty/challenge dips at past the mid-way point. generally, the game sets up the precedent that each language you encounter will be slightly more difficult than the last, introducing or changing syntax rules to keep the challenge fresh. the game peaks in difficulty at the bard language, which is the mid-way point of the game i spoke of earlier. however, the challenge becomes stale by the alchmeist language which doesn't seem to introduce any "new" syntax rules that surprise the player and make the language stand out on its own (it's really just the warrior language rehashed with a swapped plural and a very simple base 10 numbering system). it can be argued that is a subjective opinion sure, but the difficulty doesn't ramp back up or introduce anything new for the final anchorite/exile language , in fact it gets even easier. spoilering the rest since i dont want to completely ruin the fun of discovering it for yourself. truth be told i am not even sure how the anchorite/exile language works because of how it was presented. instead of utilizing the established gameplay loop of figuring out the syntax of the language based on context and having quizzes to validate your work, you just visit a few terminals, match some words 1-to-1, and bam you know the whole anchorite/exile language in under 10 munutes, no brainpower required. no idea how the anchorite/exile language is structured at all as a result, since they essentially freely give you the answers very quickly. my second gripe of the game is with the story, which i will just largely hide being spoilers. however, non-spoiler version, the story elements that were established and built up through most of your ascent of the tower were kind of just... thrown out? it felt like a huge bait-and-switch, and not a terribly fair one at that, since the precedent the story sets up doesn't mesh well with their switch. of course this is just my personal opinion. more specifically, i am not a fan of the exile and anchorites as a whole. the VR trope is overdone, and undermines the themes the game sets up since the beginning. god? doesn't really exist, it's actually just a bunch of gamers. the impures? who knows what they are, since their role as the antagonist is thrown out and replaced with tron's MCP, with pretty much no build-up or foreshadowing of its existence beforehand. we never really find out who the people of the tower were, who the anchorites were and why the built the tower, or where the exile and impure fit in. the story at the end feels rushed (both narratively and mechanically) and mishandled. it's not necessarily "bad", but the lack of proper build-up and suddenly clashing themes makes the ending feel rather lackluster. anyway, this is a good game and an easy recommend from me. it just had the potential to be better, but still worth playing and experiencing for yourself edit: some peeps have been kind enough to correct some points regarding the impures. in short, "impures" is how the warriors describe the devotees, and the impures are not the same thing as the monster despite what the murals portray. this was obvious enough when i went through the game early on, but i suppose i forgot this point when i encountered the actual monster at the beginning of the alchemist area. it was pointed out to me that the mess found in lab 3 is the probable origin story of the monster, who is likely just an alchemist that fell victim to a failed experiment. if this is the case, then there is still some minor inconsistencies: if the monster is new or relatively recent, why do the seemingly ancient warrior murals depict several monsters of the same kind? and if the depiction of the impures as the monsters is purely metaphorical, then why did the actual monster you see take on the exact form as seen in said murals? im sure it just boils down to artistic direction and im overthinking it, but food for thought. im keeping my previous points about the impures in to help this edit make sense to those that read this review.
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I majored in Linguistics in undergrad so I'm a bit biased here, but I found Chants of Sennaar to be an astoundingly good title, just incredibly inventive right through its final moments. One of those truly rare games that shows you a genuine, proper puzzle of logic and language, gives you just enough context to solve it, and leaves you feeling tremendously clever. This is a game you can absolutely breeze through and enjoy simply for its surface-level elements (music, art direction, conveyance, etc. are all top-notch). But if you dig into it a bit and really pay attention to how the languages work, how they're connected to one another, and how they're contextualized within the history of the in-game world, you'll develop a much fuller picture of Rundisc's masterstroke. I'm finding Focus Entertainment an increasingly sure bet when it comes to publishers with solid repertoires - keep these guys on your radar for sure. Well done to everyone involved, absolute recommend from me.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 17 November 2024 12:01 |
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| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 23:09 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 14:01 |
Online players
322
Developer
Rundisc
Publisher
Focus Entertainment
Release
05 Sep 2023
Platforms
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