Chants of Sennaar - A Good Time for Linguists with an Anthropological View
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
Rundisc’s Chants of Sennaar isn’t a puzzle game in the traditional sense. It’s "puzzles" will be familiar to the average gamer, what with you needing to flip switches in a certain order or rotate statues in specific directions. But there isn’t an internal logic there, no ruleset to pick apart and master. Instead, the instructions for the solution are almost always right in front of you, scribbled in a notebook or plastered across a giant sign. The catch is that these are written using mysterious characters, and the real puzzle is learning how to read them.
You do this by finding clues throughout the game world, a massive tower based on the Tower of Babel that houses several different cultures, each cordoned off into their own distinct, brightly colored layers. A simple clue may be something like a lever with two settings, each labeled with a different symbol. Pushing the lever up opens a door, while pushing it down closes the door. As the game progresses, though, clues will require picking apart more complex samples of language such as a book of sheet music, a priest’s sermon, or a joke between two guards.
This is all simple enough when you’re decoding the first language you encounter, which is the most straightforward of the bunch. But as you begin to pick apart the language of the second layer, it becomes clear that these aren’t just one to one translations. Many words in one language don’t have direct equals in others, and beyond that, each also has its own unique system of grammar. For instance, where one language might make a word plural by simply repeating the word once, another may use a suffix. And while some languages may have a word for "no" or "not," others may represent the negative by bracketing entire phrases.
This level of detail lends a richness to each language, as well as a believability to the conflict that lies at the heart of the story, in which an inability to communicate caused the tower’s community to splinter into the insular factions that exist at the game’s outset. Chants of Sennaar is also clever in the way it confers the kind of deeper understanding that comes with mastery of an entire language. When you start out translating a new language, you’ll jot down possible translations in a notebook that contains each word you’ve encountered so far. Then, whenever you come across the words in the world, your guesses will show up underneath them.
At certain points in the game, you’ll be asked to match those words to sketches representing their meanings. If you’re able to match an entire page of images (usually about three to five of them), the correct translations will be locked into your notebook in bold. Once you do this, the in-world translation of lines containing only confirmed words will change from a literal, word-for-word translation, with choppy, broken phrasing, into a fluent, cohesive phrase.
As intellectually stimulating as Chants of Sennaar’s richness of detail is, its most glaring shortcoming is its lack of the kind of hooks that might engage the player in a more innate, pleasure-oriented sense. Where most similar games have puzzles that provide a cycle of escalating challenge and reward, Chants of Sennaar’s are more like periodic exams—ones that check in on you every so often to make sure that your vocabulary is large enough to move on to the next area. And where many other games with similarly dense world-building conjure an air of wonder which might drive you to poke around in search of answers, the world here (while occasionally pretty) is neither surprising nor terribly magnetic.
The result is an interesting and impressive game that ultimately feels more than a bit academic, where solving intricate puzzles to uncover the hidden inner workings of a strange world mostly feels like an interactive and particularly creative linguistic anthropology lesson. Which is to say, Chants of Sennaar ought to be an exciting game for fans of, well, linguistic anthropology. But if you aren’t one already, chances are that it isn’t likely to make a fan out of you.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Sandbox Strategies.
Score:
Developer: Rundisc Publisher: Focus Entertainment Platform: PC Release Date: September 5, 2023 ESRB: E10+ ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Mild Language Buy: Game
If you can, please consider supporting Slant Magazine.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
The post <em>Chants of Sennaar</em> Review: A Good Time for Linguists with an Anthropological View appeared first on Slant Magazine.
https://www.slantmagazine.com/games/chants-of-sennaar-review/