Even the most enthusiastic reviews of Chants of Sennaar seem to feel obliged to mention the forced stealth sections as a weakness of the game. Depending on the critic, these portions are either labeled as an irritating diversion from the core gameplay or a negligible shortcoming in an otherwise novel and accomplished experience. While I definitely agree that the stealth is by far the shallowest element, I also found it to be symptomatic for a deeper problem that unfortunately affects even the best aspects of the game’s design. For a title about deciphering foreign languages, Chants of Sennaar is far too concerned with translating its encounters with the unfamiliar into all too familiar frameworks of video game tropes.
The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.
Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.
Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?
Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.
Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.
As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.
Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.
Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.
__________________
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The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.
Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.
Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?
Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.
Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.
As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.
Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.
Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.
__________________
More puzzle game reviews
Cocoon
Hitman GO
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4 Comments
@LordDarias I’m very happy to read that this text resonated with your own experiences with similar games! I honestly wasn’t sure if I was being too critical of the game when writing this review, as there are many aspects I like about it. Game Maker's Toolkit and Drax in particular made some great points about the strengths of the game, which made me want to play it myself in the first place. But upon rewatching Mark Brown’s video, I realized that he actually summarizes quite nicely the reason why Chants of Sennaar ultimately disappointed me: “The game is just using the idea of translation as a steppingstone for a set of video game puzzles that make you feel smart.” In the end, the translation puzzles always remain in service of more conventional video game design elements, instead of exploring the unique possibilities that the act of deciphering a language could offer to the structure of a puzzle game. And one of the unfortunate consequences of this approach is that, as you put it, the precise wording becomes more important than the sense of words themselves. Still, I think the concept has a lot of potential left to be uncovered, and I’ll make sure to check out Heaven’s Vault at some point if you can recommend it.
You're definitely a lot more critical of the game than I was, but I really respect the points you've brought up. You make a good point that the game's language translation is pretty surface-level to the adventure game elements and that they could have done more with constructing more elaborate languages. A bit too convenient that there's only about 30 characters per language and they all basically describe the same concepts, not to mention that they don't vary too much in terms of structure. I suppose I still enjoyed it a lot at the end of the day, but just like you, I'd like to see this concept expanded upon further and I'll also be looking into Heaven's Vault sooner than later.
@Drax Thanks, that means a lot. I think your assessment of the game was very fair in the sense that you judged it on what it actually tried to do, rather than what you hoped it would have done differently.
Anyway, happy holidays everybody.
Anyway, happy holidays everybody.
LordDarias
4 months ago