Review: Chants Of Sennaar

Have you ever played a game so lovely, that you wish you could erase your memory of it and experience it all over again? That’s exactly how I felt after playing through and completing Chants Of Sennaar, an absolutely beautifully made puzzle/adventure game from French developer Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment.

CoS pops you in the shoes and robes of The Traveller, a lil lad or lass who awakens at the foot of a massive tower and starts off on a journey to reach the top, for what purpose? Well you’re not quite sure about that just yet, but I’m fairly sure we’ll know when we get there!

So, you start off on your journey and encounter others on the lower level, there is just one problem, they speak in a language you can’t understand, so in this lies the heart of CoS’s gameplay. Using the actions of the people you encounter, or other clues scattered in the environment, you must decipher their language in order to understand them better and progress further.

To do this, you’ll encounter a person and see a symbol above their head, this symbol will then be added to a table you can pull up at any point, using the clues given you can assign a word of your choosing to the symbol, so if you see a person beckoning towards you, that could mean ‘Follow’ or ‘Come’, if you see them hide themselves, then logically the symbol will mean ‘Hide’!

You might see a signpost with different directions on them, one path may lead to a garden, so you’ll pop Garden in as a guess and so on. This helps you get a base understanding of what people are saying, and will help you solve some of the puzzles.

Fortunately, it doesn’t just rely on your guesses, you will as you progress unlock pages in the Travellers journel which contain contextual pictures, you can then take a symbol, and match it with the picture that has been drawn and this will unlock the true definition of that symbol.

It’s a rewarding process as you confirm your own deductions, it genuinely does make you feel quite smart as the game progresses.

Of course, it isn’t just isolated to this one language, you see as you progress through the floors of the tower, you’ll encounter different groups of people, the bottom rung are called the Devotees, the second floor are the Warriors, the third are the Bards and so it progresses. Each group has their own language, and even their own methods of speaking, which you have to decipher again, using the contextual clues from the people and environment, but even through translating one language to another.

The eventual aim, as you might have guessed is to attempt to connect all the groups who have, over time become unable to understand one another and in some cases might even be hostile to one another. It is through this connecting and translating you can help them understand each other again, and whilst I won’t spoil any particulars, it leads to some beautiful moments as you see the changes you make to the peoples of the tower.

Speaking of beautiful I need to take a bit of time to talk about the art and visuals for Chants. It is absolutely gorgeous, with a striking and simplistic art style that really brings the game and its world to life. Each area is lovingly crafted, creating a sense of diversity as you move through the tower. Animations are expressive, drawing you into the world, showcasing its inhabitants and filling you with a sense of adventure.

Now, this isn’t to say the game is perfect. There are maybe a few sections which might prove a bit frustrating, I didn’t have too much of an issue with them, but they did provide a bit of a sudden change of pace when I’d rather have been solving the puzzles and connecting people, and these do come in the form of a few stealth sections.

These sections are quite prominent during the second level of the tower, there is a fairly chunky stealth bit when going between the third and fourth sections and during the latter stages of the game there is a few stealth bits as well as something of an action sequence. Some of the stealth was a touch frustrating to figure out, and I can see a few people maybe not enjoying those as much as the core gameplay. Like I say, I didn’t find them too bad, but I know people do bounce off of that sort of thing.

That said, don’t let that put you off, because Chants Of Sennaar is a beautiful must play title, I was completely engrossed by it for the ten or so hour run time, I wanted to explore everything and figure it all out and I never felt like it was tedious or overwhelming. I had a few moments where I got a bit stuck on a puzzle of bit of language but if you take a bit of time, generally you can figure it out and it feels rewarding to do so.

Chants is the sort of game I was thinking about days after playing it, and immediately wanted to tell everyone about. It’s the sort of game I’ll replay again alongside Broken Sword or Curse Of Monkey Island. It’s quickly shot up into my top ten puzzle/adventure games, a beautiful game that I strongly urge everyone to play!