Chants of Sennaar wants to strike a big blow with its strong visual identity and its concept which is just as strong. It’s more than a success, it’s a gem.
After publishing Varion, their very first game in 2018, the French from Rundisc are back with Chants of Sennaar. This time, the studio wants to shine with a puzzle game that is quite explosive in both form and substance. But we know that standing out is not always synonymous with success. We therefore had to wait to get our hands on Chants of Sennaar to find out if the bet was successful. We’ll tell you right away, it’s a big yes, so count it among the unmissable September releases.
A surprising idea that appeals from the start
At the start of the adventure, the mysterious hooded character that we control wakes up at the bottom of the Tower of Babel. Several peoples live in this mythical place of biblical culture, but without interacting with each other. Each of them occupies a different floor of the building and has its own coded dialect. Except that our character is not like the others. He wants to try to mingle with the different ethnic groups, decipher each language and finally bring them all together. This rather original framework is mainly there to justify the concept of decryption around which Chants of Sennaar revolves.
Each time you discover a new glyph (which corresponds to a word) while chatting with someone or reading a document, your character will write it down in his notebook. At this point, depending on the context in which the glyph was used, you will be able to try to deduce what it means by noting a suggestion using the console’s virtual keyboard. Concretely, if you see that at the beginning of each sentence, the people around you use the same glyph, there is a good chance that it corresponds to “hello” in our language, for example.
Once you have discovered several glyphs relating to the same theme, then comes the elucidation phase, still in the notebook. Our hero then draws a small scene in his notebook and you must choose the correct glyph that corresponds to it. If your suggestions are correct, the words associated with the glyphs are then revealed. This is an essential phase to successfully solve the more complex puzzles which generally allow you to unlock access to go further into the tower. In addition to helping you with the puzzles, the decryption will also allow you to better understand the rather classic scenario of the game. The universe of Chants of Sennaar has a lot of charm, but the story itself, despite its strong historical context , does not really take off.
A game that doesn’t take us by the hand
If this concept can be confusing on paper, the title begins smoothly enough with the first symbols that are very easy to decipher. On the other hand, it quickly becomes more difficult to guess the word behind a sign, especially since each dialect has its own grammatical subtleties. And when the plural or negatives enter the dance, we can rack our brains for a long time.
In the game, exploration is also part of the experience. Discovering an additional dialogue or a mini-game can help to understand the meaning of a glyph or to complete the notebook with new drawings. On the other hand, this necessarily involves more back and forth and not everyone will necessarily have the courage to do it, because the main plot already requires a little too much for our taste. In addition, the areas are sometimes very large and our character does not really shine with his movement speed.
Chants of Sennaar therefore requires you to be very methodical in the way you progress so as not to accumulate glyphs without translating them at the risk of finding yourself lost. It’s even worse if you don’t take the time to write down suggestions when you discover a new one, because you probably won’t remember in what context a symbol was used and then the back and forth becomes inevitable.
Complex and original puzzles
On the other hand, don’t expect to be able to solve the puzzles in the snap of your fingers just because you have fully translated the dialect of a language. Even once the glyphs are decoded, the puzzles also call on your gray matter. They are generally very subtle and Rundisc constantly manages to surprise us with ingenuity. No puzzle is inspired by another and that’s a pleasure. Moreover, each time we complete one, the feeling of pride is there, which shows that the challenge has been successful and that the difficulty is perfectly balanced.
If you get stuck, there is a help key that will highlight the items you can interact with in a room, but no more. It can be useful, because there are still a lot of objects to collect in order to move forward, but it clearly won’t do everything. If you are not used to puzzle games, you will have to persevere and be willing to spend (very) long minutes on a mechanism.
A constant wonder
In addition to the puzzles, Chants of Sennaar also offers fairly rudimentary infiltration phases which we could have done without. They don’t add much to the experience and it’s not in these moments that the game shines, clearly. Fortunately, the title only has a few that don’t drag on.
What makes a strong impression in Chants of Sennaar is also its shimmering cel-shaded artistic direction. The Toulouse studio clearly recognizes having been inspired by the big names in European comics like Moebius and it shows. We really have the impression of being immersed in a comic book and we never tire of what the different levels of the Tower of Babel offer us, each of which has a unique atmosphere. Sure, the textures and character models are low on detail, but that’s really not a problem here.
On the other hand, sonically, Chants of Sennaar fares a little less well. The compositions which accompany the adventure are very pretty, but are far too rare. So yes, it’s always more pleasant to be calm when you’re racking your brains on a puzzle, but the silence is really too present, even during exploration.