We wanted to talk about a very interesting puzzle game we came across as of late. We are talking about:
Chants of Sennaar
this is a point and click adventure game about solving puzzles exploring locations, and talking to people but there is a catch -you do not speak the language. All off the text is written in some indistinguishable foreign language, which is made up of cryptic symbols and letters.
But many of the puzzles require you to read this unknown language, meaning that if you want to progress in this game you have to decrypt the text and figure out the meaning of these strange glyphs. Like, for example take look at this early introductory puzzle:
Figuring out the Symbols
You need to play with these valves to lower the water level but the only clue given is this sign that is written in an unknown lingo. However those same pictographs present on a sign close to a lever that opens and closes a door.
So maybe these symbols indicate closings and opening?
So if you apply that logic to the valves.. hooray access. And so that makes up a lot of Sennaar’s gameplay logic you come across some inscrutable text and then explore elsewhere to figure out the meaning of those glyphs using clues and context.
For example some characters seem to use the same glyph when greeting you so maybe that one means they are saying hello.
The symbols on these shop signs probably describe the object they sell. You can even look at the glyphs themselves: you might notice that all the verbs share a similar characteristic. So do the glyphs denoting certain type of locations or people. It is a really fun gameplay loop, and the developers found lots of different ways to hide the meaning of these pictographs behind clever deduction-style puzzles. Including a whole numerical system, descriptions written underneath paintings glyphs that mean social rankings, and so on it’s full of satisfying puzzles and a-ha moments.
Figuring out Translations
Now i would recommend playing Sennaar with a sheet of paper by your side to help with of the puzzles. But when it comes to translations the game actually has a wonderful interface to store your guesses and hunches. You see all of the glyphs you come across are stored in a db- and you can then bring up a keyboard to tybe in your guess. And now when highlighting scraps of language around the world you will see a rough transition with the words you have guessed. But the game actually goes beyond that. When you’ve spotted a certain number of characters our hero will scribble a bunch of images in a notebook.
You can assign symbols from the database to each image and if you’re correct it will lock them in, and replace your guess with an correct translation. It is clever because you have to correctly fill in an entire page to validate your hunch which discourages just brute forcing the answer by trying a bunch of wild guesses. This was likely inspired by “Return of the Obra Dinn” where the game will only move on if you have correctly deducted the details of three different murders. But it can also give some of the puzzles away:
Sennaar’s Hints
We were sometimes prompted by these pictures to make associations that we hadn’t yet figured out myself. And at other times the official translations was actually quite different to what we had assumed. Perhaps the game would be extremely difficult if the game refused to provide an official translation but wee would like too play a version of this game where we were left to rely on our own intuition alone.
Sennaar Setting
Sennaar is set on a gigantic tower like the Biblical tower of Babel and each level in habitats by people who speak a completely different language. Which means you’ve got to throw away everything you just learned and start afresh.
This turns out to be a really smart idea it breaks the game up into manageable chunks you can tackle in separate sessions rather than giving you an impossibly large language to decode. It allows the game to play with different types of glyph and grammar and sentence structure.
This leads to some tough puzzles where you have to translate a message from one language ti another which really puts your knowledge to the test. It also ties nicely into the story, which we won’t spoil here for that you need to get the game which is available on
Steam
Switch
Xbox
Playstation