3.5/5 ★ – Oodlemeister's review of Chants of Sennaar.

The indie gaming scene has exploded in recent years, yielding a diverse landscape of many genres, including one that I didn’t know I’d love until I played David Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn. That game introduced me to the deductive (or logic) puzzle game genre, whereby progress is made by using your surroundings and clues to infer or deduce important information. Chants of Sennaar brings its own distinct take to logic puzzlers and does so with a unique art style. You play a nameless, faceless robed person who awakes from a sarcophagus at the foot of a great tower. You quickly come across a group of strange people that have been blocked from ascending the tower by a sinister-looking band of warriors. You have no idea what the circumstances are because both peoples’ language is foreign to you. And so begins your journey to uncover the mystery. Gameplay revolves around you noting down symbols in your character’s journal and using deduction and inference to determine their meaning. One symbol corresponds to one word. Symbols are found in the environment; upon buildings, signs or scraps of paper. They are also spoken in speech bubbles by the tower’s people. To give an example: you might come across a fenced area that contains a bunch of tombstones. Above the gate to this area is a sign with a symbol. Inference would lead us to make a fairly good guess that this symbol means “cemetery”. As you discover certain points of interest, your journal will auto-fill with pictures that correspond to the symbols. You must match the symbol’s meaning to its picture. For example, you may have a picture of someone waving. So you would take the symbol you have deduced as “hello” and slot it in next to the picture. If you correctly match all symbols to their corresponding pictures on a page, the journal locks in those symbols and reveals the correct word. It bears saying that your words don’t have to be exact, as long as the correct symbol is matched with the correct picture. You will quickly learn that the tower has multiple levels, each with its own society and language. But you don’t have to start each new language from scratch. Many words are common across all languages and you are given methods to link certain words between languages, which makes translating each new one a little easier. The joy of the game is in the deduction. Technically you could try to just brute force your way through filling in the journal (and at times you may not have a choice if you can’t figure something out), but it takes away the whole reason for playing. That being said, while the game’s highest highs make you feel like a genius, the low lows can be incredibly frustrating. If you are stuck, there are no hints. You must trek back and forth going over the same conversations and clues, hoping something clicks. One of the biggest hurdles in my play-through was a massive shift in the game’s logic, whereby instead of a word, a symbol required a concept. Think along the lines of symbol = question. So not the word “question”, but the symbol is basically a question mark. These are not common, but they are enough to have you pulling your hair out from the fact that the leap in logic is never apparent or telegraphed in any way. Those nitpicks aside, Chants of Sennaar establishes itself as a fresh take on the logic puzzle genre and deserves to be played. Its clever mechanics and vibrant art style do a great job of keeping you on the hook and coming back until you solve the tower’s mystery. I look forward to seeing what developer Rundisc comes up with next.