Chants of Sennaar is one of the coolest puzzle games I've played in a long time.
At first, the game felt like it was moving a bit slow. It actually deterred me from playing because I was getting bored and uninterested. But I kept hearing good things about the game, so I decided to give it another chance. After spending a decent amount of time in the first area, I eventually got pulled in enough to beat the game in one sitting. So if anyone can't get too invested at first, maybe it's worth another try for you too.
Each area has its own unique vibe to it and the art-style portrays everything so flawlessly. Everything looks so clean and the environments are all beautifully crafted. The way they contrast is great, too. The way these civilizations have their own culture and beliefs creates the perfect foundation for the gameplay.
Deciphering an entire language from scratch sounds daunting, but the game does a good job at simplifying things so that it doesn't feel like an impossible task. You can take notes on what a word might be and it'll auto-fill that word in the future. This gives you lots of freedom and room for error. Even if you just have a small hunch for a potential translation, you can try it out anyways and it might end up being the right concept. I really like this mechanic because you can deduce a lot from context clues, and even if the word you guess isn't the exact idea, seeing it alongside other words might be just enough for the lightbulb to come on.
The progression is pretty straight-forward too; learning enough of the language will allow you to understand what you need to do in an area in order to progress. This is really cool because you actually don't even need to fully complete a language if you don't want to. You can get by if you learn just enough to understand what your objective is. Also, you pretty much never have to worry about being too far off-track. The game gives you a menu with pictures, and you can connect the pictures with the symbols of the language you're deciphering. If you get 3 of these connections right, it'll lock them in as being correct translations. So the game does a great job at letting you know that you're on the right track without outright letting you brute-force by guessing, which is still possible in some cases but not to an extent that ruins the gameplay.
This game is definitely worth a shot if you like puzzle games in general, but it's even a nice game to experience if you just want to explore a well-crafted and visually beautiful world. Also, huge kudos to the translation team!
