I use those images to figure out the words for “villager” and “warrior,” as well as some verbs I can pick up from the images. Later, I find murals depicting the history of the tower. That’s the core loop in Chants of Sennaar, and it gets much more complex as it goes. As I deduced, “open,” “close,” and “door” were correct. When I match the corresponding symbols to those images, all my guesses are validated and the game confirms what those symbols mean permanently. One is of a door, while the others indicate that door opening or closing. After seeing a few symbols, my characters jots down a few images in their notebook. Much like Return of the Obra Dinn, Chants of Sennaar has a validation system to make sure players don’t get lost for too long. Perhaps those symbols I saw actually meant “open door” or “close door” instead. There were some doors in this room, which I could open and close to change the flow of water.
“Lever” didn’t really make sense in this context though, so I doubled back. Whenever players write down a guess for a word’s meaning, it’ll appear above that symbol anytime they come across it. That’s when I notice the symbol I had marked as “lever” appearing in his speech bubbles. He begins talking to me in symbols, and I assume he’s telling me how to solve a puzzle in the room so he can get past some flooded walkways. When I get there, I come across a character on the other side of a waterway. “Maybe that word means ‘lever,” I think to myself, “and these other two are ‘up’ and ‘down’ respectively.” I jot down my guesses in my notebook and continue to the next room. I notice that the same symbol appears at the end of each set, which gets the wheels spinning. There’s a plaque next to the lever with sets of two symbols at both the up and down positions. In my first puzzle, I find a lever sitting next to a closed door. I very quickly learn how to start deducing the meaning of those symbols. All I can do at first is copy them down in my handy notebook. Characters only speak to me in a series of symbols, and they’re written down on signs I can’t read. The inhabitants only speak and write in fictional languages made up of unfamiliar symbols.
At first, I didn’t know anything about my surroundings, and that’s because there’s not a word of English to explain the background. Tower of BabelĬhants of Sennaar takes place in and around a mysterious tower in the desert.
It’s a clever puzzle premise that’s already changing the way I think about other languages, as well as my capacity to grasp their basics with a little extra brain power. After going hands-on with a 45-minute demo at this year’s Tribeca Fest, Chants of Sennaar instantly became one of my most anticipated games of 2023’s stacked back half.
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