Recent reviews by TheStatusKuo

9/10 - Highly Recommended

I saw this game on PlayFrame for about ten minutes before deciding I had to play it for myself. The game is an excellent point-and-click puzzle adventure that requires players to learn, translate, and become knowledgeable with the in-game languages. Chants of Sennaar is a game that stimulates the cognition in a unique and rare fashion. My partner and I had to split up sessions to let our brains cool off, and the game inspired a lot of great conversations about language and writing conventions. There are some platforming and stealth portions. The designers of the game were very good about ensuring very quick iteration time if you failed. The graphics are relatively simple, but the environments are colorful and beautiful. The system of tracking guesses and having those guesses included in captions was brilliant. Being able to replay scenes and dialogue is wonderful. The validation system helped to provide a sense of progress and accomplishment, even if it could be brute-forced. This is a great game to play cooperatively with friends. While the game helps keep many things logged in the in-game notebook, it may still be helpful for you to take your own notes as well. Overall, this is a great game to play by yourself or cooperatively with a friend. Everybody can get involved in trying to deduce the word meanings and solve puzzles. The pace of the game is nice and relaxed, and the content and puzzles are unlocked through your own observation and translation!

Some potential areas for improvement:
Movement with the mouse was a bit clunky, requiring multiple clicks to cycle from walking to running. The camera is sometimes a bit slow to pan when your character nears the edge of the screen. Impatient players may end up missing things. Because of the slower pace of movement, sometimes executing on a known solution could feel like it was taking more time than necessary.

***POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT***
I thought it was super cool how each language had its own grammar and syntax. Even as pictograms become less literal, it was really cool to see how grouped concepts like parts of speech and locations were distinguished in the different languages.

What started as great silly fooling around with fun game mechanics turned into a pretty compelling story. Fun, silly, and a darn good time! :D