Chants of Sennaar Review (FaceofEvil)
i generally dont leave reviews, but there are a couple things about this game that i believe can be improved.
overall, it's an enjoyable, unique, and novel concept: theres a bunch of different races in the tower of babel and none of them speak the same language. you must translate all of the languages by hand, solve some relatively light puzzles, and get to the top of the tower. the core gameplay of how you go about translating the languages is fairly engaging; you start by guessing what each word in a language means based on context alone, but eventually you can verify your guesses to see if your assumptions were correct.
however, there is some room for improvement. one of the issues i have with the game is how the difficulty/challenge dips at past the mid-way point. generally, the game sets up the precedent that each language you encounter will be slightly more difficult than the last, introducing or changing syntax rules to keep the challenge fresh. the game peaks in difficulty at the bard language, which is the mid-way point of the game i spoke of earlier. however, the challenge becomes stale by the alchmeist language which doesn't seem to introduce any "new" syntax rules that surprise the player and make the language stand out on its own (it's really just the warrior language rehashed with a swapped plural and a very simple base 10 numbering system).
it can be argued that is a subjective opinion sure, but the difficulty doesn't ramp back up or introduce anything new for the final anchorite/exile language , in fact it gets even easier. spoilering the rest since i dont want to completely ruin the fun of discovering it for yourself. truth be told i am not even sure how the anchorite/exile language works because of how it was presented. instead of utilizing the established gameplay loop of figuring out the syntax of the language based on context and having quizzes to validate your work, you just visit a few terminals, match some words 1-to-1, and bam you know the whole anchorite/exile language in under 10 munutes, no brainpower required. no idea how the anchorite/exile language is structured at all as a result, since they essentially freely give you the answers very quickly.
my second gripe of the game is with the story, which i will just largely hide being spoilers. however, non-spoiler version, the story elements that were established and built up through most of your ascent of the tower were kind of just... thrown out? it felt like a huge bait-and-switch, and not a terribly fair one at that, since the precedent the story sets up doesn't mesh well with their switch.
of course this is just my personal opinion. more specifically, i am not a fan of the exile and anchorites as a whole. the VR trope is overdone, and undermines the themes the game sets up since the beginning. god? doesn't really exist, it's actually just a bunch of gamers. the impures? who knows what they are, since their role as the antagonist is thrown out and replaced with tron's MCP, with pretty much no build-up or foreshadowing of its existence beforehand. we never really find out who the people of the tower were, who the anchorites were and why the built the tower, or where the exile and impure fit in. the story at the end feels rushed (both narratively and mechanically) and mishandled. it's not necessarily "bad", but the lack of proper build-up and suddenly clashing themes makes the ending feel rather lackluster.
anyway, this is a good game and an easy recommend from me. it just had the potential to be better, but still worth playing and experiencing for yourself
edit: some peeps have been kind enough to correct some points regarding the impures. in short, "impures" is how the warriors describe the devotees, and the impures are not the same thing as the monster despite what the murals portray. this was obvious enough when i went through the game early on, but i suppose i forgot this point when i encountered the actual monster at the beginning of the alchemist area. it was pointed out to me that the mess found in lab 3 is the probable origin story of the monster, who is likely just an alchemist that fell victim to a failed experiment. if this is the case, then there is still some minor inconsistencies: if the monster is new or relatively recent, why do the seemingly ancient warrior murals depict several monsters of the same kind? and if the depiction of the impures as the monsters is purely metaphorical, then why did the actual monster you see take on the exact form as seen in said murals? im sure it just boils down to artistic direction and im overthinking it, but food for thought. im keeping my previous points about the impures in to help this edit make sense to those that read this review.