Chants of Sennaar Review (Milldawg)
This game's pitch got me excited - a cute, relaxing language puzzle game with 98% positive reviews? Awesome. I enjoy games like Lingo and The Witness, and figured this was along the same lines.
5 hours into this game and it has had so many disappointments. Some spoilers below (moreso of the gameplay and systems than the content of the puzzles).
***********SPOILERS***********
The notes system is great. For each glyph you encounter, you can write your guess at what it means, which will then appear alongside the glyph whenever you encounter it. The 20-character limit is a little annoying but is understandable.
But then the game gives you a quiz - "did you figure out what these glyphs mean?" You can match the glyphs you've discovered to images in the notebook, and if you match them correctly, the game confirms, and gives you the official meaning of those glyphs. (There is no penalty for an incorrect guess; you can brute force any of these quizzes.) I found the confirmation aspect to be disappointing; one of the exciting things about deciphering a code or language is in piecing it together yourself, gradually gaining confidence in your interpretations as you become exposed to new information. To have them formally confirmed detracts from that experience for me. There are only a limited number of clues for each glyph, so when I'm uncertain about an interpretation of a glyph, my only recourse is to Git Gud or to do a little brute forcing. I know the game probably can't really work without a way to confirm the meanings of the symbols with certainty, but I would have preferred a much deeper clue base that you could access as a series of progressively easier "hints."
I also wish you could have an easily accessible written record of all your glyph data. If I see a glyph on a mural in Room 3 and then I get to Room 271 and I want to recall the context of that glyph, I have to go back to Room 3 to look at it again. You can replay conversations at least, and there are teleporters, but again, you can only do it from the room in which it happened. Not having access to previous sentences can be quite inconvenient when trying to piece together meanings from different contexts.
The movement is a bit clunky; there are some areas where you can't really see where you're going, and it's kind of important that you are able to. There is also a lot of pointless running around that adds useless filler time between puzzle-related content. When I'm exploring and trying to get my bearings, and I have to retrace my steps to check back on something I saw earlier, having to run down a long staircase every other screen with gets pretty frustrating.
But my biggest disappointment with this game, and by far the #1 reason I gave it a thumbs down, is that there are stealth missions. Why are there stealth missions? If I wanted to play Splinter Cell, I would be doing that. To me, this kind of puzzle game should be a relaxed experience that you can play at your own pace. When I consider other puzzle games I've really enjoyed - The Witness, Lingo, Superliminal, Manifold Gardens, Escape Simulator - one thing they all have in common is that there's no danger whatsoever. You never have to think about getting attacked or caught; you can explore freely and safely. It's a relaxing experience. When I have to sneak around and carefully time my movements, it adds a layer of required alertness that stresses me out and hinders my engagement with the language puzzle content. There is little to justify it either outside of thematically; it's not as though you learn stealth-mission-related words by sneaking around.
I'm still only about halfway through the game at this point, and I will almost certainly finish it because I really do like the core concept and I want to see how it's developed and iterated on throughout the game. But it will be through gritted teeth at times as I suffer through pointless platforming and superfluous stealth missions.
If you like both language puzzles and stealth missions, you will probably like this game (as 98% of reviewers do). But if you're like me and just want to be able to solve mind-bending puzzles without having to do "gamer tasks," you may be sorely disappointed.