martinEnjoying playing Chants of Sennar with my wife. It is a linguistic (language deciphering) puzzle game.
Kaylee ♡#ChantsOfSennar is on iOS now, I tried the port and it seems really good!
Mark Gritter@davidcarlton I had about the same experience, but I felt like the story was very weak.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@markgritter/112532063627476880
Mechanically, I am annoyed by in-game notebooks where you can't add your own notes. I am more forgiving about limitations like "you are in a library full of books but you can only look at two of them" or "you cannot try out your new vocabulary except in very specific situations" but I definitely noticed both while playing.
Mark Gritter (@markgritter@mathstodon.xyz)
I finished playing #ChantsOfSennaar while sick so this review may be a bit colored by fever. :) I found it an engaging and fun game, but it probably wouldn't win my Hugo award vote (it's on the shortlist!) because there is such a limited story there. My comparison for a game about translation is #HeavensVault. The latter is also a point-and-click adventure (without the stealth sections in Chants), but in Vault the language you are studying is _dead_. So it makes sense in the story that you have only fragmentary writing, but even so, Heaven's Vault comes with a very rich library of text on which to perform translation. Chants is much more sparse and stylized, which works well if you engage with it as just a point-and-click puzzle, but less well as a translation game or a story. You are studying five living languages, and theoretically can interact with both speakers and writing. But your interactions are repetitively scripted and non-interactive. You can't try out words with the other characters (which is a perfectly reasonable game design choice!) In one section, you're in a library and restricted to just the books that happen to be sitting open. This foregrounding of frame or artificiality is I think one of the themes I really took away from my playthrough. Unlike many point-and-click games which default to a "neutral", stage-like presentation, many of the rooms you'll visit are deliberately framed, for example by using an overhead or low camera angle. The camera will follow you to some extent, but for a game which is set in stunning architecture, it's frustrating to have only the designer's frame, and no ability to look where you want to look. #Games
From a plot perspective there's really not much there in terms of tension or player agency. Your progress upward in the tower doesn't involve much looping back or side quests (although a fast-travel system makes this possible) and the final act is "do this because a dude told you to" even though I find it a somewhat morally ambiguous decision -- one the game assures you is fine.
As a trivial note, although the automatic notebook in the game works pretty well, I really wish there was an in-game way to add additional notes, such as remembering subject-verb-object vs. object-subject-verb order.
#ChantsOfSennar explores a sprawling landscape or architecture and culture, and does a good job enticing you to engage with it. But its framing and narrow ambition somewhat thwart that goal, both visually and in play.
(But, again, that seems a completely reasonable design choice to actually get a game finished! I'd rather have a game that works and has modest goals than one bogged down in development hell forever.)
ThierryJ 
#ChantsOfSennar J'ai terminé le jeu hier soir, en un peu moins de 16h au total. C'est vraiment un petit bijou, réalisé par un studio français (Rundisc), récemment primé aux #Pégases.
On joue un personnage muet, sans visage, chargé de rétablir le lien linguistique entre les cinq peuples de la tour de Sennaar (qui rappelle évidemment la tour de Babel), chacun avec une culture et un langage propres. Il s'agit pour l'essentiel de résoudre des énigmes et traduire des glyphes d'une langue à l'autre.
On joue un personnage muet, sans visage, chargé de rétablir le lien linguistique entre les cinq peuples de la tour de Sennaar (qui rappelle évidemment la tour de Babel), chacun avec une culture et un langage propres. Il s'agit pour l'essentiel de résoudre des énigmes et traduire des glyphes d'une langue à l'autre.
「K」I was gifted Chants of Sennar, and I am in awe with the style of this game. Look at it! Sometimes I forget to play as I'm just staring at the breathtaking vistas.
taco, bird/cat 
finished chants of sennar recently and it's an easy recommend; definitely check it out if you like puzzle games. one of my favorite games of 2023. #SteamDeck verified!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1931770/Chants_of_Sennaar/
Liana BrooksEldest is playing #ChantsOfSennar in Korean so she can work on her Korean.
Thomas Leroy 🍣🐈⬛Of course, I fell for the vinyl bundle 😅 (10 euros saved over buying them separately)
➡️ https://store.focus-entmt.com/eu/chantsofsennaar
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