Chants of Sennaar Trusts You to Figure It Out

There is a specific kind of confidence a game needs to hand you a language you don't speak and then simply walk away. No tutorial pop-up. No color-coded hint system nudging you toward the answer. Rundisc's Chants of Sennaar, released in 2023, operates on exactly that confidence, and for the most part the trust is warranted.

The pitch, stripped down: you move through a tower divided among peoples who cannot speak to one another, and you decode each group's written language by watching context — what characters do, what surrounds them, what repeats across situations. It's a premise that sounds like edutainment, the kind of thing a museum designs to make grammar feel fun. It isn't that. The puzzle design is sharper, the atmosphere genuinely strange, and the game's best moves come not from the central mechanic but from what that mechanic forces you to notice around it.

The Language System, Actually Explained

Your notebook accumulates glyphs, and you assign tentative meanings to them by tapping what makes sense given the scene. See a guard standing at a gate, see a glyph above the door, and 'forbidden' becomes a working guess. The game validates guesses by having you complete a matching exercise — correctly connect enough glyphs to their meanings and you lock in partial translation of that group's language. The feedback loop is clean without being generous. You can be wrong for a long time before the system corrects you.

What's smart is that the glyphs are internally consistent. Rundisc didn't create gibberish; they created constructed languages with their own logic, which means a fluent enough reader can start inferring meanings the game hasn't explicitly confirmed yet. That's rarer in puzzle games than it should be. Most translation or cipher puzzles give you a code where every symbol maps to exactly one answer and pattern recognition does the rest. Chants of Sennaar asks you to do something closer to actual linguistic inference, building meaning from repetition and context rather than mechanical substitution.

Stealth Sequences Nobody Asked For (And They Work Anyway)

Periodically the game pivots into light stealth sections where you move around guards using distraction items or environmental routes. The immediate instinct is to roll your eyes — this looks like the game padding runtime or hedging its bets on whether pure puzzle design can carry three or four hours. The instinct is mostly wrong. These sections are short, low-friction, and they serve a specific purpose: they force you to observe the spaces you're moving through. A guard's patrol pattern is also a sentence about that space. The stealth mechanics are not interesting on their own terms, but they make you look at rooms differently, which feeds back into the language work.

That said, there are moments — particularly in the mid-game tower levels — where a stealth section runs slightly long relative to its informational payoff. The game reads the room well most of the time, but occasionally the balance tips and you're waiting for a patrol to cycle when there isn't much left to see. It's a minor complaint. It doesn't break the pacing the way similar sequences do in, say, a game like Little Nightmares II, where the combat interruptions feel genuinely misaligned with everything around them. Here the friction is lighter.

The Tower as Structure, Not Metaphor

Chants of Sennaar is transparently riffing on the Tower of Babel. The game doesn't hide this or dress it up in elaborate fictional distance. Each level of the tower houses a distinct society — warriors, monks, alchemists, others — each with their own visual language, architecture, and set of glyphs. The art direction does a lot of work here. The warrior floors feel militarized and compressed; the monastery floors open into long corridors and meditation cells. The visual grammar of each space gives you information before a single glyph appears.

What's less expected is how the game uses its structure to make a quiet argument about communication itself. As you move between cultures, you carry partial knowledge of each language, and there are moments where you can facilitate understanding between groups — not through a grand gesture but through small acts of translation, of holding two systems in your head simultaneously. The game never states this theme explicitly. It trusts the accumulated experience of play to carry the meaning. That restraint is harder to pull off than it sounds, and Rundisc mostly pulls it off.

Where the Difficulty Curve Earns Its Reputation

Some players will stall in the game's later sections. This is documented and expected. The early languages introduce you to the inference model with enough contextual support that wrong guesses feel recoverable. Later languages are denser, and the game's willingness to scaffold you decreases. The notebook helps — it's well-designed, readable, genuinely useful — but there are stretches where the connective tissue between what you've observed and what you need to conclude requires holding several partially-validated assumptions in working memory at once.

Whether this reads as demanding or frustrating probably depends on how you approach puzzle games. Players who stalled in Return of the Obra Dinn's later deductions will recognize the specific quality of this friction — the game isn't being unfair, but it's also not going to help you. The difference is that Obra Dinn gives you extensive cross-referencing tools while Chants of Sennaar keeps things more analog. Your notebook is a notebook, not a database. Some people will find this refreshing. Others will find themselves re-reading the same three pages trying to remember what they thought a glyph meant three hours ago.

Sound Design as Vocabulary

The score, composed by Maxime Ferrieu, deserves mention specifically because it varies by cultural zone in ways that reinforce the language work. Each society sounds different — distinct instrumentation, distinct rhythmic patterns — and after enough time in a zone you start associating those sonic signatures with specific glyphs or meanings, which is either a clever design choice or a happy accident. Given how precisely Rundisc constructed everything else, it reads as intentional.

There's no voice acting, which is obviously consistent with the premise but also quietly efficient. Adding voice would require deciding what these languages sound like phonetically, which would either flatten the mystery or over-specify it. Silence and ambient sound let the visual language carry more weight. The game understands this. It's one of several places where a seemingly constrained choice turns out to be load-bearing.

Who This Is For

Chants of Sennaar runs around five to six hours depending on how much you stall. It's compact, which suits it. A longer version would either repeat itself or dilute what makes the mid-game so effective — the specific quality of reading a sentence in a language you didn't know three hours ago and understanding it without prompting. That moment happens multiple times, and it doesn't get old. Rundisc built the whole game around producing that moment reliably, and the architecture holds.

If you bounced off Heaven's Vault because the archaeology system felt opaque or mechanical, Chants of Sennaar is worth a second look at the genre. The feedback is cleaner, the pacing is tighter, and the game respects your time in a way that doesn't mean hand-holding. It also has a better relationship with silence than almost anything else in its space — the kind of quiet that doesn't feel empty but actually means something, once you know how to read it.

That's probably the cleanest thing to say about it: Chants of Sennaar gives you the tools to understand it and then gets out of the way. Not every game trusts its own design enough to do that.