Counterpoint on Chants of Sennaar — Reading Through the Negative Reviews

Introduction

Komugi gave Chants of Sennaar an 8.5, closing on 'the quiet elation of meaning coming into focus — you rarely get this anywhere else.' A lovely conclusion, and I don't dispute that the notebook system is a masterpiece. But my job is to go read the other side. As usual, I went through the negative Steam reviews, sorted both by helpfulness and by recency.

The overall Steam verdict is Very Positive, so the detractors are a minority. Their claims, however, are remarkably consistent, and they sort into three families: detours away from the core game, friction in traversal, and a final act that stumbles at full price. All three are points Komugi's review either brushed past or never touched.

What the Negative Reviews Claim

First, the detours. Multiple negative reviews on Steam make the same point: the game keeps prying you away from what it is — a deductive logic puzzle. Stealth sequences, timed gimmicks, a sewer maze. One review goes as far as 'I really liked the Bard area until the sewer maze, then the whole thing was ruined for me.' Because the core play is quiet observation, the foreign matter stands out all the more.

Second, traversal. There is no keyboard movement; you walk by pointing and clicking. The character is slow, there is no map, and fast travel points are sparse on each floor. 'It takes you forever to get from anywhere to anywhere,' one review writes; when you're stuck, the trip to go look at something else becomes a chore in itself. In a game where re-observation is everything, re-observation has heavy legs.

Third, the final act and the price. A top-rated negative review argues the last area 'is clearly where the developers got bored': puzzles that barely qualify, at least one solvable only by guess-and-check rather than deduction. Full completion in a bit over eight hours, twenty dollars is too much, wait for a sale. Attached to this is a structural complaint — next to Outer Wilds, the game is 'exceedingly linear,' spoon-feeding information in a fixed order.

Examining the Claims

The detour problem is, in my view, this genre's chronic illness. A game with few verbs — observe, hypothesize, write it down, that's all — is tempted to borrow verbs from other genres to create peaks of tension. Return of the Obra Dinn refused to borrow; this game borrowed and got heavier for it. And note that the stealth here barely punishes you: get spotted and you restart at the area entrance. The leniency is kind, but it sharpens the question of why the stealth exists at all. Stealth that generates no tension is just delayed walking.

The traversal complaint should be read as a structural observation, not a mood. No map, a slow walk, sparse fast travel: this combination directly raises the cost of 'going back to look at that sign again' — the exact operation hypothesis-testing requires. In an observation game, making re-observation expensive is close to a design self-contradiction. Recall that Heaven's Vault, the closest relative in the language-deciphering genre, suffered the same disease in its sailing sections. This is homework the genre keeps failing to hand in.

The weak final act is understandable given the studio is two people. The last language is mostly spoken at you, with little chance to decipher it yourself — professional critics raised the same point, so this is not a grudge unique to negative reviewers. But understanding a flaw and defending it are different things.

Where I Agree

I agree with the traversal critique. Komugi's review articulates the notebook's verification system with real care, yet says not one word about the heavy legs required to shuttle up and down the tower to do that verifying. The sparse fast travel and the absent map do not exist in that review. More than the 8.5 itself, this absence is the problem — it's friction a reader deserves to know about in advance.

I also agree about the ending. Komugi called the reveal — five sacred glyphs as rotations of a single form — 'a fitting close,' and the reveal is indeed superb. But the roughness of the final area's puzzles on the way to that reveal is a separate matter, and the review doesn't touch it. On stealth, Komugi did write 'it will divide players,' so it's no blind spot; but receiving it 'as a change of pace' is Komugi's constitution, not a defense of the design. Infiltration that produces no tension isn't even a change of pace — it's padding. On this point, I side with the negative reviews.

Where I Push Back

I push back on the price complaint. The arithmetic of 'eight hours for twenty dollars is laughable' assumes experience should be priced by the hour. But this game's language system has almost no peers — consider how much empty space stretches between Heaven's Vault and this game, and dollars-per-hour becomes far too crude a ruler for its rarity. Waiting for a sale is a respectable decision; 'not worth full price' overreaches. Rarity commands a price.

Nor do I accept 'linear spoon-feeding.' Language learning is inherently order-dependent. You cannot ask a player to question grammar before they own any nouns, and since each floor's language scaffolds the next floor's deciphering, the sequence cannot be shuffled. Outer Wilds affords freedom because its fragments of knowledge are mutually independent; demanding the same freedom from a game whose knowledge is cumulative is like telling a textbook to read the same from any chapter. The linearity here is not laziness. It is pedagogy.

Closing

Let me be plain about who this is not for: people who want deduction at 100% purity, people unwilling to give a single minute to stealth or mazes, people who buy games by the hour. Play Obra Dinn first, or pick this up on sale. Half of what the negative reviews say — the traversal friction, the rough final act — is simply true, and if that half tends to sting you, buying at full price carries real risk of regret.

And who it is for: people drawn to language itself, people who love the observe-hypothesize-verify loop, and people who can forgive the mid-game detours as the ambition tax paid by a two-person studio. I endorse Komugi's 8.5 as a score for the notebook and the language design. An honest price tag, though, docks half a point to a full point for the detours and the ending. A game whose main trade is world-class and whose side jobs are mediocre — buy it knowing that, and the tower is worth the climb.