Chants of Sennaar

First Impressions

The Traveler wakes from a sarcophagus at the base of a spiraling tower. No text, no voice announcing a goal. All you are handed is a sign written in unknown glyphs and an empty notebook. From here a journey of relearning language begins.

It was made by the two-person French studio Rundisc and released by Focus Entertainment on September 5, 2023. The setting is the Tower of Babel: each floor houses people who cannot understand one another, and you play the translator who moves between those silences.

What I felt in the first minutes was less anxiety than the pleasure of observing. If Return of the Obra Dinn reconstructs moments of death, this game builds meaning itself, one word at a time.

Putting the Mechanics into Words

At the center is a single tool: the notebook. Glyphs you encounter are logged there, and you write your guess beside one, "this is probably 'gate.'" The next time that glyph appears, your guess is overlaid on it. You pin hypotheses onto the world and test them as you go.

The validation is clever. Once you have collected enough words in a language, the notebook offers a small test: match drawings of nouns, verbs, and adjectives to their glyphs. Get them all right and the words are confirmed, their true meaning revealed; get one wrong and you return to observing. It leaves the answer to your observational resolution rather than a hint.

There is more than one language. Each floor introduces a new one, with its own grammar: plurals by reduplication or a dedicated marker, subject and predicate in swapped order. What you learned below no longer simply transfers, and that accumulation of difference turns code-breaking into something closer to learning a language.

The World

The tower is not mere backdrop. Each floor is built as a distinct culture: Devotees who pray to draw nearer to God, Warriors who drive away the impure, Bards who celebrate beauty, Alchemists who probe a great gate. Values, architecture, and color shift as you climb.

The art recalls the bande dessinee lineage of Moebius and Schuiten, with flat, bold color and a quiet tension even in empty frames. What drew me in was how language and society are bound together: the moment a word becomes clear is also the moment you grasp what these people fear and revere.

The story is said to draw on the parable of the blind men and the elephant; each floor's people see only part of the whole. Climbing the tower and crossing the language barrier becomes, itself, the act of stitching the fragments back together.

Design Craft

The learning curve is carefully built. The first language is rich in signs and pictures, easy to infer from context; once you are comfortable, a grammatically different language is slipped in, training you to doubt your own way of reading. The difficulty is moderate, and fresh observation keeps opening the way when you stall.

Stealth sections are folded in here and there. Being caught only sends you back to the area's entrance, so it is not punishing, but the quiet focus of decoding and the tension of sneaking do not always sit well together; several critics noted this. I took it as a change of pace, though it won't suit everyone.

Late on, the game reveals that the glyphs for what each people holds dear (God, Duty, Beauty, Transformation, Exile) are the same single character rotated in three dimensions. Like Her Story, it is a structure where the last move reshapes the whole, a fitting close for a game about language.

Closing

Chants of Sennaar takes the full procedure (observe an unknown script, form a hypothesis, test it, confirm it) and turns it directly into play. There are no flashy tricks, but the quiet lift of meaning coming into focus is hard to find elsewhere. The density of its language design belies a two-person team.

I would recommend it to anyone who likes building conclusions from observation, as in Obra Dinn, or who is simply curious about language itself. Whether the stealth and the dry, academic texture suit you will vary. I scored it 8.5, difficulty 3 of 5. For a while afterward you catch yourself trying to read the signs on the street; that is the kind of afterglow it leaves.