A (mostly) puzzle game about language. Specifically languages you don’t know. And if you’re thinking “oh this sounds like Trunic,” then you’re a little mistaken because the main goal of the game here is to learn and understand the languages. The game helps with this.
I saw this game on a recent GMTK video about short games, and it looked interesting enough for me to pause the video and play it to 100% with my partners. We definitely enjoyed it and would recommend it.
As you navigate the game (mouse or controller, but no wasd movement) you’ll encounter signs, murals, notes, and people, who give you instructions or exposition in their own language, and it’s your job to figure out what they’re saying. Everyone uses a glyphical language. As you encounter new glyphs though, your character automatically records them into a notebook, and you can link each one with a guess to what their meanings are.
As you encounter more glpyhs and learn to read the language (mousing over some text will show you it’s translation using your guesses where necessary to fill in blanks) your character will doodle some pictures or icons in the book, and you can then link glyphs to these icons. After completing a page, all the glyphs on that page will be validated and you’ll know what the game considers their meaning to definitively be.
After a while you’ll start noticing some patterns, glyphs reused in lots of places, contextual usage (greetings at the start of conversation for instance), even similarities between glyphs, such as indicators for verbs. Which is all well and good until the game pulls it’s one fantastic trick: It shows you a second group with its own glyphs, writing rules, sentence structure, and vocabulary. The ultimate end goal is to help each group to converse with each other by translating messages between them.
One thing I mentioned to my partners as we were playing was “what if there was a hard mode where the game didn’t validate glyphs” but then when I went back to the GMTK video after finishing, he raised the same idea. The validation system is inspired directly by Return of the Obra Dinn, but at times it does feel like it can give things away. It feels like that would make a better game than being lead astray by false or contradictory assumptions though.
The game has no hint system, but when you get to validating glyphs, generally it’ll only ask for 3 or 4 at a time, so in a pinch you can know two and guess the third to get a validation. You can also hold shift or middle click to see an indication of every exit and interactable in the room. Things you haven’t seen yet include an additional blinking dot inside the icon to help keep track. There are also some weird sections that aren’t related to the language puzzles, such as stealth and lever puzzles, but they weren’t too too bad.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1931770 £17.99 (Demo available)
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Chants-of-Sennaar-2370366.html £15.98
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