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dkirschner's Chants of Sennaar (PC)

[July 29, 2024 08:15:45 AM]

I was into this for a while and then lost interest. It's a neat game, like a point-and-click where you decipher hieroglyphic languages. Here's an example from the very beginning. You encounter another person, who speaks to you. They speak in hieroglyphics, and you don't know what they mean. However, the person gestures to you as they say a word, then to themselves as they say another word. Maybe they said "you" and "me." They gesture to you, then to themselves, then to a closed door. Maybe "you help me open the door"? When you help them, they say something and then leave. "Thanks"? "Goodbye"?

You proceed to a hallway with carvings that tell a story. Again, you don't know any of the hierogphyics' meanings, but you figure something out about people following a sun god, then some warriors barring the way to a temple. Proceed, and you'll encounter more NPCs in various situations who say a few lines, gesture, and you start to see that this is a game about figuring out what the heck people are saying by talking to them, interpreting context cues, and observing your surroundings. You have a journal wherein you are occasionally presented with pages with images and you can match the hieroglyphics that you have discovered (and what you think they mean) with the images. You can type up to 20 characters of guesses for each hieroglyphic in your journal. So, you might encounter an NPC and they say "You help me go/move/create ______ to the temple/church/worship." In this case, you've got a couple guesses for the symbols for what might be go or move or create and temple or church or worship, and then you haven't guessed the blank. The more NPCs you talk to and objects you interact with, the more context you have for each word. However, this makes it hard too, because the more situations in which you encounter a word, often times the more potential meanings it seems to have.

There are a total of five languages to learn, each used by some type or class of person in the city. Admittedly, I only finished the first language, got kind of frustrated/bored, and looked up a lot about the game online, then decided I didn't care to finish. There are a few reasons I got frustrated/bored.

1. There is a lot of backtracking, slow movement, and no map. I spent more time trying to remember how to get to various rooms than actually thinking about solving puzzles. I read that there is a good reason for there being no map, but that it doesn't become apparent until later in the game. Well, in the first part of the city, I can tell you that it sucks without a map. And you have to go through every screen, watching your character run and run and run. It would be nice to double-click on a door and have your character go straight to the next room. Like, I know I need to go to a place 8 rooms from here. Why can't I just GO there instead of click click click and watch him run through 8 rooms (and then back, and forth, and back, and forth...).

2. You can make various plausible interpretations of some hieroglyphs, and this became frustrating. The languages are actually pretty simple, and I understand why they need to be for the sake of making the language game work, but I kept overthinking, like assigning more complex or nuanced meanings to symbols than was actually the case. This led to me getting stuck for long periods of time. Until I realized that...

3. It solves words for you. This one I really didn't like. When you are working on the journal, sometimes (or all the time?) if you just slot the correct hieroglyphic with the correct image, it will automatically reveal the meaning, even if that's not what you guessed. So all your hard interpretive work is wiped away in favor of a process-of-elimination matching game. The more I played, the more Chants of Sennaar reminded me of The Case of the Golden Idol, which left a really sour taste in my mouth with bugs at the end where it was auto-solving scenes.

In the end, I felt like I had the gist of the gameplay and puzzling, and that it would just be doing the same thing with four more languages, possibly with more fun challenge, but also possibly with the ability just to cheese the whole thing by doing process of elimination. The story in the first part of the city isn't terribly compelling, though I am sure it becomes more interesting. Even though my experiences with the last two word/mystery games I've played (this and Case of the Golden Idol) haven't been great, I am still interested in Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault. But, it is possible that this is a genre that just doesn't click with me. Will determine that after those other two games!