Chants of Sennaar

A phenomenal deduction game based somewhat loosely on linguistics, leveraging heavily on the concept of linguistic determinism and relativism. Even if you aren't into that aspect of language, it's a great deduction and puzzle game. That said, if I never have to do this game's sneak minigame again it'll be too soon. I did come up against a particularly wild bug, where I had collected all the graphemes in the game, but the power went out, and when it came back up I was still in the last stage with none of the graphemes collected. Re-collecting them was actually a kind of neat, backwards puzzle. But, I'd still advise you to not lose power.

TLDR : A good game that would have been so much better if it focused on what it was doing great, the glyph guessing part. The game is gorgeous, the music is good, the world is intriguing as a alternative Babel tower. The actual glyph guessing is really well made, it feels incredibly rewarding to finally understand a sentence, a sign you didn't get at all. In that aspect, it reminded me of Obra Dinn and Golden Idol, as a detective game that actually promotes doing deductions. The issue is that the pacing is severly hurt by some segments, such as the sneaking sections in the keep. They are not well made, not rewarding, and feel frustrating. Some places lack a bit of orientation clues, or shortcuts to make traversal faster because it's a pretty big place and you're not that fast. But it's still a very nice experience, it's worth a play especially if you like archeology, ethnology or linguistics. I've never played a game that made me feel like i was a researcher like this.

Very good point and click adventure game with a language learning database puzzle on top of it. The languages are very well developed and are interesting in their own right, both syntactically and typographically. My only, relatively minor gripe is I think I would be very interested in a version of this game where there wasn't a canonical translation and you're forced to make do with your own interpretation of words. But this version of the game on the other hand makes it fairly accessible for people who aren't particularly interested in learning languages.