malvasia bianca

Wow, I really am behind on my game blogging – I finished Chants of Sennaar in April and I’m only getting around to talking about it now.

Anyways: it’s a translation game, but one with five languages, in a Tower of Babel setting. And this opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for a translation game, it turns out.

At a basic level: the languages aren’t all skins of English. They’re not shockingly different or anything, but they’re not all Subject Verb Object languages, they handle plurals differently, stuff like that. A pleasant enough way to provide variety across levels; and the game occasionally requires you to produce sentences instead of just understand sentences, which forces you to be able to actually make concrete that understanding of language differences.

The different writing systems are kind of cool, too? No straight up alphabets, most are at least a little bit ideographic; and the game uses that intelligently to help modulate the difficulty. But, beyond affecting the difficulty, the writing systems help improve the aesthetics of the game; and the game ties some of the writing systems explicitly to cultural touchpoints, which I enjoy. (I can’t say I found the specifics of all of those realistic, but that’s okay, it’s a game!)

And this does all fit together well as a game. The game gives a pleasant difficulty ramp; the way it asks you to prove your knowledge of the languages isn’t particularly realistic but works well from a gameplay perspective; and they do you a good job of pacing your encountering of new words and of new uses of existing words in a way that has you alternating between thinking you should be able to figure out what a word means but something’s wrong with your guess and then having the satisfaction of figuring out where you went wrong and learning something new about the game as a result.

That last part in turn gets to why I thought Chants of Sennaar was interesting beyond just the translation game mechanics / challenges. The different groups in the different levels of the tower don’t just have different languages, they have different cultures and ways of thinking about the world. And there was one level in particular where I just couldn’t get the game to validate my translations for much longer than I expected. A little frustrating, but I kept at it even as my stack of unvalidated words got longer and longer despite it clearly containing some quite fundamental words. When I finally figured out how to translate those early words on the level, it turned out that I’d been missing something pretty fundamental about the culture of the people who lived on that level; I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that gave a cultural reveal in that sort of manner?

So yeah, good game. A solid puzzle/deduction game based on a Tower of Babel concept; and that concept not only provides an extra layer to the deduction mechanic, it also motivates the game culturally in meaningful ways. And this is all executed well: I didn’t feel like individual sections or the game as a whole overstayed its welcome, and the game frequently felt pleasurable slightly annoying and only rarely “I’ve been banging my head against this for too long, I should probably check a walkthrough” annoying, which isn’t an easy balance to strike in a puzzle game.