Chants of Sennaar made me feel like a god — then humbled me completely

Rundisc's Chants of Sennaar arrived in August 2023 with the kind of quiet confidence that tends to make games journalists nervous. No combat. No fail states with teeth. A puzzle structure built entirely on a mechanic — language decipherment — that most studios would treat as a tutorial gimmick and leave behind by hour two. Thirty-two hours later, having worked through every civilization on the tower and sat with the credits for longer than I usually do, I can say the confidence was earned.

The comparison points are useful to establish before anything else. Heaven's Vault, from Inkle, is the obvious reference: pictographic language, archaeological framing, a protagonist who is really just a reading instrument. Chants of Sennaar shares that DNA but strips out the branching narrative scaffolding and replaces it with something closer to pure systems design. There is almost no story being delivered to you here. The story is what you reconstruct. That choice defines everything about whether the game will work for you.

What you actually do for thirty-two hours

The mechanic is simple to describe and deceptively hard to master in the early floors. You observe glyphs in context — a guard points at a door and says something; a priest gestures at an altar and uses a different cluster of symbols — and you sketch hypotheses in a notebook the game manages for you. When you feel confident enough about a word's meaning, you lock it in. Get it right and the icon confirms. Get it wrong and nothing punishes you except the confusion you've now propagated forward into future interpretation.

That no-punishment design choice is either the smartest thing in the game or a minor missed opportunity, depending on your tolerance for consequence-free exploration. I lean toward smart. The penalty for a misidentified glyph is soft but real: you'll reach a locked gate and realise your translation of a key phrase doesn't produce a coherent instruction, and you'll have to backtrack through context you thought you understood. The game never announces this. It just lets you be wrong and feel it when the wrongness catches up with you.

Five civilizations, each with a distinct visual language — not just a different symbol set, but a different grammatical logic. The Warriors' language is blunt and spatial. The Devotees use repetition and number as meaning. The Alchemists layer prefixes that shift the entire sense of a root word. Rundisc did not just reskin the same system five times, which would have been the easy path. Each floor asks you to adjust not just your vocabulary but your underlying model of how the language encodes meaning.

Where the design is genuinely confident

The notebook mechanic deserves credit that reviewers often give to the game's art direction instead. When you attach a hypothesis to a glyph, you're committing it to a visible record; the game doesn't hide your working. Later, you can scroll back through earlier civilizations and see where your understanding was correct from the first encounter, or where you spent three floors operating on a faulty assumption. That retrospective readability is rare. Most puzzle games of this kind — think Return of the Obra Dinn, which also asks you to build a model from fragments — lock your conclusions away and only reveal correctness at the point of submission. Chants keeps the working visible and lets you watch your own comprehension evolve.

The visual language of each civilization is also doing puzzle work, not just mood work. The Warriors' architecture is angular and hierarchical; the symbols on their walls are placed at heights that carry meaning about status. You can infer from the image what you haven't yet confirmed from the text. Rundisc has clearly thought about iconography as a system rather than decoration, which is a harder design problem than it sounds. Comparably ambitious environmental storytelling shows up in games like Outer Wilds, but Outer Wilds is delivering a narrative you're meant to discover. Chants is asking you to build a language model, and the environment is evidence in that project.

Where it loses confidence

There's a section in the Alchemists' zone — I won't specify exactly where to avoid spoiling the discovery sequence — where the puzzle solution depends on a piece of contextual observation that the game stages in a room you can pass through very quickly. I missed it on a first pass and spent around forty minutes re-examining every earlier surface before returning to the right location. When I found the solution, it read as fair in retrospect; the information was genuinely there. But the staging didn't signal that this room held critical density. In a game that otherwise trusts you to look carefully, a failure to mark observational priority feels like a design inconsistency rather than a deliberate challenge.

There are also a handful of moments — maybe five or six across the full runtime — where the game uses a visual puzzle that sits outside the language system entirely. A gear rotation sequence, a tile-matching configuration. These aren't bad puzzles, but they arrive like a different game has briefly taken over, and the tonal shift is jarring each time. Rundisc seems to have included them as pacing breaks, worried that pure decipherment could become monotonous. The worry is understandable; I'm not sure it was warranted. The language system had enough internal variety to sustain the whole game without reaching for traditional puzzle-box mechanics.

The question of difficulty and who this is for

Chants of Sennaar has no difficulty settings, which will put off some players and strike others as the only honest choice given the design. You cannot make a language decipherment game easier without either giving you more hints — which collapses the central mechanic — or slowing the glyph introduction rate, which makes the experience feel padded. The game commits to a single pace, and that pace is unhurried but not slow. It expects you to sit with uncertainty. In a media environment where the path forward is usually signposted clearly, that expectation feels deliberately countercultural.

The audience this suits is not solely the crossword-and-cryptic crowd. Players who spent time decoding the Futhark inscriptions in God of War or piecing together the Precursor language in Jak and Daxter — games that dangled linguistic fragments without asking players to fully commit — will find Chants a game that finally asks them to cash in that interest. It is genuinely demanding in a way those games were not. But the demands are precise, and they're legible from within the first hour.

The ending, and what it does

Without describing the specific resolution: the final sequence reframes the work you've been doing across the whole game. It is not a twist in the narrative sense. It is a structural reveal that reassigns meaning to earlier events — not through new information, but through a new frame for old information. This is the kind of ending that requires the preceding twenty-plus hours of active engagement to land properly; a passive player who took liberally from a guide would feel nothing at this moment. A player who earned their translations will feel the specific satisfaction of understanding something without being told.

That's the quality Chants of Sennaar is selling, and it delivers it cleanly. Rundisc built a game around a single demanding idea and declined to soften the idea for commercial reasons — no combat loop to fall back on, no waypoints pointing at meaning. The minor inconsistencies in staging and the occasional tonal breaks from the non-language puzzles are real; they don't sink the experience. What remains is a precision instrument for a specific kind of play, and if you're in its target frequency, it will occupy your thinking long after the notebook closes.