Chants of Sennaar: The Language Puzzle as Empathy Machine

There is a specific feeling you get about ninety minutes into Chants of Sennaar, and I’ve been trying to work out how a puzzle game manufactured it. You are standing in front of a person who has been shouting the same glyph at you since you arrived. You have finally worked out what it means. And the glyph, it turns out, means welcome.

Rundisc’s game came out on 5 September this year, published by Focus Entertainment, and it is built on the Tower of Babel — five peoples stacked up a single structure, each speaking a language the others have forgotten, each convinced the floor above them is a threat. You climb. The only thing you carry is a notebook.

How the validation page works

The mechanic is simple to describe and much harder to build. You see glyphs — on signs, in speech bubbles, carved on doors. You have a journal, and against each glyph you write your best guess at the meaning, in plain French or English or whatever the game is running in. You can write anything. Nothing is checked.

Then, periodically, the journal produces a page with several illustrated panels on it and a slot beside each. Drag the right glyph onto the right drawing for every panel on the page, and the page locks: those meanings are now confirmed, and from then on the game silently prints them as words wherever they appear.

That page is the entire design. Three things fall out of it.

It defeats guessing without punishing being wrong. A page only validates as a set, so you cannot brute-force one slot at a time and read the tick. Getting five of six right tells you nothing, in the same way a nearly-correct hypothesis tells a scientist nothing. But a wrong guess in your notebook costs you nothing either — no penalty, no lockout — so you’re free to be confidently wrong for hours, which is how actual decipherment works.

It separates two different pleasures. Working out that a glyph means “door” is one kind of fun: you noticed it above every doorway. Working out that a glyph means “forbidden” is a much better kind: you noticed it above some doorways, and beside a guard, and on a sign the guard was pointing at while making an unmistakable gesture. The page validation lets both count, and then rewards the second by turning a wall of nonsense into readable prose.

It makes the world the dictionary. No character teaches you anything. The language is only ever learned from context — a hand gesture, a repeated juxtaposition, the layout of a room, the fact that this word appears exclusively in a kitchen. Rundisc had to author every glyph’s meaning into the level design, which is a properly enormous amount of invisible work, and it’s why the tower feels lived-in. Every prop is a lexical entry.

Why the translation reads as empathy

The Warriors are the point at which the game reveals its argument, and it does it without a line of dialogue you could quote.

When you first reach their floor you cannot read a syllable of it. They are armoured, they shout, they hunt you through corridors in genuinely tense stealth sections, and they are — obviously, self-evidently — hostile. That’s not an interpretation. That is the raw sensory data.

A floor’s worth of glyphs later, you can read the signs on their walls. And the signs say things about duty and about fear of what’s above. The stealth section doesn’t change. The level layout doesn’t change. The soldiers still chase you. What changes is that you now understand that they are frightened people doing a job in a building whose upper floors they believe are full of monsters, and you have just come down from those floors, and you are the monster.

The game achieves this with zero exposition, because it made you do the work. This is the whole reason “empathy machine” fits here rather than being marketing: comprehension arrives as your achievement, at a moment of your choosing, and it retroactively rewrites everything you already saw. A cutscene could tell you the Warriors are afraid. Only a language puzzle can make you realise it.

The later floors take it further, when the game starts asking you to translate between the peoples — using one language you’ve cracked to bootstrap another, and eventually acting as an interpreter for two groups who have spent generations inventing reasons to hate a noise they can’t parse. The mechanic and the theme are the same object. That’s the highest thing a game system can do and it happens about four times a decade.

Where it fights itself

The stealth is the seam, and everyone says so for good reason. The Warriors' floor and a later sequence swap deduction for patrol routes and hiding spots, and Rundisc are plainly better at semiotics than at line-of-sight cones. It’s not punishing — a fail sends you back a few metres — and it is a different, lesser game wedged into a great one, presumably because someone worried the middle act needed a pulse. It didn’t.

The second issue is subtler. Because the validation pages arrive at authored moments, the game’s difficulty is partly a function of which meanings Rundisc decided to check. There are glyphs you will crack instantly and glyphs you’ll carry for two floors, and occasionally a page will ask you to distinguish two concepts on evidence that is thinner than the rest of the game’s standard. Those moments feel like a design slip in a piece of work that’s otherwise extraordinarily precise about what it has shown you.

And it’s short — a weekend — with no second run in it, since you can’t un-know a vocabulary. That’s the same tax Obra Dinn pays, and it’s the correct price for both.

The ancestors

Heaven’s Vault (2019) is the obvious comparison — Inkle’s game also has you translating an ancient script — and the two differ in one instructive way. Heaven’s Vault lets you be wrong and keep walking; it will accept your bad translation and build on it, and the ambiguity is deliberate and, for a lot of players, maddening. Sennaar validates. You always eventually know. Inkle made a game about interpretation; Rundisc made a game about decipherment, and decipherment has a right answer, which is why Sennaar’s dopamine hits harder.

But the real ancestor is Captain Blood, 1988, and I say that with the confidence of someone who owned it. ERE Informatique’s oddity — on the Amiga, the ST and the C64 — put you in a spaceship talking to aliens through UPCOM, an icon language of pictograms. You built sentences out of those symbols and the aliens replied in pictograms, and the whole game was a negotiation conducted in a vocabulary you had to assemble by trial. It was unfriendly and slightly broken and completely unforgettable, and it understood in 1988 the thing Sennaar understands now: that the moment a stranger’s grammar clicks is a bigger event than any firefight.

Tunic is the modern cousin — an invented script and an in-game manual you learn to read — though Tunic’s language is mostly a wrapper on its secrets, where Sennaar’s language is the secret.

The verdict

Chants of Sennaar is the best thing this genre has produced since Obra Dinn, and it gets there by a completely different route: where Pope built a forensic machine, Rundisc built a social one. The validation page is a small, elegant answer to the verification problem, the art — cel-shaded, Moebius-flavoured, all flat colour and clean line — does real work in making glyphs legible as glyphs, and the central trick of making comprehension feel like forgiveness is genuinely new.

The stealth is a wart. Ignore it; it’s over in twenty minutes and the game on either side of it is close to flawless.

It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, and the Switch version is the one I’d choose, because this is a game you play with a real pen and paper next to you and a handheld leaves the desk free. Guess wildly, and be wrong in ink.

If you want another game where the systems carry the argument instead of the script, Cocoon came out a fortnight ago and has no words in it at all.

Spoilers below

The Anchorites are where the structure pays off. By the time you reach the top of the tower you are carrying four vocabularies, and the final floors stop being about learning a fifth and start being about arbitration — the game hands you the ability to move meaning between peoples who cannot address each other, and every puzzle after that is a diplomatic act.

It is also Babel told properly. The myth’s usual reading has the confusion of tongues arrive as a punishment dropped from above; Sennaar puts the whole catastrophe on the ground floor, where it belongs — generations of people directly above and below each other, each treating an unparsed noise as a threat and building a theology out of the misunderstanding. Rundisc never state that. They let you assemble it, glyph by glyph, and then hand you the job of undoing it.

And the descent at the end is the finest thing in it. You go back down through floors you crossed in fear, and you can read all of it, and the tower that spent the whole game being a hostile puzzle box is now simply a building full of people who have been shouting explanations at you from the start.