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 Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game released in 2023 by Rundisc and Focus Entertainment, loosely based on the myth of the Tower of Babel. Our nameless wanderer is tasked with climbing the tower, with only one slight problem: We don't understand anything that its denizens say. Making matters worse is that each section of the tower is home to a different set of residents, each with their own distinct language - learning the language of the believers on the first level is great, but it's pretty much useless on the second level where the warriors live. As far as gameplay and structure goes, if you've played Heaven's Vault, you're about 80% of the way there, but Chants is a lot less story-driven and more puzzle-y. It's got some rudimentary stealth sections, but for the most part the game unfolds in a pretty consistent manner: You find some new glyphs, you're shown some kind of puzzle (usually dialogue combined with some kind of action), then the game will pop up a page in your notebook asking you to match text glyphs to concepts. It's a really neat game, and figuring out the structure of each language (this is what verbs look like, this is how they do plurals, etc) is a lot of fun.  This is a blind LP. We've obviously played ahead of the videos, but we are very much stumbling through this together. Please keep spoilers to a minimum, although if we really botch a translation job, feel free to make fun of us once we finish that section. Joining me is our band of space detectives, including FPzero, poorlywrittennovel, and Tanz. Updates will be on Monday and Friday unless otherwise noted. Table of Contents Part 1: You help me? Part 2: You me go tower Part 3: Me not love crop crop die Part 4: Plant seek instrument Part 5: Warriors not love death Part 6: Warrior God? Carry weapon! Part 7: Plural impure not build music Part 8: Bellman loves bottle Part 9: Idiot warrior plural be Part 10: Question compass you seek question Part 11: Wine plural me plural be Part 12: Men, we are not Part 13: Me plural seek transform Part 14: Diner closed Part 15: Refectory is open! Part 16: Scientist plural want help impure Part 17: We are the people of Exile Part 18: Are you afraid to die? Part 19: God, duty, beauty, transformation, exile Artix fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Dec 29, 2023 23:23
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Part 1: You help me? Part 2: You me go tower We start the game by waking up in a weird tower where we don't understand anyone and have to learn as we go. This is the content covered by the demo, and I suggest you try it for yourself before watching these if the game sounds interesting at all. It covers about half of the first level of the tower, and we'll be picking up in the game proper on Monday.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:26
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Oh, now this'll be an interesting one to follow along with. Curious little brain teaser connected to somewhat simple puzzling obscured by said brain teaser. Though, I doubt the puzzling will stay all too simple for long.
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Dec 30, 2023 01:53
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I watched these two videos when Artix uploaded them, and immediately went and bought the game for myself. It's good, it's cool, and I look forward to seeing how you all fare in intuiting what words mean.
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Dec 30, 2023 04:02
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Heck yeah! This was my personal Game of 2023, looking forward to this LP!
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Dec 30, 2023 14:22
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Yeah my own game of the year was a tossup between this and Hi-Fi Rush, first couple vids were a lot of fun, even with the probably half-dozen playthroughs I've watched since my own I think this is the first one with multiple minds coming together so it'll be interesting! (and yeah anyone who's interested enough off this to grab it should go ahead and do it, it's still on sale for the moment and it's worth going through blind first and then coming back to see other brains go at it!)
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Dec 30, 2023 17:05
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This is a very, VERY well done game concept and very charming way of presenting it too. I'm interested in seeing how the game plays out in full.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:26
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This is a good game. I will keep quiet about other things because playing it through blind is a virtue.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:52
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I really wanted to like this game, but I just couldn't understand what was meant by the pictures in the notebook repeatedly, meaning I often had to refer to a guide to the extent I got frustrated with it. In theory it's good (and an interesting setting), in practice I found that Obra Dinn did it earlier and better (although, on the latter part, what has really matched it accordingly?)
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Dec 31, 2023 18:44
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Oh man, watching you guys logic your way through things is so amazing. I'm here for this!
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Jan 1, 2024 05:47
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Love this game. Love seeing Linguistics happen to people playing it.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:15
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Part 3: Me not love crop crop die Does *anyone* love crop crop die? I feel like that's a pretty universal sentiment, friend.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:17
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Congratulations on getting the verb "to make" right on the first guess, you are the first LPer of this game in the history of ever not to get hung up on it in favor of thinking it meant to sell
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Jan 1, 2024 22:38
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Artix posted:
And here I thought there was an implied comma in the thread title the whole time. "Me Not Love Crop, Crop Die." As in "my crops died because I was a lovely farmer".
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Jan 1, 2024 23:01
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Artix posted:
But yeah, not many people enjoy plants just withering away like that. But I'm fairly sure there are such weirdos around. Just having a potted plant next to you, but refusing to water it, because that would destroy the artistic merit. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 23:55
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Bliss Authority posted:Congratulations on getting the verb "to make" right on the first guess, you are the first LPer of this game in the history of ever not to get hung up on it in favor of thinking it meant to sell I know Artix has probably recorded a bunch of this already, but for anyone else playing: the Tab toggle or hold to show you anything interactable on a screen is handy to double-check a room and avoid pixel hunting. I think it even changes the markings to show which you've already looked at. Yapping Eevee fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 01:46
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Yapping Eevee posted:I initially made this mistake because I talked to those two dudes the other way around. Relatedly, it took me longer than I'd like to realise what the right-page image was asking for, Make instead of 'pot'. This probably would have helped us in the last recording we did. 
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Jan 2, 2024 05:37
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"Me not love crop crop die" sounds like something out of a machine translation that went through at least three languages.
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Jan 2, 2024 15:07
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This game was so good, language puzzles are the best.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:56
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Now that we've seen the third video, the thread title makes sense. I really do love how the language puzzles work in this game so far. Our character is a master at linguistics.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:02
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I love Chants of Senaar. Going to be keeping an eye on this LP, because seeing somebody else experience this is fun.
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Jan 4, 2024 09:55
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Part 4: Plant Seek Instrument But if Preacher Loves Garden, why isn't he in the garden??? Checkmate, abbeyailures. (It's because he's dead)
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Jan 5, 2024 23:04
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Congratulations on passing the Devotees section! Already the color and architecture is less inviting here.
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Jan 6, 2024 02:23
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Should rename the thread after a great phrase from each floor I say. Remains to be seen what the standout one from the Warriors one will be though.
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Jan 6, 2024 02:34
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Cooked Auto posted:Should rename the thread after a great phrase from each floor I say. Remains to be seen what the standout one from the Warriors one will be though. If that's happening, we need a post that catalogues every title the thread will have.
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Jan 6, 2024 02:39
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This game has a few little achievements for doing slightly odd or out-of-the-way things, and I'm glad you happened upon that one. (There's also one for ringing the Abbey doorbell three times from the second video.)
Yapping Eevee fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 02:45
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Cooked Auto posted:Should rename the thread after a great phrase from each floor I say. Remains to be seen what the standout one from the Warriors one will be though. Surely it'd be 'come out to play'?
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Jan 6, 2024 08:38
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Just finished the game myself! Great to get in on the ground floor of this LP.quote:if you've played Heaven's Vault, you're about 80% of the way there Honestly this put me off irrationally for a while, I saw people going "this game is so innovative!" when it first came out and since I loved Heaven's Vault I was like "hang on, aren't you forgetting...?" and so I didn't want to play this game for a while. Completely irrational as I say, because if I liked HV I should like this. And ultimately they are doing different enough things that they're not stepping on each other's toes: HV has one big, complex script to decode whereas here there are multiple smaller languages to decipher and ultimately translate between. Also yeah, in HV solving the language is the big puzzle and everything else is a bit of a fun visual novel taking you to places where you can find more text and figure out more of the language. Here though the language directly feeds into puzzle-solving, as we've already seen.
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Jan 8, 2024 09:32
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Oh right, Heaven's Vault. I just recall completely flubbing the navigation minigame first time it came up and never getting farther on the game because the navigation game was... I dunno, maybe I was just missing something obvious about how to control it. I'd love to get a chance to finish that game, because the very little I did was intriguing.
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Jan 8, 2024 10:09
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When it comes to decoding a script, well, Tunic fiddled with that as well.
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Jan 8, 2024 12:38
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I enjoyed Tunic but I really dislike when games that are ostensibly [Genre] (Puzzle Platformer for Fez, Zelda/Dark Souls for Tunic, etc) decide "Actually, we're going to throw all that out and become a weird language puzzle instead. You want a true ending? gently caress you, time for something completely different and probably not at all what you liked about the first half of the game." Environmental Station Alpha is probably the biggest offender that I know of, but I'm sure there are others. Part 5: Warriors Not Love Death We leave behind the Devotees for the domain of the Warriors, where they tell us a blatant lie. Warriors *love* death, as long as they're the ones doing it.
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Jan 8, 2024 22:34
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You're making really good progress! I remember bumbling around the Warrior area for quite a while not really making any progress with the language, in part because I didn't figure out what was going on with the "Rosetta Stone" shield for a while because the "plural" symbol threw me off. The idea of carrying around the spear and going "how do you do, fellow Warriors?" got a good chuckle out of me 
Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 23:18
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nweismuller posted:Oh right, Heaven's Vault. I just recall completely flubbing the navigation minigame first time it came up and never getting farther on the game because the navigation game was... I dunno, maybe I was just missing something obvious about how to control it. I'd love to get a chance to finish that game, because the very little I did was intriguing. That navigation in the star streams or whatever is my big problem with the game. I didn't struggle to control it too badly, but it's incredibly slow and tedious and it ends up being like 40% of the game time and I don't think it contributes a drat thing to the appeal of the game. If it weren't there I'd replay to see some other outcomes but I can't face doing more of it.
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Jan 9, 2024 03:41
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Artix posted:I enjoyed Tunic but I really dislike when games that are ostensibly [Genre] (Puzzle Platformer for Fez, Zelda/Dark Souls for Tunic, etc) decide "Actually, we're going to throw all that out and become a weird language puzzle instead. You want a true ending? gently caress you, time for something completely different and probably not at all what you liked about the first half of the game." Environmental Station Alpha is probably the biggest offender that I know of, but I'm sure there are others. Yeah this is why I'm not so keen on Tunic: it really feels like two different games smashed together and I don't think the combination always works well. On topic: Regarding Chants of Sennaar, it's a interesting game, but it seems to me like it makes it a bit too easy to brute force things sometimes with figuring out the meaning of words. On the other hands, figuring out the linguistical structure of differend languages is pretty cool!
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Jan 9, 2024 11:42
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malkav11 posted:That navigation in the star streams or whatever is my big problem with the game. I didn't struggle to control it too badly, but it's incredibly slow and tedious and it ends up being like 40% of the game time and I don't think it contributes a drat thing to the appeal of the game. If it weren't there I'd replay to see some other outcomes but I can't face doing more of it. Actually, that's the same reason I keep bouncing off of it. I mentioned it before, but I'm still reminded of how Return of the Obra Dinn pretty much nailed a mystery game in it's design and implementation (even though it would have been really cool to have been able to jump to scenes from the book). Sorry - I just really liked Obra Dinn.
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Jan 9, 2024 13:21
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ivantod posted:
I'll say it in a future episode, but I think it's less about brute forcing and more "you've seen the context for this word, and we expect that the drawing will point you at something in the right ballpark." Generally it's a pretty good system, but there's definitely some words where you're probably guessing what the broad strokes meaning is without really getting it.
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Jan 9, 2024 14:36
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Of course there can be literal brute forcing involved, if you have an unfinished page and know everyone of thise except for one and just try to fill in the last one by guessing.
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Jan 9, 2024 16:15
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I really liked Chants of Sennaar; it's got a great aesthetic, music and vibe, figuring out languages is fun and it's one of my favorite games from last year. I think the LP has shown enough to make it clear that the game is, for better or worse, very afraid of players getting stuck due to a bad inference. I'm not 100% sure I would've liked it more if I'd skipped all the "ok now assign glyph to concept and we'll tell you if you're right" parts, believing that might be wishful thinking. Sometimes they definitely felt a lot like the game cheating me out of solving a puzzle.
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Jan 9, 2024 16:52
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Meanwhile I do like that they test you on it because of nothing else, getting glyphs confirmed makes it so that conversations can now have tenses or plurality shown and translated more directly to English. This is even more evident when subject-verb-object order gets messed with.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:02
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FPzero posted:Meanwhile I do like that they test you on it because of nothing else, getting glyphs confirmed makes it so that conversations can now have tenses or plurality shown and translated more directly to English. This is even more evident when subject-verb-object order gets messed with.
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Jan 9, 2024 21:46
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