Man, faithful, warrior, God... There are four cards on the table. A man, sitting in front of us, mixes them and places them face down. I draw the first: warrior. He takes the second: God and wins a point. Because? The rules are not explained, but after a few rounds of confusion I understand it: it all lies in the hierarchical relationship between the elements of the game. Man is worth less than the faithful, who is worth less than the warrior, who in turn is worth less than God. He wrote it Ignazio Silone in his novel Fontamara, describing the miserable life of the peasants of Abruzzo, who are worth less than the prince's dogs, who are worth less than the prince's guards, who are worth less than the prince of Torlonia, while "at the head of all there are It is God, owner of heaven. [...] And it can be said that it is finished".
Chants of Sennaar animates a world made up of five languages spoken by peoples who cannot understand each other. A long and intricate story will be revealed throughout the approximately ten hours necessary to complete the adventure of the mysterious traveler, called to reconnect things, events and, above all, people. So that power relations no longer dominate, but rather dialogue and mutual understanding. Language becomes a narrative vehicle and also the main tool in the gameplay of Chants of Sennaar, in a kind of investigative mystery in which the body to be analyzed to solve the enigma is composed of glyphs, symbols and different syntactic structures.
We tell you about this extraordinary journey inspired by the legend of the Tower of Babel in ours. Review of Songs of Sennaar.
The mystery of the Tower
the peoples of Torre They are divided and apparently condemned to incomprehension: each of their languages is different, making any type of dialogue impossible. There are the faithful, with the soft lines of their glyphs; Then we have the warriors, who use symbols with clean and brutal lines, as sharp as and sharper than a sword. In all this chaos of incommunicability, an anonymous traveler appears, stooped and modest in appearance, but guided by great ingenuity and an apparently humble, but actually very powerful tool: a notebook.
The annotations will lead us to lift the curtain on the mysteries of the myths of the Tower civilizations, uncovering the reasons for their divisions and frictions, in an attempt to reconnect what was once united. The sovereign power of the word dominates everything that can be a carrier of oppression, of love, of beliefs, of rumors. The protagonist has the task of returning everything to the unit, of translate and, therefore, allow a dialogue between the people of the Tower, even in a symbolic way: as the adventure progresses, we will be asked more and more to parallel the glyphs of the different languages, discovering similarities and differences. and investigating the reasons why they were developed.
Because in The Songs of Sennaar there is always a reason, and we are called to investigate the red thread that connects meaning and signifier, form and content. The first language we encounter is emblematic in asking us, first of all, to be willing to put our spirit of observation into play: a vertical line ending with a short dash perpendicular to the first indicates a person, while the same line, if placed and crowned by a circle, indicates a deceased. He sense of discovery that follows each linguistic epiphany, small or large, is the greatest joy of this tortuous adventure, sometimes complex, but always profound and ready to offer unexpected surprises.
Annotations and connections in the Songs of Sennaar
To make this complex research work possible, Rundisc turns to one of the best research video games of all time: we are talking about Return of the Obra Dinn. If in Lucas Pope's adventure the notebook of the anonymous insurance investigator from the London office of the East India Company "blocked" the correct conclusions about the identity and causes of death of the passengers when a certain number was reached, in the case of Songs of ShinarCorrect association between images and glyphs. two sides of the travel notebook will lead to the crystallization of the work done, proposing the correct translation of the analyzed symbols.
Sometimes it is possible to force things - this could also happen in The Return of the Dinn Work - but this does not imply a disqualification of the basic system, capable of stimulating the player and pushing him to formulate hypotheses, which can be noted in a dedicated section. space for each of the glyphs discovered. Continuing with the adventure, as mentioned above, we will also be asked to compare the symbols of the different languages present, tracing similarities and differences. Ultimately, the riddles in The Songs of Sennaar are precisely intended to deepen our linguistic knowledge and test our deductive processes- By opening and closing a door, for example, and looking at nearby glyphs, a hypothesis can be formulated about which one means "close" and which one means "open."
How intriguing these linguistic mysteries are was already demonstrated a few years ago by the excellent Heaven's Vault, a video game impressive for the quality of the structures underlying the dead language that the protagonist Aliya Elasra must decipher. In the case of Chants of Sennaar there is less freedom compared to the space adventure of the archaeologist in Heaven's Vault, and at times we would have felt the need for a life of escape, for a map to guide us through the corridors of this labyrinth, or perhaps some suggestion in some truly cryptic moments. In our opinion, the massive backtracking required in some sections is functional with respect to a need felt by the developers: that of making the player perceive a sense of growth and progress, conveyed through the analysis of phrases seen and not translated in the game. past. but perfectly analyzable once certain progress has been made in what is, for all intents and purposes, a real investigation into the interior of the mysterious Tower. Less stimulating (and, in our opinion, almost completely superfluous in the playful fabric of the work) are the stealth sections, which we often find ourselves repeating over and over again due to banal positioning errors.
Between Moebius and Sable
One of the main strengths of Chants of Sennaar undoubtedly lies in its artistic sector. The production, firmly anchored in the stylistic aesthetic features, the very clean lines and the bright colors of the great French cartoonist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), admirably characterizes the Tower and the people who inhabit it, proposing suggestions rooted in the European Middle Ages, the Middle East and other cultures. Moebius' art also served as inspiration for another video game released in recent years: Sable, in a certain sense complementary to Chants of Sennaar from a visual point of view.
Everything is completed with the music of Thomas Brunet, always adapted to the changing context of the different levels of the Tower and the cultures that inhabit them. Excellent Translation to Spanish, capable of making clear the progress of the protagonist from the formulation of working hypotheses to the confirmation of his linguistic theories, with a change in the interpretation of the phrases read and heard depending on whether the meaning of the glyphs has already been confirmed or not.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 19.99 € Holygamerz.com 8.5 Readers (10) 7.7 your voteChants of Sennaar is an original production full of excellent ideas, artistically very valid and solid in its gameplay. Except for some perhaps excessively cryptic sections and a sometimes very strong feeling of disorientation, especially when one has moved a little away from the base of the Tower, Rundisc has created a work with very distinctive and well-characterized features, with an important message in the bottom. line: the edifice of language is built on the shifting foundations of humanity, and accessing its depths and mysteries is essential to tell stories, discover truths, but also manipulate and dominate the members of our communities. This underlying ambiguity is the beating heart of The Songs of Sennaar.
PRO
- Visually wonderful
- The story unfolds in a truly captivating way.
- Languages are constructed convincingly.
- The notebook system is functional to the nature of the research and is well implemented.
AGAINST
- Hidden sections could be easily removed without compromising the work.
- Sometimes you feel a little lost
