High up the tower – but still nowhere near the top – I discovered the bell-ringer’s shack. The shack was actually a sort of stone hut, if such a thing is possible, sat at the end of a curving wall. There was a door and a few slotted windows, and if I walked to the right, I found the bell-ringing equipment, which I needed to use but could not yet understand.
Chants of Sennaar reviewPublisher: Focus EntertainmentDeveloper: RundiscPlatform: Played on Switch and PCAvailability: Out now on PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox X/S.
Would the bell-ringer help me? Looking through the slotted window, I could see him, or rather his muttering shadow, ignoring my banging on the door, willing me to go away. How to get him out here to chat?
The answer – the first part of the answer anyway – lay with red graffiti slapped on the wall of his house. Three symbols, which meant three words, by the looks of it. If only I could read them.
Chants of Sennaar is often like this, an objective nested inside a puzzle nested inside an enigma. At first glance it all looks impossible, but this is a game for your inner watch-maker, and it requires you to tweezer each problem apart, one tiny cog or spring at a time. Take them out. Line them up. See what they suggest.
Wrong analogy probably. Chants is a game about climbing the Tower of Babel and making sense of the various peoples you meet as you work your way higher. It’s an adventure game, generally sort of isometric, with pointing and clicking and the solving of those nested puzzles. All quite traditional, written down like that. But I needed to remind myself that this is the actual genre from time to time, because the game often feels nothing like it. It feels like a revelation, actually, like games have worked out how to do something elegant, impossible, and empowering.
1 of 3 Caption Attribution Chants of Sennaar.
That’s because, since this is Babel, the real task is translation. Progress, puzzles, simple human curiosity, all of this comes down to collecting the marks you see as you move around the world and then working out what they mean. Astonishingly – Babel, remember – Chants doesn’t do this once but several times over. You solve one language and then move higher up the tower: a new group of people, a new language to decode, new customs and rituals and ways of being in the world. What a game this is.