Commonplace

Chants of Sennaar

Played October 12-16 2024. I loved this! Didn't outstay it's welcome, very visually clean, satisfying but not-too-difficult puzzles all built around deciphering multiple languages using Return of the Obra Dinn-style deduction and journal verification. The languages themselves aren't all that elaborate, but what elevates this is that there's a Tower of Babel-esque narrative tying them together, with different people-groups that have languages reflecting their distinct values, translations reflecting how their words for the same concept (say, referring to one another) have different connotations in the different languages, and small differences in the grammars of the languages helping the puzzles reach beyond word-matching.

I'd recommend to fans of Obra Dinn, or even of other compact conceptual puzzle games like Patrick's Parabox.