CHANTS OF SENNAAR

How Babel helped a world of stealth become a world of words

- CHRISTIAN DONLAN

Format PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One

Developer Rundisc

Publisher Focus Entertainment

Origin France

Release 2023

Chants Of Sennaar is a game about cracking codes. These codes just happen to be a series of languages that you encounter as you work your way up through the various cultures that inhabit a giant tower. Because of this, when looking back at the game after completion, a lot of players are likely to remember a linguistic roadblock, such as a glyph whose precise meaning stumped them, or maybe an instance of the fingerpost, a moment when everything clicked and they realised they could suddenly understand a whole conversation in one of these languages for the first time.

But that's looking back. At the start, at the bottom of that tower and staring up at the peak, the impact of Chants Of Sennaar comes down to images, not words, and places much more than sentences. Fittingly, then, back at the start of the game's development, it was the visual world that came together first.

From the very beginning, Chants Of Sennaar was set in a landscape of spacious, ruler-straight architecture that would unfold around you on an inhuman scale. It was, as now, a game in which minarets and turrets and castle walls rose abruptly from jagged bedrock, in which you moved through ornamental gardens and courtyards whose detailing suggested anything from urban Spain to the night markets of Marrakesh.

"When it came to visual development," Julien Moya explains, "there was a long phase of research into historical, artistic and architectural references." Moya is the creative director of Rundisc, the tiny Toulouse-based studio behind Chants Of Sennaar that he co-founded with game director Thomas Panuel in 2018.