I just finished Chants of Sennaar and it was so good. It’s a puzzle game loosely based on the myth of the tower of Babel. Your mission is to learn the (invented) language of several distinct cultures and get them communicating with each other. The puzzles are great. There are some stealth and running-away-from-things elements so I have to recommend the Steam version.
It was nice to play a game with such a well-executed and coherent theme that I found genuinely challenging but still managed to complete without looking up any answers. I personally found the theme rather moving, with its emphasis on growing past cultural insularity, connecting through the things we have in common, and celebrating our differences. It’s neat because as you start linking up the cultures, the environment and what people are doing changes to reflect the new values.
What’s funny is that I read the story first and got the impression that the game must have been awful. Then I played that game and it was really good.
A good game can still be a disaster if it’s surrounded by bad business decisions. But I assume it’s rare for someone to screw up the business side and still somehow produce a good game.
It was “good” but, among other things, it had the terrible luck of launching a couple of months after the launch of Skyrim which took all the air out of the CRPG space. If it’s early 2012 and you have $50 in your pocket, are you gonna buy Skyrim or KoA? I think the answer is obvious for most interested people.
I’ll add another recommendation for Chants of Sennaar. As I get older, I sometimes struggle with the time investment of puzzles in games (or puzzle games). But this one hit the sweet spot for me: some simple puzzles, some difficult ones – and any time I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to solve something, I spent another 3 or 4 minutes and figured it out. I think maybe there was one puzzle I had to search online for the answer, but that’s it.
This reminds me of GRIDROAD, which I still have not finished. Unfortunately, the three maps I can’t figure out how to 3-star are newer additions to the game. If you google for answers you get videos solving the original puzzles, but not these new ones.
World 4: Corner, Pinch
World 5: Giga
Bit of a longshot, but has anyone here played gridroad, and if you have, did you 3-star any of those three maps? Little help?
I played it first (I didn’t solve the entire thing, so didn’t get the proper ending), but I also am enjoying watching Let’s Plays of Chants Of Sennaar. It’s a surprisingly entertaining game to watch others figure out.
I watched “Pirate Software” play it. He’s Thor. Apparently some controversy has arisen about him, but I have no real clue so I just watched it. He did quite well.
Uh, his name online is PirateSoftware; nothing piracy related about him.
I was 16 when those games released and I got both on launch day. I loved KoA for its decent immersion and fun dumb action but yes Skyrim has had some cultural stay that I haven’t see in a long time for a single player game.
@Johnny_Bravo, as a supporter of Starfield, I call out to you. I’m about 40 hours in (and I tend to look around a lot) but I’ve just had my third game breaking bug (New Atlantis is unusable due to a broken Terrormorph spawn). The first break was apparently rare, happened early, and I just restarted. The second was apparently very common, and I found a workaround to get through it.
This one is apparently very common and NONE of the online fixes worked.
As a PC player, I’m about an inch from throwing achievements and a clean first playthrough (my normal mode) to fix it that way, but if I’m going to do that, I figure it makes just as much sense to start over, and do a curated list of mods anyway.
I know it’s a Bethesda game, and was fully willing to deal with Morrowind level 30 minute CTD events (actually closer to 60-90 to be fair for Starfield), but this many game bricking issues at three years in an unmodded playthrough is pretty bad. Do you have any advice about best options?
The one thing I did see and thought was bad was when he played Animal Well. He pretended to go away awhile and solve a massively difficult puzzle that was actually solved by tons of people teaming up online to work it. He acted like he solved it himself. Come on. He’s not that smart.
I did enjoy his longplay of Animal Well otherwise, though.
Oh yeah that was covered in the video. Videos like those remind me of old VH1 style documentaries. But yeah he also had kickstarted a game that he wanted to make which takes heavy from Undertale, and hasn’t finished it after many years is another thing that gives him ill will.
Honestly, no. I made it all the way through my first playthrough (on PC) with no gamebreaking bugs and haven’t touched the game since. Never played with any mods or anything. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
No problem, it was just a request for advice before I pressed the Big Red Button. But given my issues, yeah, not going to recommend Starfield as a game to anyone in this thread, or certainly not to anyone on a console at least!
Starfield is one of the few big games that never got Steam Deck verified. I’m surprised, but I avoided it since…but then again the reviews were only OK.
I’d probably like it pretty well. I’ve been playing Bethesda games since Daggerfall.
Starfield can be fun but the bugs are embarrassing. I’d be ashamed to admit it if I was QA for that game.
I mean, a huge portion of the game (Trackers Alliance) was broken at launch on Xbox and 2 years later I think it still doesn’t work. How can you release a huge chunk of content that so many people can’t play? It’s shameful, even for Bethesda.
I made it all the way through my first playthrough (on PC) with no gamebreaking bugs and haven’t touched the game since. Never played with any mods or anything. Sorry I can’t be of more help.