"Chants of Sennaar" & "Spider-Man 2" Double-Bill

Publisher: Focus Entertainment

Developer: Rundisc

Available for: Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Over the years my patience for anything other than high-octane action in games has waned more and more, but one thing that I still always appreciate is a good puzzle that makes me feel smart for having solved it. Enter Chants of Sennaar on recommendation from the infamously hard to please Yahtzee Croshaw, and you have an indie gem that hasn't quite gotten the attention that other indie gems from this year have gotten.

Chants of Sennaar takes place in the tower of Babel, where you awaken as a hooded figure unfamiliar with any of the languages spoken in this world. You have but one goal: to ascend to the top of the tower, and the only way to accomplish this is to speak with the denizens of each level, learn their language, and piece together how to proceed based off of these investigations.

Now, this is a puzzle game of two separate types: language puzzles and logic puzzles. The game is at its strongest when dealing with the former. You'll enter a level with maybe one or two words in your repertoire ("me" and "you," for example), and you'll have to piece together the rest of the language and how its grammar works from context clues from there. For instance, you might come up to a mural depicting a bunch of people, and at the bottom of the mural, one symbol will be repeated twice. Then, a mural next to that might depict a bunch of heavily armed people, with a different symbol repeated twice at the bottom of that mural. From this context, you might infer that the symbol on the first mural means "person" while the symbol on the second means "warrior," and you might further infer that the way to change "person" to "people" or "warrior" to "warriors" is to repeat the symbol for the singular twice. To give another example, you might end up talking to someone and they say three symbols, the first of which being "you." In exploring, you might find a directional sign containing one of those three symbols and find that following the sign leads to a garden. So, in revisiting your earlier conversation, you might interpret the person's dialogue as "you --blank-- garden." From there, you might temporarily substitute the word "go" for that remaining character in the sentence and see how it lines up logically in other sentences. After officially seeing all the words in a specific set, your character will open up a journal page containing a bunch of drawings. To use that previous example, you might see a drawing of a garden and a drawing of a person walking. If you connect the symbols you guessed meant "go" and "garden" to their respective drawings, they'll be "confirmed" if you were correct. Your goal, with this in mind, is to "confirm" all of the symbols in a level's language. Each level has an entirely different set of characters for their language, different grammar rules, etc, and the mental work gets more and more difficult the more complex the language becomes. When you're going around the levels trying to decipher the meaning of each word, the game is a stimulating mental exercise that was right up my alley.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the logic puzzles, things are just the slightest bit too obtuse. For instance, you're meant to simply guess that a weight labeled "1" actually weighs "10" and a slightly bigger weight labeled "1" actually weighs "100." It's little things like that that aren't complete rocket science, but aren't exactly intuitive either. 

Beyond that, there are also some forced stealth sections that are pretty universally tedious. It's not that they're hard, it's just that it's just a bunch of waiting and trial and error in terms of timing. You'll wait behind a bit of cover for, say, 10 seconds waiting for a guard to pass by, then move to the next section. Then, a guard might suddenly start coming at you from the opposite direction and see you where you're hiding, meaning you'll have to start the whole sequence over again. Again, it's not that it's difficult, but it is a waste of time.

The final thing to note is that there's just too much walking across empty vistas and the walking speed is just too slow. The tower of Babel and it's sense of scale are more than a little impressive the first time you come across these vistas, but when you're going back and forth across an area and you just want to get back to that NPC you were talking to earlier, it becomes tiresome.

Folks, I've had more than a little trouble making this review read well because there's not that much to say beyond "it's a fun little puzzle game that makes you feel smart when you succeed." So, take all I've said for what you will.

Keeping in mind that I'll be using my smaller game scale, let us review:

Obtuse logic puzzles - 1.0

Too much time wasting - 2.0

The final score for Chants of Sennaar is...

7.0/10 - Good

Decent work, Rundisc, decent work!

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Insomniac Games

Available for: Playstation 5

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Now, I know that stuffing a game like Spider-Man 2 into a double review might seem a little damning, but trust me when I say not to feel that way. The fact of the matter is that there isn't that much to say about this sequel that hasn't already been said about Spider-Man back in 2018. While this will tell people who need sequels to be significant departures from their predecessors everything they need to know, if you're like me and more of a good thing done slightly better is more than enough, then you'll enjoy what you find on your plate if you decide to give Spider-Man 2 a shot!

So, we'll just discuss the differences on display here. In Spider-Man 2, you'll spend your time almost equally between Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Peter is trying to balance the responsibilities of adulthood with the responsibilities of being a superhero, while Miles is fighting a similar battle, trying to balance applying for college and determining what his future holds in a world where New York needs him almost constantly. Before either of our heroes can make too much progress in their respective personal battles, however, a criminal mastermind named Kraven the Hunter appears in New York boasting nothing short of a small army of followers. With the help of hitherto unprecedented technological innovation, Kraven starts hunting the city's many defeated and/or reformed supervillains, and our Spider-Men obviously can't sit by and let that happen, so from there we have the basic starting point for our story. I'll say this on the story front: it's as predictable a comic book story as they come, but it's not as predictable as the original Spider-Man's story. That's not saying much, but there's at least some things you won't see coming a mile away in this game. With that in mind, I actually did find myself invested in the moment-to-moment story. 

However, the game's marketing is its own worst enemy. Showing us that Venom was going to turn out to be the main villain right in the very first trailer that ever came out was a mistake, and having post-symbiote-suit gameplay serve as the big E3/Game Awards demo was an even bigger one. So much of this game's story could have been jaw-dropping, emotional, or a temporary surprise, but almost every chance the game had to pull something like this was spoiled by the marketing. Is it that big a deal? Not really, but especially given that nobody really expects much from superhero stories, it would've been pretty effective to sell Kraven as the villain and not give us an answer when we roll our eyes and ask "yeah, yeah, ok, who's the real villain?" So, insofar as Venom could possibly be effective when we knew he was coming, I do have to say this interpretation of Venom....there's something about it. I don't know what it is, but something about the way he exists visually in this world is just...legitimately creepy. Perhaps some youtube video essayist a couple weeks from now will be able to break it down better, but if you were looking forward to Venom in this game, I'd say he doesn't disappoint.

What also doesn't disappoint is literally all the new aspects of combat and design. Swinging around the city is just as satisfying as it's always been, but this time around, you also have a wingsuit to bring into the mix. What this means in practice is that you can chain together different types of swinging to gain altitude, break into your wingsuit to glide great distances, seamlessly switch back to swinging, etc, and it all serves to make the act of traversing New York even better than it already was. 

Staying on design for a second, the design as it pertains to 100% completion is greatly improved over the original game. Gone are the days of having to swing around a section of the map for 10 minutes waiting for one of the randomly-generated crimes to occur, and gone are the days of doing repetitive tasks long after they overstayed their welcome. When you unlock a new open world activity that earns you progress towards completion, you do so during a story mission that causes the activity to feel important within the story context. And what's more, every single open world activity you unlock only requires doing maybe 6 times at most. There's a far greater variety of activities that each only show up a handful of times, so none of these activities outstay their welcome, and as a result, completionism is really only a matter of taking an hour or two in-between certain story missions to complete the handful of stuff you unlocked. It's simple, fast, straightforward, and satisfying to people like me who enjoy 100%-ing games like this. 

In terms of combat, there are additions such as parrying and special attacks, which are pretty self-explanatory, but they ensure there's a lot more variety in how you approach combat scenarios than there was previously. 

Finally, the game continues the tradition of forced stealth sections where you play as Mary Jane...and they're actually not bad this time around! With the help of a taser that never runs out of batteries, these sections feel less like restrictive side notes and more like....restrictive side notes....that actually do help break up the pacing a bit. In any case, getting caught is no longer an instant death sentence and MJ actually feels like she's somewhat capable with that taser in her hands, so I actually have no complaints this time around!

Also, and this is a major side note that doesn't matter, but if you think that Insomniac is waging some kind of war on conventionally attractive women because of the design changes they made to Mary Jane...in the same game that has Black Cat in it...you're a f***ing idiot, an incel, or both. Again, bigtime side note that doesn't matter, kind of like the attractiveness of characters in the first place, but it came to mind since I was writing about MJ anyway.

Sadly, there's one major way in which Spider-Man 2 differs from its predecessor, and that's in the buginess department. The original game had some technical jank going on, but this game is full of bugs. I've gotten trapped in the architecture, enemies have gotten trapped in the architecture, I've gotten trapped in a falling animation for several seconds when I should have already landed, I've had to reload saves on more than one occasion to fix broken quests, etc. The previous game had its share of bugs, but I expected more from Insomniac's second outing.

Like Chants of Sennaar, I've found myself having some difficulty making this review read as well as I'd like. Part of it is that we're close to the end of the year and I want to have everything squared away asap, and part of it is that again, Spider-Man 2 is so similar to Spider-Man that a simple line reading "if you liked the previous game, you'll like this one" would likely suffice. That kind of statement tends to be viewed as a negative in this industry, but as I've already said, most of the differences between Spider-Man 2 and its predecessor are positive, so it's like eating a slightly better version of the same dinner you had the night beforehand. If that works for you, it works for you...and it works for me, but it's just hard to get as excited about it even though it's a fantastic game. So, take that for what you will!

Let us review:

Technical issues - 1.0 

Wasted potential because of marketing - 0.5

The final score for Spider-Man 2 is...

8.5/10 - Near Fantastic

Great work, Insomniac, great work