Left Behind Game Club: A Video Game Podcast · Left Behind Game Club

Chants of Sennaar

·1 hr 11 min·2 clips

The game fills a dictionary with glyphs, then lets you brute-force meanings with question marks.

Episode 205 starts with familiar table energy. Jacob McCourt puts Chants of Sennaar on the table, while Travis Colnutt, Alex Martin, and Jessica Fantuzzo settle into the bit before the analysis gets going. The title pronunciation gets a little wobbly, which honestly fits. This is a game about translation, partial understanding, and trying to make sense of symbols before they fully click. The early jokes about saying hello in glyph form are loose, but they land close to the point. Then the practical details come in. The group identifies the game as developed by Run Disc, published by Focus Entertainment, and released across Switch, PS4, Windows, Xbox One, Android, and iOS on September 5, 2023. After that, the conversation is at its best when it gets into puzzles. One speaker calls the opening level fantastic because it teaches through structure instead of handing over answers right away. A hierarchy puzzle with cards works because the payoff waits. The player has to carry the logic forward, reach another space, and use it on a door later. That kind of delayed gratification is where the game seems to win them over. The praise stays nicely specific. They like that Chants of Sennaar asks players to solve, remember, and reuse information, instead of rewarding every translation the second it appears. The second level gives them another clean example. Disguising yourself as one of the warriors depends on reading the instructions well enough to move a box where the boss wants it. That makes the language system feel active. Translation is not just menu work there. If the words do not click, progress through the area can stall. The garden section is rougher. It sounds like a shared-play headache, especially when one person is trying to explain a half-broken language to someone else in the same room. They call it big user error, which gives the frustration a funny little sting, but the real point is sharper: Chants of Sennaar can test patience when players fall out of sync. Alex still backs the structure, saying the opening level sets the tone for the whole game. The bards come up too, with the third area's language structure singled out as an easy target, though the excerpt cuts off before the full complaint arrives. By the end, the feed drifts away from the main conversation. The closing stretch is mostly podcast promotion, with Fun and Games describing video games as a medium for stories, strange worlds, and different kinds of fun.

As heard by us

A puzzle-game discussion that makes language decoding feel tactile.

Chance of Cenar turns language into the central problem, and the club stays with the feel of solving it. The opening level gets credit for teaching hierarchy, delayed payoff, and the habit of holding onto a clue until it can do real work, which gives the discussion its sharpest…

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Why you'd press play

You want a language-forward puzzle chat that tracks hierarchy, memory, and delayed payoff.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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