#metroidbrainia

[endormiscat]

[patmax17]

I recently played Chants of Sennaar

It's a game where you explore a giant tower whose inhabitants speak a language you don't know, and have to figure out the meaning of the words they use to progress.

It's a very cool twist on a puzzle game, and has some interesting takes on language, culture and communication.

As a lover of puzzle games and a person fascinated by language and translations (living in a bilingual area), I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's about 10 hours total, the perfect length for a focused indie video game, IMO

[oneefin]

one of my favorite "metroidbrainia" tropes that i really hope to see future metroidbrainias continue is this idea of seeing something really cryptic and mysterious only to come back later with a means of translating it and discover that it's actually really silly.

fez and tunic both do this, but i can't really talk about them without going into spoiler territory, so here's a spoiler break:

in fez, one of the first things that happens is you meet this giant yellow cube that grants you access to the main mechanic of the game. the cube speaks in a script that the player does not understand at this point in the game.

later, you can revisit this cutscene having learned how to read this script and it turns out the cube is just like... a guy lol

and an example of this from tunic that really stuck with me is when players figured out through solving an extremely late game puzzle that the game contains a hidden musical language with similar mechanics to the game's written script. when the first people to come across this were seeing where, if ever, it was used throughout the game, they quickly came upon the sound that the east and west bells make after you strike them in the early game:

people thought, "wouldn't it be funny if this arpeggio encoded something, and it was just like. DING DONG lol", except the characteristics of the sound matched up quite well with that hypothesis (it's a short repeating cycle of arpeggios with a small difference in each half of the cycle), and when translating it out, it turns out this is 100% what's going on

anyway i want more games to do this. please give me more cryptic secrets that turn out to be jokes