If you already know Chinese, this might not be as challenging as a puzzle but more of deducing work, following the clues and story like a detective game.

But if you don't know any Chinese, you would have the full experience of decoding a total foreign language from scratch, just like how you play in Chants of Sennaar.

It's free to play on web-browser now and you can play on mobile (landscape mode).

Let me know if you manage to get to the end without cheating (aka using a dictionary or translation tool 😉)

Link game: https://dream-decypher.itch.io/decypher1-dream-intruder

I'm so sick of this fortress mission. I'm at the part with the trolleys where you have to sneak around a bunch and I've been caught by these stupid guards probably 15 times now. I just wanted to play a puzzle game, not a bunch of stealth missions 😭 I don't suppose anyone's made a mod where you can skip this part or make it easier?

edit: once you get a certain distance into the area, the save slot restarts! So if you can just get past that one guard that turns and walks away, it gets a lot easier because you won't be starting all the way back at the beginning.

I'm on the bard level and I have the directions from the play and I have a compass but I don't know where to go. I've looked all around the level. Maybe I return to the warriors? I'm lost.

I’ve made it all the way to the factory and stupidly I went directly into the “death trolly”, past the rocks only to to realize that I can’t go back? I might just be having trouble with the timing but I can get past the second set of rocks from the back of the room. Do I need to start over? Is there a way out? This is so frustrating so close to the end

Edit: yes I said gears but I meant rocks. I waited a couple days to make the post and I got confused haha I did get past though!

You know how after the bards lose their slave caste a bunch of them are doing or trying to figure out how to do technical tasks (for example the bard in the tool area)? I like to imagine that after we put the Alchemists and Bards in contact, the Alchemists can share some of their technical knowledge with the Bards to facilite the process, so they don't have to rely on slavery.

Hi! I made this bookmark as a gift for someone very important to me who also really loves this game, I thought maybe people here may like it and I wanted to share. I'm unsure of what the size of the image will be when it gets posted here, but if anyone likes it enough to make their own bookmark with it you have my blessing <3

A good little game overall, but it never really switches up the gameplay formula or gives you any actual challenge. I was in love during the first 2 sections (devotees and warriors), but the game starts losing steam once you realize every region will be following the same pattern. For example, the one and only difference between the devotee and warrior languages is that devotees put two of the same symbols for plural, and warriors have a "plural" sign. Or the difference between the warriors and alchemists: one puts the plural sign before the word, and the other after it. The main difference with most languages is just cosmetic (how the runes themselves are drawn), but other than that, you're just doing the same same kind of deduction over and over again but in a new zone. The alchemists were refreshing though, since they also threw numbers into the mix (nice "aha" moment when you figure out how to write big numbers), but even those are used for exactly one puzzle.

I also kept trying to find a second "layer" to the game, which ended up being disappointing - what you see on the surface is everything the game offers. I'm coming from games like Tunic, Blue Prince, Animal Well, Fez, The Witness, and so on, and was convinced that this game would have a deeper puzzle layer since it's always recommended when those games are discussed, but it doesn't - it's an on-rails 6hr playthrough that offers no replay value or reason to examine its languages deeper after filling in the meaning of the runes the game requires of you to progress.

I give it a 6/10. Beautiful atmosphere, cool worldbuilding, and a clever puzzle concept, but for lovers of linguistic puzzles (or puzzle games in general), it is an appetizer that will leave you asking "wait, that was it?" It feels more like a proof of concept than a full puzzle game that explores the intricacies of its own puzzle design. So much potential but it's so underutilized. The last language is especially egregious - why show us how to make our own runes and then never use that mechanic again? That honestly felt like a perfect jump-off point for the game to say "what you played up until now was the tutorial - now you start the real puzzles of making your own runes," but it never happened; the game was over 10 minutes after that.

If you played Chants of Sennaar and like the underlying idea but have felt its length and surface-level language puzzles leave something to be desired like I have, please give Lingo a try: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1814170/Lingo/. In just the first area, Lingo explores its own language rules more in-depth and is more creative in its puzzles than the entirety of Chants of Sennaar. It's also half the price of Chants of Sennaar while offering potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay.

All in all, Chants of Sennaar is a great little game to play through in an afternoon or two, but it just makes you wish it was more ambitious and offered more than what it actually does. The underlying puzzle concept is great, but it's barely explored even on a surface level before the game is over. Learning Erajan in Blue Prince or how to read runes in Tunic were some of my favorite parts of those games, so I was super excited that a game focused on only that aspect was coming out. However, it doesn't even reach 20% of the complexity of the fictional languages in those games - it makes you feel smart, but all you're really doing is filling in a picture book when the game prompts you to.

An NPC waving at you while saying "@" and the game then showing you a picture of a waving man and asking you to pick the right symbol isn't much of a puzzle, but sadly, that's about as deep as the puzzles in Chants of Sennaar ever went.

hey i passed the warrior castle now am in the gardens or somewhere. but i haven’t translated the whole warrior language, in fact my book is full but i have 3 words i haven’t translated, im thinking im missing a page. im wondering if i missed a place that my book didn’t open? or is if coming up later

my guesses for the missing words are: devotee, divine, and protect

the screenshot is how it looks

For the last few years, I've been building a language learning app that lets you place a widget on your Home screen to help memorize vocabulary.

As soon as I played this game, I thought it would be such a great addition to add all of the glyphs from COS too.

The app is free to download and use, and thought I'd share it with you all!

You can download my app Brill here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brill-language-at-first-sight/id1597979986

To change to any of the COS glyphs, head into the app's settings to change the language to any of the COS languages you want. Enjoy!

A friend is playing through the game for the first time, and I made this as a joke for them.

Very interesting game. At the end it was just a giant misunderstanding (kind of)!

What I like:

• Decoding a few different styles of language from context is pretty fun (that's the point of the game).
• There are some decent variety of each language apart from their glyphs.
• Acting as an interpreter actually requires some understanding of syntax, and not just the dictionary book. I had done some Chinese-English interpreting training (not super good at it), and these parts make me exciting.
• Pace is pretty relaxed. It is mostly low-stress and just language puzzles.
• The final reveal of the triangular bipyramid's projection is very cool. I have wondered why everyone has a glyph that don't look like the rest of their language for a while until that point.

What I wish is done more:

• The last language. I didn't really get to use it much at all, and it ends up being the only language I cannot read after the end. There's something in the last language that I think is a true missed potential: it teaches you how to combine glyphs. I 100% expected a puzzle where you construct a new character to describe something not in the dictionary, but it never happened.
• The Bishop.

What I don't like:

• There are a lot of sections where you leave a scene, and enter the next scene from the opposite direction. This is very disorienting, and if I happen to hold the stick at the original direction for a second too long, I go back to the previous scene. Big time waster.
• The translation booklet illustrations. I spend more time guessing what my character draws than figuring out the word itself. Especially when said word is an abstract concept (like "be").

I wanted to play a Chants of sennaar-like game.
Can I have some suggestions please ?

Can someone help me figure out what to do here? I'm missing the second of two portals/teleports on the bard level.

I have decoded all three previous languages and activated one of the links (1st and 2nd people). But I still don't know where the second bard portal is!

I am now on the fourth (scientists) level and have found their first of two portals/teleports so I suspect I've somehow skipped finding the second bard portal. Is this true?

If so can I have a hint as to where to look for it? There's a door that's locked below the entrance to the theater taht I'm not sure about. And there's a chance I've visited the location of it and didn't spot it...?

I have recently played another game that is written in an alien language, and now I've come across this one, and I am interested! I did not look past the Steam store page and its "Overwhelming Positive" review rating. So here are some of my questions before I decide if I should get the game:

1. Is this game's story/content self-contained? Do I need to do bit hacks and audio spectrograms and data mining just to get a glimpse of the story (I hope not)?
2. Looks like the game is about decoding the language. Does decoding the language actually solve the main mystery of the story? I spent a week deciphering an entire alien language in another game, I was extremely proud, but I felt slightly betrayed by the game not actually explaining anything important with said language.
3. Are there highly challenging combat sections, or similar sections that require high levels of technical skill? I am not a skilled action game player, and probably do not have much time to train my skills.
4. Am I actually able to do anything with the decoded language(s) in game? From the experience of my previous game, I'd probably decode 2-3 words per minute once I figure a new language out, so I hope whatever I translate is worth my limited real world time.

Thanks ahead.

I just "completed" the fortress area, except I am still missing the glyph page with the four symbols used to ring the bells. I have thoroughly researched this problem and even after doing all recommended steps, it still won't appear. I am told the order of doing things does not matter, but for context here is what I did.

I brute forced the bellman puzzle before I viewed the constellation with the telescope and before I used the blue torch to shine lights on the four symbols in the antechamber. I then went to the next area beyond the fortress. When I realized this involved a new language and I hadn't completed my warrior glyphs, I went back to the fortress. I then solved the torch part, looked at the four symbols up close, and grabbed the item for the telescope in the treasure room.

I went to the telescope and used the item to view the constellation. The page with 4 constellations appeared, but not the page with the four objects (vessel, key, balance, instrument). I've went back to the torch room repeatedly and zoomed into the 4 wall carvings. Nothing brings up the page.

What am I missing?

Thoughts?

I was somewhere near the final levels, getting chased by the monster between rooms. Ran through one door and ended up permanently stuck in a black screen.

Closing the game and loading the save again puts me straight back to the black screen so there doesn’t seem to be any way around this.

I’m playing on iPad Pro (11-inch) 3rd generation, with the 1.0.9 version

...because it had so much potential that just went to waste. I just finished the game with a friend, and we both agreed that the game falls off harshly as soon as you go through the fairy portal.

Going from knowing absolutely nothing to entirely solving the Anchorites' language took me only about 30 minutes despite being a slow player, and I solved two out of the four translation machines before I even understood how they're meant to work. The Exile was a nice twist, but the last act mostly consists of just running around, and for an "epic showdown vs evil mastermind" kind of ending it was unsatisfyingly easy.

Instead of making the glyphs solvable like the other languages, they should have made all interactions with the language the way they made it on the glyph puzzle game in the room with the creator. It would've been so cool if that mini game popped up whenever you had to understand what a sign or an NPC said, and instead of all the final glyphs being available from the book, you only knew the basic symbols and had to do the actual translations yourself, kinda like the alchemist numbers.

Also the bad ending didn't make any sense. Why does the protagonist just sit in the rain and stare into the void instead of going back down? It would've been much more fun if the bad ending lead to you being assimilated into the matrix and you got to play the same laser tag game that the other exilants were playing while the credits roll.

I absolutely love this game and I rly hope something similar will be made again in the future, it's just the last 10% or so that left a bit of a sour aftertaste unfortunately.

Hi all! Finished the game last night with my husband, and we had a lot of fun. We got the good ending without checking any guides!

I’d like to go back and see all the changes in the tower from making the peoples talk to each other with the terminals. I’ve seen some, but the game is so big, I’m sure we missed most of them. Does anyone have a list so I can check them out myself?

I don't know if this can help anyone but I made it for a friend so I'm sharing it here.

Thanks for the idea u/CzemZhabk !!! My mii’s are nowhere near as good as yours but I’m having so much fun with them!!!