Chants of Sennaar

I completed Chants of Sennaar yesterday, and it was a bit of a letdown. I didn't buy into the mythical story the way I became enthralled with Heaven's Vault sci-fi/adventure. As to the puzzle part, it was okay, it flowed without too much effort, but I wish there were more challenges. Instead, the game seemed to make sure we could make out all the glyphs. It felt a bit like a cultural power fantasy... Otherwise, hey, the UX was slick.

The one thing I liked was having to write into the discovered languages, that felt new. I don't know of an equivalent in English, but in French we have different words for talking about the direction of a translation. The version goes from foreign to mother tongue, and the thème is mother tongue to foreign. So Heaven's Vault was great for version but had almost no thème as I recall. Sennaar's endgame puts heavier emphasis on thème, but it had to kinda dumb down the language in order to enable us to wield it.

(That was your daily bit of foreign language trivia to knock down frontiers and get the people of Earth back together, huzzah.)

Regarding the art, I'm somewhat tired of the brutalist vibes at this point. My current assessment of architectural modernism makes me more inclined to feel spite than awe in the face of such constructions. Obviously that's a political issue which runs deeper than the placated message of 'getting people to talk will solve all problems', so it won't get much focus. But it definitely is a problem to me.