I’ve played two of this year’s Best Game or Interactive Work Hugo finalists (Dredge and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). The only console I own is a Nintendo Switch, so I’m not going to be playing Alan Wake 2 or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor any time soon. Baldur’s Gate 3 has a MacOS version so I might get a copy — I’m definitely interested in playing it but finding the time for it may be a problem.
That leaves Chants of Sennaar which has a very nice Switch version. OK, I’ve only played it for less than an hour but firstly it looks gorgeous and secondly the language puzzle aspect is very clever.
You a berobed little guy wandering around a huge tower complex in a desert. Everything is oversaturated yellows and oranges except for the blue of the water in fountains and numerous canals. No monsters or fighting (yet) but plenty of exploring and working out simple puzzles with switches and gates. The broader puzzles are what makes the game especially interesting.
The tower has other people wandering around and you can interact with them except…you don’t speak their language. Instead, you see glyphs/symbols that stand for words. These come both from people you meet and also from pictures and signs. As you encounter these symbols, a lexicon of the ones you have seen gathers entries. You can make guesses about the symbols (e.g. “open” and “close”) and that helps you with your journey. At various points, you can get your guesses confirmed.
You quickly learn a basic vocabulary of what is important either to your needs (“open” and “close”) or to the culture of the people you have met (“god”). You start feeling pretty confident…and then you meet a different group of people who speak a different language.
I had to stop myself playing because I’ve a trip coming up and I wanted to save the game for the boring bits. I was hooked into this game very quickly. The language puzzle aspect has an interesting emotional impact. Rather than alienating you from the little computer people you meet, it makes you feel more actively interested in them as a people and a culture, elevating them from mere background.
I’m still a bit sceptical about how this category will work out. If it ends up just being a list of the big AAA games for the high-end consoles then it will go the way of Best Dramatic Presentation — fun but inconsequential. However, if it works as category that helps you discover good games that you might not have known about then it will be a positive addition. So far I found one great game that I otherwise didn’t know about, so that is a definite vote of confidence in the category.
Camestros Felapton 
9 responses to “Hugo 2024: Currently playing Chants of Sennaar”
My personal feeling is that there probably aren’t enough big AAA genre games to take over this category consistently, which will mean that there will likely always be a couple of outliers, and that can’t be a bad thing.
But Sennaar is a worthy finalist. I don’t think it’s perhaps the best of the spate of ‘translation’ games that have appeared in the last few years [for me, that’s still Heaven’s Vault], but the genre is clearly thriving.
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I do hope so. I could category should have a discovery element to it. Even Best Novel still does that.
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Either my husband was playing the same game or there are at least two with the same premise and setting. He seemed to be enjoying it.
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Can I just note that I’m not a fan of the AAA designation? In American baseball, AAA is the highest minor league and so while it’s better than AA and A, it’s still below the big leagues.
And where did it come from? In what system is AAA the highest? Credit rankings? Like a lot of gamers use S tier when compiling lists as the highest. (Japanese influence.) Would SSS be better than AAA? One of the game company presidents bragged they were releasing a AAAA game. (It turned out to be pretty mediocre.) Maybe we don’t understand this system.
So anyway, the big games are always going to dominate a category just because of raw numbers. You’ll get some odd breakthroughs like Among Us or even Fall Guys which will be all the rage for a year, but even then they won’t win the big gaming awards.
The Hugos voters might be contrarians and vote differently than the teen sweats, but I’m not sure how that will play out. Maybe a certain group will play a smaller game and that will be enough in a small nominating category to get it on the ballot. I’d still bet money, despite the inclusion of some indie games, that the award goes to one of the bigger titles.
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Oh sure, I think BG3 is almost certain to win – but the question seems to be about the shortlist rather than the final winner? We both seem to agree that there will usually likely be a couple of ‘outliers’ in the list, but I imagine we both doubt that any of them will actually win.
(On another point, calling top-tier games SSS seems so obvious now that you mention it!)
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“And where did it come from? In what system is AAA the highest?”
If Wikipedia is to be believed, it probably was borrowed from crediting ratings. And it seems it’s AAA not SSS because S-tier lists didn’t become popular (in English-speaking gaming circles at least) until after AAA was already in use.
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I know nothing about this category, so am glad I’m not voting this year.
Also, today’s weirdness on WP is that it won’t let me click on the stars for likes, even though I’m logged in to WP!
So consider this a +1 for Jack Lint.
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My 13 year old thanks you for this post. I told him about the game, he tried out the demo on his Switch, and then paid me $20 to buy it (or, rather, reduced the amount of money his mother owes him for raiding his piggy bank by $20).
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🙂 yay
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