The Best Indies At Gamescom
Gamescom is over and everyone is heading home. My heart, however, remains there. I played more games in that week than I have all year, and while some didn’t stick with me, there are others I’ve put in my calendar and wishlisted on Steam already. So, for this week’s Indie Spotlight, I’ve chronicled the best indies made by small teams that I played at Gamescom.
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I’ll start off with my favourite, Chants of Senaar. While aesthetically a mashup of Sable and Journey, Chants of Senaar ditches the wandering aimlessness of its inspirations in favour of a more focused, puzzle-solving narrative. The story is inspired by the Tower of Babel - the one so big it was seen as a hubristic affront to God, and the denizens were all forced to speak different languages so that nobody could communicate. As legend has it, that’s why we all speak different languages.
The core of the gameplay involves climbing the tower and figuring out the languages spoken by its inhabitants. Everyone speaks and writes in a series of glyphs you have to guess the meaning of. It starts off simply, with a lever that opens and closes a door, and escalates to someone asking you to open gates while they wait and vice versa. After each set of puzzles, you’re able to try and match the symbols with their actions to confirm the words.
Gradually unlocking meaning and seeing alien phrases and sentences take shape is thrilling, and deeply appeals to the puzzle-solving part of my brain. Chants of Senaar is developed by just two people, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. It looks gorgeous, the puzzles are tricky but not frustrating, and there are multiple languages to learn. I’m utterly fascinated by this game - both its puzzles and the reason
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