This is the first of an indefinite number of sporadic reviews that I intend to do for games that go beyond the scope of our normal podcast episodes, but that I play in my off time. The first three games are some games that I've completed over the last few weeks on Steam: The Beginner's Guide, Chants of Sennaar, and Return of the Obra Dinn. The first two I also briefly discussed when Jaymo and I were on Smashing Game Time episode #114: 2000 Flashback - Banishers, Transistor, The Old Switch-A-Roo. And Return of Obra Dinn I also discussed on the first of on our own season break episode, Lite Switch: March 8, 2024.
The Beginner's Guide
All credit to checking this out goes to the Overthinking Games podcast, because I've been working through all their past episodes, and so a handful of weeks ago that came to an abrupt halt because their sixth episode, The Beginner's Guide is Amazing, is specifically about this game and came with specific instructions to play the game before listening to the episode. So after a bit of not listening, I finally got around to getting the game and checking it out for myself.
It wasn't an unreasonable expectation, since The Beginner's Guide is only about 90 minutes to play. And I use 'play' fairly loosely, because this is much less of a "game" and much more in the realm of "interactive storytelling". It's what I would think comes to mind for the term "walking simulator", but not in a particularly pejorative way. That's because much of the premise is here isn't about the gameplay, but rather how we get the levels shown to us, both what we are shown and how the narrator tells us about it. Like how, in one of the first levels, the narrator points out something we might otherwise miss.... that we can see the boundaries of the level in a way that sort of pulls back the curtain on this being a video game.
If you don't want spoilers because you're going to try out the game (which I do recommend trying out), then skip right ahead to Chants of Sennaar and come back later after you've played it. If you've already played the game or know you're not going to bother, then I get into more of the game after the image.
While there's a lot about the philosophy of games and art here, what makes this game so interesting to me is how well this really incorporates the concept of an unreliable narrator. Of course, it's one thing to have a villain of some kind that lies to the main characters, but the idea of lying is something that is normal enough that it's usually not that narratively interesting. In this case, though, with the narrator and the way that The Beginner's Guide introduces itself as seeming to be a much more simple sort of anthology of levels (at least that's how I took it, I didn't think there was going to be anything deeper), I didn't expect this to be making any deeper statements. I just took it at as 'truth' for so much of this experience, such that it really is an interesting reveal to discover that the relationship between narrator Davey and level designer Coda is not the sort of thing that Davey presented it as.
I've really enjoyed how stories can explore unreliable narrators before, and there's an Agatha Christie book that comes to mind right off the bat as a superb example of just that. I'm putting a link in here to that story on the Agatha Christie wiki if you want to find it and don't mind being spoiled about it, but for purposes here, the thing that makes it really relevant is that in that case the unreliable narrator knows that they're being unreliable, as it's a story where the murderer is telling the story. It's a surprise to the reader, but the narrator knows what they're doing. In contrast to that, though, I think there's a really rich point of discussion about if Davey actually knows what he's doing. He may not 'get' just what's wrong with him and his interpretations, even with how direct Coda gets about this.
The crux of this is that it seems like Coda is simply exploring level design, concepts, etc. for their own purposes, but Davey doesn't seem to ever get what Coda is doing. More to the point, though, is that Davey doesn't seem like he even gets that Coda's not trying to do the same stuff that Davey wishes he could do. So when Coda isn't doing things the way Davey imagines handling it, he figures the only possible explanation is that something is 'wrong' with Coda. I do think, incidentally, that may also tap into a slightly larger criticism of how often art has people trying to use it as a tool to psychoanalyze the artist rather than take it a bit more at face value. Sort of a "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" kind of thing.
But all of those are just my interpretations of this. What I think does make this interesting (and indeed, what gave Overthinking Games like an hour of discussion) is that this does seem like there's a lot of different reads here, and I think some of that depends on which character this is a study of. I can imagine some people, even after the narrator is more properly explained, feeling like this is still saying much about Coda and Coda's processes and goals. But there's conversations to be had about both what this says about Davey as a character (in isolation) but then there's also a question about if Davey and Coda were ever friends and what sort of relationship they had, or if this was a more uniquely sort of parasocial connection that Davey interpreted quite differently from how Coda ever viewed things. And of course, there's also how this sparks some discussion about what the purpose of these levels should be, how much they say about the artist, how much meaning is imbued in them, and so on.
I think that's what makes this such an interesting game, it's the sort of thing that really can spark some fairly in-depth discussions and even the game itself starts to present a second perspective when I started to play through the early levels a second time, knowing what I knew at that point and how that changed my perspectives. It's not notable for gameplay, but it's a great example of how video games can be used to be deliberately thought provoking.
Chants of Sennaar
I have a definite weakness for puzzle games, or puzzles in general. That goes well beyond video games into also enjoying things like codes and cyphers as well. I also find linguistics really fascinating, and I've gone through far too many audiobooks about language for someone that still just speaks a single one.
So, Chants of Sennaar was right up my alley, as the game takes its inspiration (quite clearly) from the Tower of Babel and makes language a central part of the game. The very core premise is quite simple, you work your way up the level encountering both signs and characters that are using a language you don't know. These are generally all logographic systems, so each symbol corresponds to a word but its up to the player to figure out just what the words mean. Then, there's chances every so often where the game has you confirm what symbols correspond to a group of concepts, so as time on a level of the tower progresses, one gradually fills in a full dictionary for that language.
There's two things that I think this does really well in this regard, one mechanical and one conceptual. Mechanically, I really appreciate how Chants of Sennaar makes it so easy to put in guesses for the words and then will show what the English translations are when you encounter a language. So I wasn't having to constantly translate things on the fly, and I could spend more of the effort on figuring out what words meant than something like translations by hand. It also gave a bit of added flexibility as I would put a lot of information in there sometimes in order to help me try to crack the languages. It helps keep gameplay on the right part of this, on the languages.
The more conceptual element is that when they decided to create the languages, they really put some thought into how to do that. The simplest is that it doesn't just use the standard subject-verb-object format that we're familiar with in English, nor does it presume the same sorts of rules to handle things like pluralization. So going from one language to the next, it's not simply a matter of swapping words out, but it also requires figuring out how a new language handles syntax and that's a depth to the linguistics I wasn't expecting.
Indeed, it goes even further than that and also has some level of cultural impact in how they view concepts also. So when it comes to translating between languages and understanding new languages, it also helped to start to understand what the values were in the society at that level of the tower. Again, it was a complexity that really helped make this a lot more engaging. In that vein, there's some really interesting themes about perspective and how having different cultural views of the same thing can lead to interpretations so different as to make communication between groups quite difficult. It leads to an ending that I thought was really engaging, and it's also explored in a really interesting manner where the game provides chances to act as a translator between different groups to try to help find common ground and remove barriers.
If I had any criticism of this (and I do), it would be that while the central gameplay is about decoding languages and puzzles to further that goal, there's a few parts of this game that are very different from that. There's some stealth sections that I don't think do this game any favors, and one chase scene that I also don't think was good. They tended to be annoying segments for me, and part of that is because the most involved come a ways in, and at that point it's the language that's keeping me going in this game. I don't know what mindset one would need to play this and be thinking "what this really needs is a stealth section", because to me it just felt like distractions.
I really wish that instead of those sections, they'd put more into the languages, both because I felt like the last level of the tower hadn't been as compelling when it came to having that language unfold (and that's a shame, because I think the construction of the language was really interesting) and because that's the part of the game that just in general I wish there'd been more of. If this had done another couple levels with a couple more languages, I would've been very pleased (though I realize that's not a trivial thing).
Still, the criticism of "I wish that there was even more of this game" isn't a particularly harsh one (I did get 10 hours of gameplay out of this), and I've already been recommending this one to other people from pretty much as soon as I finished it.
Return of the Obra Dinn
The final game is Return of the Obra Dinn, which again is scratching that puzzle game itch. The premise is that you begin by boarding the Obra Dinn, a ship that has returned with no one alive on board. You have a book that contains a crew list, drawings of everyone on the ship (unlabeled), and some other reference points. You also have a compass that allows you to hear the last few seconds before someone died and then explore the moment of their death as a 3D scene. Your challenge is to identify every person on the ship, and then determine what happened to them, all 60 of them. I do think I should've gone into this with a notebook, and I somewhat regret that. The game uses that book to put things you find, but it only does so halfway.
One of the really impressive things here is how this was basically just created by Lucas Pope, who's the same developer that made Papers, Please. So this is an impressive amount of game for a single person to do have done so much of the work for. It also decided to do this monochromatic graphic style that I thought was really effective. It seems to work with the mood, but it also helps in a puzzle game like this because it gave the game a way to simply the visuals so that it was a bit easier to find the right things to focus on. It's not easy by any stretch, but it does feel like details that are still there are all quite deliberate so I felt like I was focusing on things that were real. And so I was more focused about trying to find all the real things rather than trying to filter out the false things that I thought were important but weren't actually. It meant I never felt like I had wasted my time and I think that's a really key takeaway from a game like this.
One of the decisions that was apparently made in development was to structure the story into chapters, and I think that was a really intelligent decision. In short, as you find bodies, the book fills in empty pages about that person and their death (as well as things like who else was there when they died). However, these deaths are all put into the book in chapters that roughly correspond to segments of the story of the Obra Dinn. There's a whole lot of interconnection, and I don't think you can solve most chapters without information available in other ones. The chapters do make it feel more digestible though, and so it doesn't feel like it's overwhelming and there's a sense of progress as I began to actually complete chapters.
That's a sense of progress on top of how this game lets you know you've figured out fates correctly, which was that every time you have correctly identified three people and how they died, it will lock those in for you. Those can be any deaths, so if you're missing something in one case, it doesn't hold you up and you can move on (if you're able to) with other leads and other cases.
My biggest criticisms on this game both come to that notebook, though. There's a couple ways that comes up short and I feel like both would've been huge quality of life improvements without being too much to ask. The first is tied to those moments of death. In the book, you get one low-quality picture and a transcript of what was said. However, so much of this game relies on exploring those moments of death and I really think that there should've been a clear way to get back to those memories from the book once they'd been unlocked. Having to run around the ship to get back to those places was really frustrating, especially when looking for very small things in some of those scenes. Like, at one point I was trying to compare shoes.
The other thing I wish the book had a way to track was partial identifications. If you want to select a specific person, that works very straightforwardly. And you can also partially identify someone by rank (crudely), so you can mark someone as an unknown officer, an unknown steward, an unknown midshipman, and so on. Which is somewhat helpful. But what I felt like that was also missing was a way to track a couple other things... I would've really liked a way to at least note in there that I had narrowed down someone to a first or last name or a country of origin. I had all of that happen, but it was tough to keep track of because they were some of the only conclusions that were very significant, and tied to the crew lists, but that I didn't have a way to track it in-game.
The last very minor criticism is that there's two hidden achievements that feel punishingly annoying and tedious rather than 'fun' because one is so easily missable as solving any fates correctly will block it out.
Still, even with those criticisms, I think this is an incredible game. There's a few bits that I stumbled through and I'm not entirely sure on, or that I solved much later than I feel like I should've been able to, but it does feel like all of this fits together in a way where everything can be figured out clearly. It was so satisfying (if not a bit frustrating that I didn't do it earlier) to figure out approaches to identify characters through some really clever approaches, and there's something really satisfying whenever the book announces that you've gotten more fates solved.
Finally, this also has a really cool story. I don't want to say much about it because that was such an interesting narrative see gradually unfold, but it was really interesting and I like that it's this sense of world-building by showing a rich story without ever using exposition. It's a lot that has to be understood from context, and there's a lot of unanswered questions simply because there's no access to anyone that'd have those answers. And that seems entirely justifiable to me, sometimes there just simply isn't answers to be had and on some level this game embraces that even though the individual fates can all be solved.
Recap
To anyone that is into interpretations of art and doesn't mind that it's light on gameplay, The Beginner's Guide is definitely worth checking out. It can be found on PC for all operating systems. The Beginner's Guide is also on Steam.
Chants of Sennaar is a great game for anyone into puzzle games and particularly fascinated by language and linguistics. There's also some interesting themes explored in here. I don't like the stealth segments, but they're not a dealbreaker, they're just inconvenient. Chants of Sennaar is available on PC for Windows and also on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and our own Nintendo Switch. Personally, I'd recommend PC because I really appreciated having the keyboard for this.
Return of the Obra Dinn is another great puzzle game, the story is interesting, but it's the puzzle aspects that are the driving force and the story just exists to provide the mystery. It's an incredibly satisfying puzzle game to solve, and rather addictive. Return of the Obra Dinn is available on PC for both Windows and Mac, as well as Playstation 4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.
Personally, I think they're all worth checking out. Game on, everyone.
