Chants of Sennaar vs Heaven’s Vault:
decoding words or piecing together history?

Chants of Sennaar

In Chants of Sennaar, a traveller climbs a tower seeking to reconnect peoples who do not understand each other.

You observe your surroundings, speak to people and infer meanings from situations in which unfamiliar glyphs appear.

The notebook records symbols and clues from your surroundings as you work through language-based puzzles.

Rather than finish a notebook page immediately, you can spend time exploring other contexts and revising a hypothesis.

Each floor has a distinct culture and architecture, giving the language you encounter a surrounding world to investigate.

This single-player puzzle adventure explores how the languages people use in everyday life connect to one another.

Heaven's Vault

In Heaven’s Vault, archaeologist Aliya and the robot Six investigate the disappearance of a researcher.

You sail the rivers of the Nebula and examine ruins and artefacts to decipher ancient writing.

A mistaken translation can misdirect an investigation, making interpretation part of how you learn about the world’s past.

The narrative adapts to the order of exploration, discoveries and actions, while characters remember what you say and do.

What you pursue first can mean missing another opportunity later.

This single-player narrative adventure combines deciphering writing with relationships and interpreting the past.

Chants of Sennaar

When a glyph appears in another conversation or picture, compare whether your provisional meaning fits there too: this follows the reviewers’ accounts of reasoning from context.

Even after learning a word, reviewers enjoy revisiting word order and forms of address when translating between the tower’s peoples.

Some value checking hypotheses in the notebook, while others find confirmation curtails independent interpretation; the choice is between reassurance from checking and the pleasure of keeping an interpretation open.

Concerns about backtracking for clues or stealth mean that choosing this game also involves accepting time spent on activities between moments of linguistic reasoning.

Heaven's Vault

If you enjoy using translated fragments to build a picture of the world that used those artefacts and its history, translation’s role in the investigation may appeal to you.

What to investigate first, whom to trust and what to say are also decisions; because the narrative remembers exploration order and your actions, consider whether interpreting writing and responding to people both appeal to you.

Praise for returning to investigate other choices or interpretations sits alongside frustration with irreversible decisions: trying every branch immediately and returning for a different investigation are different preferences.

The Steam base-game language listing checked for this comparison lists English only; official Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean support is not confirmed there.