A non-spoiler tip I would recommend, particularly for later in the game, is to put either a random word or even just a letter in as a guess for every new glyph you discover. It'll help you more easily recognise when glyphs are repeating. Helped me out a lot in later levels.
That would have been a useful tip. I did put as much guesses as possible, but putting a character to notice the repettion could have save me with in the third level
I like the mechanic of the journal pages being used to lock in a few words at a time. It's very reminiscent of Return of the Obra Dinn. I also really enjoyed Carrie's exclamations of "Daniel! Daniel!" when the Warriors' speech (showing their very different language) popped up for the first time. Her excitement is both delightful and infectious. This is going to be a fun playthrough!
So you initially thought the different modifiers for “human” referred to different cultures or nations, whilst I took them for professions with “priest” and “soldier” as my original guesses - and as it turns out they are in fact two different cultures, one priestly and one warlike. Interesting how we both came at the truth from different angles.
That's the best part of this game in general. Seeing people figure out the same words but from different starting points. Also, the order in which you get the words can affect how you may interpret them.
It's actually kind of odd to me that the devs chose to define that glyph as "man/human", when myself and almost everyone I've watched wrote in "person"
Ooh, look at that! It's Chants of Sennaar time! This game and its art direction is wonderful and I will enjoy you guys stumbling through it (no disorienting caves in this one, I think we'll be fine). Good stuff!
Very good start, with some hitches which are to be expected. The funniest I've seen other people playing is someone had guessed "Enter" for the "seek" glyph, so when the kid said "You enter me" he was like "WELL, That's definitely NOT enter"...
I'm not a linguist but I do find psychology interesting. So what in our mind says "plural". different groups of people approach it differently. Like English says "just put an S on the end and that says more than one of that thing". But that doesn't have to be how it works. So we saw here that you could just write the word twice. Or maybe an accent mark on the word like an underline.
We were actually planning to play that one first, but found it to not be very suited to our Let's Playing format. So we changed plans and jumped right to this one instead.
Mostly the fact that it gives you very little control over the pace of dialog. Text boxes are on screen for a limited time, conversation prompts give you a limited window to respond, etc. We found it very difficult to find opportunities to actually discuss anything or talk through decisions, or sometimes even talk at all without missing whole chunks of conversation. It's a very neat game, but the recording attempt was frustrating for both of us and the results were kinda just bland to watch, so we decided to bail.
I've been talking to my screen this whole playthrough as though anyone could hear my guesses. Very engrossing game. You have no idea how much I enjoy these Sunday playthroughs with the two of you.
The cat probably wants to check in. Cats don't like closed doors because it means there is a part of their territory they can't access. That bothers them. So, your cats are probably trying to get in to make sure the room is in order. Then leave to make sure the house is in order. Rinse repeat.
I just finished this game last weekend in literally less than three days. its SO GOOD. Something about the puzzles just scratches my brain just right. And the art, so beautiful.
YESSS, my favourite puzzle game of last year! So hype to see you folks play this! Also I think it's really funny of the devs to have players work out words like 'open', 'closed', and 'door', and then throw 'interlocutors' at unsuspecting streamers to work out how to pronounce
This is a very cool game and it's fun seeing you two figure it all out. It's certainly more fun watching you figure it out than if I played it myself. Also I really wish there was a full game like this for real languages. As a way to learn, practically. Since especially if you can't be in the area where the language you're learning is commonly spoken you don't get to have these natural, intuitive moments of learning like this
That first mistake I dont blame letsplayer brain! The switch does look like it's up at default by itself, it's only more noticeable if you check again afterwards so it's moreso an easy mistake to make
Dan had the same reaction I did to this game: one incredibly basic tutorial puzzle -> yes, this game, please and thank you, 10/10. The world needs more language puzzle games!! This and Heaven's Vault are two of my favorite games ever
When I played this myself last fall, I wondered when you two would cover it! It’s worth noting that you stopped just a couple screens short of the demo. 37:39 Since whatever this building is is labelled in the Devotees’ language, and not the Warriors’ language, I think the person behind the door might not be a Warrior…
Dan and Carrie, don't feel bad about that first door puzzle. You are now the 6th people I've watched playing this to get that wrong, including me. I'm now convinced that first puzzle is very unclearly shown. The lever definitely needed to be more obviously down, with you moving it to up, instead of being in a position that already appears up, and moving it even more up.
I was also confused when I came to first door on my playthrough. The big thing to notice for the first lever is that the diamonds on the side are the positions you can set the lever too. Since the lever is already at the bottom diamond, the lever will move up to the other diamond when it is used. I didn't like it the first time I came to it but, now that I am on my 5th watch through of this game, I have grown to like how it feels so incredible alien. Really puts me in the mood of being in an unknown land where assumptions could be completely wrong and you need to pay attention to little things.
I've never seen anyone get it right first try. The visuals aren't super clear and I think we all assume you pull a lever because that's how levers always work in videogames. I can't decide if I think it's a slightly poor puzzle that wasn't playtested enough, or if the devs are aware of the common mistake and keep it in to teach the player to pay closer attention to the environment.
It's interesting that, since it's a videogame, we expect the difficulty to progress from easiest to hardest, but when learning a language, it's usually hardest when you have absolutely no context to work from, so it moves from hardest to easiest.
they are overthinking parts of this a bit xD the jagged symbol is clearly 'no/forbid/negation', ie 'you cant go door' and 'warriors forbid go door' and 'i cant (stay/play/outside?)' i NEED to play this. im sold.
Oh man, having played this game it’s going to be _hard_ to avoid going ‘nooo, you’re wrong about X’ or ‘oh man you got Y way before me’ and spoil you on stuff, but I will persevere! I hope you have fun with this game!
The journal reminds me of the Obra Dinn. If that's actually where the inspiration came from, it's neat to see _Return of the Obra Dinn_ influence such a different kind of game. 1:12: For people with small screens or mediocre internet connections: The shaded bits have a bunch of diagonal lines darkening them. 20:25: I guess the difference between "hello" and "goodbye" is usually clear based on context. 0:45-1:00: The minimalism, the warm color palette, the surprisingly expressive characters concealed by red robes...yeah, I see the comparisons. 8:12-30: Maybe the funky こ means "lock"? Okay, it's not really こ, but I didn't want to spend more than a minute looking for a vaguely similar character. 22:00: Most suns aren't tetrahedral. Most gods aren't, either, but suns are more likely to follow the rules. 33:45: My intuition is that he wants you to open the door? 43:30: I kinda hope there are enough cats that that can be the official sign-off for this series.
I'm so excited for this one. I heard of this game a few months ago and completed it 100% over the course of a weekend. You're in for an absolute treat!
Chants! I love this game from everything I've seen. It's interesting seeing how both of you come to conclusions compared to others I've seen play this, it makes for a great LP experience.
Oh, you are in for an adventure with this game. I would suggest using mouse, because as I remember it allows you to hover over text across the screen to highlight words you know or guesses you have written (I might remember wrong though, but it is worth trying).
seeing other ppl figuring this out is so interesting! you guys focus a lot more on how the words looks than i did during my playthru, i p much just focused entirely on outside clues, but you guys put a lot of thought about relation beween the words themselves
I love the concept of this game. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did or even more! My only complaint in the end was: It's a bit too short and for me at least, the difficulty wasn't increasing enough. I'd certainly love to play a longer game like this with a story more of my taste and a few more engaging gameplay elements in-between.
OMG I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE PLAYING THIS! Seriously, this game is one of my favourites that I semi-recently finished it's gonna be a blast watching you get through it.
Yayyyy!!!!!!! I've watched two other playthroughs of this, it's so interesting. Sadly, I didn't play it myself but it's nice to see how differently people approach it. Already can't wait for new episodes!!! (even though I only just opened this video)
Just starting playing this game, I had it installed for a couple of months but never opened it lol. I came to you guys for later alligator, then the lil gator game, and now i'm here again
Very much looking forward to this playthrough - I started playing this on a whim with my girlfriend early one afternoon, and we didn't stop until past 2:00 AM when we finished it 😅
Ooh, one of my favourite games. This is gonna be interesting, I'm currently also following another let's play by a guy that has studied several languages and I'm curious about y'all's language background now. I wonder how differently people might approach this game based on which and how many languages they speak.
The problem was that the switch on the first door is in the down position, which you can see from the linked diamonds next to it. However that's not *super* clear visually, so I blame the game for being unclear and confusing there.
Excited to see more of this! It's such a wonderful puzzle game and I especally love games that involve translation as a mechanic. The ending is a bit of a flop but the fun I had with the rest of the game more than makes up for it.
I heard this game was inspired by a certain story, so I had a totally different approach to it. Very interesting to see someone play without that context, especially when it came to the murals.
Just dropping in to say it'll be weird not to spend my Sunday night watching Dan and Carrie be a delight for the first time in literal years, but I'm planning to stream this myself soon so dodging anything even resembling spoilers - looking forward to catching up later though 💜
This goes to show that having English as a primary language can be an obstacle to language puzzle games. The words in English are really precise and specific towards a meaning, and don't really have "segmentation" of meaning as a primary ruling. I've seen this struggle happen in "Baba Is You" too, which is another language puzzle game.
Never played this one myself, nor watched anyone else, so I'm mostly coming at this cold (I have seen mentions of it, so might have half-memories of some spoilers somewhere in the back of my mind). With all the backseat advantages of not having to share my guesses with the world, not having to control a character, not having to herd cats, and not having to entertain, I think I'm mostly ahead of Dan and Carrie - for example, I have a moderately confident translation of the one sentence we've seen from the warriors, largely guessed from the forms of the glyphs - but not so far ahead it's not fun to follow along.
Cat psychology: I'm pretty sure that when most humans think a cat is asking to go in or out, what the cat is *actually* asking is for you to open the door. Not because it necessarily wants to be on the other side, but just because cats don't like doors to be closed.
I've watched several people play this game, and it seems like every single one of them has made the mistake of thinking that first lever is in the "up" position at the start of the game, and so the top symbol must be "close" and the bottom symbol "open". And then proceeded to get confused by the second puzzle. I think it's a combination of the weird orientation of the lever mechanism, and also the fact that the animation of you moving the lever is kinda obscured behind your character due to the camera angle, makes it not immediately obvious which direction it has moved. While playing this myself, I definitely was unsure about which direction was which, but I went back and pulled the lever a couple extra times to double-check and realise I'd got it wrong, and swap the directions over. But no-one I've watched play the game has done that... I suspect that the fact you know you're being recorded makes you less likely to want to spend time double-checking everything, you subconsciously want to move on to the next thing to keep the entertainment happening...
I love this game! I've played through it twice, the second time I even played through with the language set to something I can't even read (It might have been traditional Chinese? I don't know, it was logographic, and the characters were big and complicated for my dumb American English brain, and I didn't recognize them like I would have with Japanese or Korean.)
26:20 this image feels very much like the Tower of Babel. I wonder whatever happened in these images made it so that your player character can't understand the language he's experiencing.
Yayyyy! I'm super interested in this game, I'm excited to watch this! EDIT: Now having watched this, I'm gonna actually play it first for once. It looks too good not to!
Having 100%'d this game in one (admittedly really long) sitting, it's definitely in the more Obra Dinn camp of game/puzzle design as opposed to Baba, these two will get along with the game just fine don't worry! Imo it's easier than Tunic but I won't get into how since that might be spoilers for some
It's a very _different_ kind of brain challenge. _Baba Is You_ levels are intricate clockwork mechanisms, where you need to understand how they work (and how to break them) to proceed. _Chants of Sennaar_ seems like it challenges your intuition and pattern recognition.
