Chants of Sennaar decoded language — Gamescom wants to monetize it

Chants of Sennaar is one of the more quietly remarkable games released in recent years. Developed by Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment in 2023, it asks players to decode five distinct constructed languages through environmental observation and contextual reasoning — no tutorials, no glossary handed to you upfront. You watch a priest repeat a gesture near a glyph. You connect symbols to actions. Slowly, painstakingly, a language resolves itself. It is a puzzle game structured around the act of understanding, and for a lot of players, that process felt genuinely irreplaceable.

Now Gamescom — specifically the Gamescom Opening Night Live satellite event ecosystem and its associated brand partnership infrastructure — is reportedly exploring ways to package that sense of discovery into a licensed monetization format. The details are still thin, but the broad shape of what's being discussed is clear enough to be worth examining: turning Chants of Sennaar's decoded language system into something that can be sold, staged, or sponsored. That's a strange idea. Not necessarily a bad one. But strange enough to deserve scrutiny.

What 'decoded language' actually means in the context of the game

To understand why this matters, it helps to be specific about the mechanic. In Chants of Sennaar, players move through a tower of civilizations, each speaking a language expressed through abstract glyphs. You collect symbols, observe them in context — a guard pointing at a door uses a glyph that probably means 'stop' or 'forbidden' — and you test hypotheses by selecting possible translations. When you nail a word, it locks in. The game confirms your guess through a small illustrated panel, almost like a comic strip.

It's a slow system by design. Rundisc built the pacing around friction. You're meant to feel lost before you feel competent. Stripping that out — reducing it to a branded quiz format, or a timed challenge at a convention booth — would gut the thing that makes it work. Which is the obvious risk in any attempt to turn a contemplative single-player experience into an event.

What Gamescom is likely after

Gamescom has been expanding its live event programming aggressively. Opening Night Live, hosted by Geoff Keighley, draws significant viewership, and the surrounding expo floor increasingly features interactive brand installations rather than simple booth demos. The appeal of Chants of Sennaar's language system is legible from a marketing perspective: it's visually distinctive, it's intellectually legible to a general audience in a short window, and it carries the cultural cache of being the kind of game that wins awards from outlets that don't usually cover indie titles.

The monetization angle, from what's been reported, likely involves either a licensed installation — think a physical decoding challenge that visitors pay a small fee to enter, something in the range of a few euros per attempt — or a branded digital extension tied to a sponsor. Neither is inherently scandalous. Event-floor experiences cost money to build, and Rundisc is a small studio. Revenue from licensing a convention experience isn't automatically a compromise.

The tension at the center of this

Here's the honest problem: Chants of Sennaar works because you are alone with it. The isolation isn't incidental. The game is explicitly about the failure of civilizations to communicate across cultural boundaries — the Tower of Babel structure isn't decorative, it's the thesis. You decode languages precisely because nobody around you will explain them. Turning that into a group activity with a timer and a leaderboard inverts the entire premise.

Whether Rundisc had meaningful creative input into this arrangement is the question I'd want answered before forming a firmer opinion. Small studios often lack the leverage to push back on how publishers or event partners package their IP. Focus Entertainment has a reasonable track record with its indie label, but 'reasonable' and 'protective of artistic intent at convention scale' are not the same thing.

Precedents worth thinking about

This isn't a new tension. Supergiant's games, particularly Hades, have been adapted into tabletop experiences and limited merchandise lines without the core games feeling cheapened. But Hades has combat systems and character relationships that translate cleanly into other formats. The decoded language system in Chants of Sennaar is more fragile — it depends on ignorance, on the player not yet knowing. Once you've solved a glyph, the magic is spent.

A closer parallel might be Return of the Obra Dinn, which also trades in slow deduction. Lucas Pope has been careful — perhaps overly careful, depending on who you ask — about how that game gets used outside its original context. Rundisc will face the same question now at a larger scale.

What would actually work

If the goal is genuine engagement rather than brand adjacency, there's a version of this that makes sense: a self-paced installation, designed for a single visitor at a time, using a constructed language that doesn't appear in the existing game — purpose-built for the event, drawing on the same design philosophy without cannibalizing the source material. That protects both the player experience and the game's replayability for people who haven't bought it yet.

Whether that's what's actually being built remains unclear. Gamescom 2025 announcements tend to solidify in the weeks before the August event, so more detail should emerge. For now, the concept sits in that uncomfortable space between interesting and worrying.

Chants of Sennaar earned its reputation by trusting players to sit with confusion longer than most games would dare. The version of this Gamescom activation that would honour that legacy is one that does the same. The version that doesn't is just a logo on a wall with a glyph next to it.