family sharing is wack, so the following is offered on behalf of my partner.

chants of sennaar is a competent puzzle game, but it is not the game i wanted it to be. i am still Recommending this for what it is, but if i knew sooner what this game was -not- i probably would not have taken interest in it.

picking up a game like this, i am looking for a linguistic puzzle that is going to challenge my deductive reasoning and ability to infer foreign contexts of meaning, purpose, and grammar.
technically, this does all those things.
however.
the obstacles that were most prevalent and challenging in this game were -not- ones of linguistic intuition. they were more pedestrian. the game gives you a book of illustrations to compare the glyphs to, and to check your work every few steps a la obra dinn. this is a good system... but because you only discover each set of illustrations as you explore the world, the -real- challenge of the game is finding all of the triggers so that your character can starting writing their own notes.
also, sometimes it's hard to figure out what the illustrations are supposed to even represent, but like... i don't really fault the devs for that. i also don't know how to draw the concept of "Has". i think they did the best they could there.

and then there's the stealth sections.
in and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with the stealth sections in this game. there are checkpoints. you can usually figure out what you're meant to do easily enough. it's acceptable.
it's just... not what i wanted from this game in particular. i'm not trying to play assassins creed or whatever, i'm trying to play a fun language puzzle game. every time i get to a stealth section, i feel like, man, i just wanna get back to the fun part of the game.
it doesn't ruin the game, but it does hamper my enjoyment.

to its credit, i did enjoy the translation challenges near the end. and the consequences that has on the game's world were a delightful surprise. it also has some creative check to make sure you're on comprehension par. i want more of those. i want more esoteric and creative rules of grammar to puzzle out.
i also think that might be beyond what the average player is looking for. ultimately this game -is- accessible even to those players who might be less confident in their puzzling skills or less gung-ho about roughing through a language. so maybe i'm in the minority there.

if you want a good puzzle game with a few stealth speed-bumps, this is a good pick.
but if you want a good -language- puzzle game, i would recommend Tunic over this.

Picked this game back up after having a convo with a friend about puzzling games and am highly disappointed in myself for not 100%ing it my first go around. The amount of people who have reached out to me since I picked it up again is shocking, but the more I've begun to familiarize myself with the game again, the more I realize why so many people love it. The graphics are simple and subtly gorgeous with the minimal coloring conveying unique story points. The decoding of languages is not only an enjoyable puzzle in and of itself, but it shows how visual cues are a necessity to learning. Worthy of picking up for a uniquely appealing puzzling adventure. Easily enjoyed with friends if you get stuck.

I bought the game for the great use of shadows and cross-hatching in its art style, since I feel that artistic care in lighting is very rare in videogames these days. But I enjoyed the language puzzle enough to stick around and 100% the game. I do recommend it.

It's not perfect.
Some of the puzzles require leaps-of-logic from the player. Getting stuck can happen and it's tedious. It's often unclear if you missed a key detail, or if you just haven't explored enough. This leads to a lot of re-treating the same territory, when really your best bet might be to do some brute-forcing on translations. Beyond that it's pretty slow to move around the environment, and there's no map so it's easy to get lost, so this compounds some of the tedium in its puzzles. These issues are unfortunate because I really think the rest of the game is beautiful.

By that I mean to include the experience that the game offers. It's a metaphorical landscape that I enjoyed discovering. It doesn't shy from making critiques of aspects of society, but does so without being mean-spirited. Depending on how you interpret what it presents, you might come away with a very different message than I did, and that is probably a good thing -- one could argue that's what the whole game is about. Despite its flaws I think this is probably why it's getting that Overwhelmingly Positive rating. Cool game from France.