I really wanted to like Chants of Sennaar. The premise feels so interesting; knowing nothing and figuring out what languages mean based off of person or environmental interactions, with extra layers like translation or conversations. Having multiple symbol-based languages with different sets of rules for concepts like plurality or pronouns is great enough from a puzzle solving and linguistic aspect. But they go further, with languages themselves are coated with different focuses and patterns which demonstrate the values of each society and how that grew in the language. The devs put so much thought into the subtle mechanics of the game, but they really failed in the blatant mechanics. The main issue with the game is that the whole gameplay loop lacks satisfaction. Mentally mapping out the different villager wants or situations to figure out what you're able to do next to satisfy one of these "quests" doesn't give extra fulfillment to sleuthing out where to go next or what puzzle to tackle next. Puzzles are either bland like please look here or please move pieces of the environment, or have potential like please understand these words. But understanding words are what you're doing the entire game and the puzzles of understanding them in an environment don't feel different cognitively than understanding them in a villager conversation. It's frustrating because to me, understanding the words themselves aren't enough of an incentive to continue, because the game presents as very sterile to reinforce this gameplay mechanic, the game doesn't offer me anything else to keep me going. I know other people feel like the villager interactions give enough and a different gameplay satisfaction compared to puzzle and environmental solving, but it just doesn't to me. Also I think most people don't enjoy the stealth sections.

Shenzen I/O is a fun Assembly design builder where you just use a few simple components and a few lines of code to tackle a moderately complex system request. A lot of the joy comes from discerning the problem; realizing what patterns the requested input/output translates to for your components, and then mapping out the general design flow. You can then pick away at the edge cases, and once your readable code/design works, minmax it to a more efficient less maintable garbage heap. It does test your problem solving and early on gives a good enough time between "I think I know the solution" to "the solution works". The later levels are obviously more complex which does lengthen this time to satisfaction and reduces your incentive to continue. It also does the Zachtronics special where you initially understand the limited mechanics, sprinkle your ingenuity into some of the designs by using them in non-standard ways to make the design concise. Then the game starts expecting you maximize the jank to make your design even fit within the design constraints by the end of the game. So I dropped off at the halfway mark when I realized this and may pick away at it slowly.