I remember playing No Man's Sky at launch and despite all its flaws, I really liked how it handled discovering different languages and wondered what a game might look like with that as a central concept. Chants of Senaar delivers a very memorable experience based on this premise and every moment of discovering the languages of the game was a joy. From the symbolic depictions of words, to the different representations of concepts between cultures and the ways you stumble upon a new word's meaning, this game was crafted with a lot of care and attention to detail and it really shines through.
The music is great and the game is beautiful, although I'm not sure about the hatching for the art style. I played the whole game with it off and switched back a few times but am firmly on the side that no hatching looks a lot better. This game is pretty close to a 9/10 for me but a couple of things held it back. Some locations are way too far apart. In the 2nd area especially while I was still figuring things out, I was going back and forth between a few places and was moving for minutes and minutes just to go check something again. On top of that, the movement is a bit slow and janky - the framing of each shot and the trigger locations for the camera to move exacerbated this. I would find myself spam clicking the edge of the screen since there was only a sliver of road ahead of me to move to. This also carries over to the chase and stealth sequences which weren't amazing but the checkpoints were the most forgiving I've ever seen so that helped assuage any problems there.
Discovering each language overshadowed all of the traditional point and click puzzles, much to the game's benefit. I think I might have a problem with the point and click genre in general as it can often feel like the illusion of a puzzle and a lot of busy work. I think linearity is the main culprit for this feeling and that's why the translation is handled so well. You often have multiple threads to work on and multiple clues to look at simultaneously. Some of the main tasks to progress through areas veered a bit on the wrong side of this as it felt like I was being funnelled through a linear path to get the items I needed. To be clear, I'm not bashing linearity, but I think it can sometimes remove the need for player thought and replace curiosity-driven discoveries. In fairness though, I would say the general puzzles in the game are neutral at worst, although a couple did fall into the category that I hate: quick and easy to think of the solution, no mechanical difficulty to execute the solution but really slow to execute the solution. Thankfully these issues were largely at the periphery of what was a really special game to play. I loved the full ending and can definitely recommend the game. (Also I liked that nothing was too hard that it needed a guide).

Animal Well was an absolute pleasure to play, it stands out in the field of metroidvanias and excels in the creativity of its mechanics. The setting and art style were stylish the whole way through and the process of exploring the map was on par with some of my favourites in the genre. I finished the game and have seen a fair amount of the side content but it seems like there is a lot more still to discover and I intend to keep playing. My views on the game are unlikely to change too much unless there is substantially more than just collectibles remaining (which there might be).
Something I value super highly in metroidvanias is the design of the mechanics which enable exploration. I really like when the tools/abilities take you by surprise, whether that be something unbelievably creative, something that enables more enjoyable movement and general map traversal, puzzles where it's difficult to infer the future mechanic that will solve it or seemingly innocuous parts of the environment being of later importance. Animal Well succeeds on all these fronts and culminates with some very memorable moments of unlocking an ability and figuring out a subtle use to reach a new area. Similarly there are some ways of using your items which you can more or less stumble onto and then have a eureka moment. Supraland was probably my favourite in the genre for its mechanics, with things like unlocking the magnetic power and realising every hammer, nail etc. strewn across the map is now important. This game might have surpassed it, for its design and for the creativity that the items permit - you often get to feel like you're sort of breaking the game as you learn new movements techniques.
There was always some part of the map I was curious to explore and you will definitely be rewarded in terms of the entire map coming together, in the same vein as you might expect from games in the genre. The overall polish is very high; aside from a few enemy hitboxes which felt off, the quality was amazing overall. There were a couple of moments where I thought something was slow or not implemented, and then immediately realised there was a button that could solve my problem.
I think the game is really, really good, but outside of the mechanics I was so fond of, I don't think that it crosses over into amazing or special. There weren't any bad puzzles but nor were there any really memorable puzzles (again this is in my experience so far). The enemy encounters are what you'd expect with a game with no combat and didn't have the spectacle that something like Ori could achieve. The art style often lent itself to make each biome feel fairly similar and they were nowhere near as distinct as something like Hollow Knight. There weren't that many major platforming elements, although there were some things you could do across multiple screens which were awesome. I assume there is some environmental storytelling that I missed, regardless any narrative that is there seems to take a back seat to the ambient setting and feel of the game.
I can definitely recommend the game and believe there is a lot to enjoy, but my current opinion is that it's nothing crazy. Despite the stellar mechanics, the overall package isn't that special to me, although I imagine it will be to some people. Maybe I'll find what I'm looking for in the rest of the game as I continue playing.

Update: the post-game content is fantastic, the map is way cooler than I realised and the puzzles have improved a lot, changing from 8/10 to 9/10.

Early Access - First Patch - 19 hours so far
The game is a ton of fun, I'm a massive fan of a lot of the new features and they appear to have built on the first game extremely well. I usually don't play games in early access and prefer to play a finished product. I would pretty strongly recommend that if you can wait to play this, then you should. There is an amazing game here but a few too many cool moments are robbed by the fact it's not finished. I'll try to convey the current state of the game and convince you not to play it yet without any direct spoilers - these aren't all criticisms per se, just the reality of the game right now.
The character portraits and their in-game models are not all finished - the placeholders for these are either concept art (which honestly isn't too bad) for the portraits, or this cloaked figure for some models. I wouldn't care about this if these were minor side characters but there is one major character that you meet but they only have the concept art for their portrait. Similarly there are some important, late-game textures which are still concept art.
Menus are a bit buggy sometimes, this might only be using a gamepad but sometimes you have to switch tabs in the menus to get the cursor back after it disappears from going up or down a page. The scroll bar has these pulsing arrows that make it seem like there's something important on the next page but the they just do this by default.
Generally, the gameplay is very polished and bug-free from my experience. The two major bugs were: one main boss enemy going invisible half-way through the fight and I could only see their red energy shimmer to hit them. The other was in the main end boss fight where one of the arena-wide effects stayed on the screen for like 1/3 of the fight and wouldn't go away, and this seriously messed with me seeing other similar effects on the ground. There are a few enemy damage effects which get hidden beneath your cast area and you basically can't see them - enemy damage should pretty much always have priority over your own zones for being displayed.
The hub area feels a lot less polished than the House of Hades, the substitute for the archive room feels unfinished and the general curiosity that was there in the first game isn't really there yet for this game. The main elements of the hub are cool though, as is the witchy feel.
A lot of the systems feel pretty much fully fleshed out and have a great amount of depth. This is true for the boons, upgrades, weapons, arcana and combat from what I've seen so far. That said the general combat has a few balance issues. I can't remember exactly how the first game handled staggering enemies with no armour, but for a lot of elite enemies in this game, once their armour is gone, you can fully stun lock them and too many of these fights end with me not moving, spamming attack. These fights aren't the gimmick enemy with tons of armour and no health either, so it kind of leaves a weird taste in the mouth with the fight being trivialised once their armour is gone.
I think one of the damage effect boons for scorch is bugged. You build up fire stacks on the enemy which deal dot and one boon lets you consume the stacks early for a bit less damage, but I'm pretty sure it was a detrimental boon - watching the health bars it looked like it was doing no damage but taking the stacks.
There is absolutely a confined part of the game that is more or less finished, you can have a complete experience that is parallel to the first game and there is still a lot of fuel for incentivising subsequent runs. The content after this section is about half done and is great and a lot more of a departure from the Hades formula. But I wish I had waited to play it all in one go.
Dialogue is great and the voice acting is amazing. The story seems great and the cast of characters and their interactions are all polished (at least for general progression and early social links). Similar to the first game, sometimes you get event-specific dialogue at weird times, multiple runs after you did something for the first time.
A brief word on difficulty. I haven't settled fully on anything yet but currently two main trends stand out for me. First is that sometimes it can be really hard to increase your damage output if you're not getting the right boons etc. This draws out some runs a bit too much while you're searching for synergies. The other is that the bosses and specifically the end boss might be too easy. Obviously there's a similar system to heat and I've used this a fair amount but not at high difficulties yet. However, the fight feels way too passive. My first victory was very early on and I felt like I was cheesing the game. If you have good sustain and move speed and some ranged damage, the fight is starting to feel very simple once you've learnt it. I think Hades in the first game stayed pretty tough because he was so aggro - that is not the case here. Still early thoughts though.
I have other more substantive criticisms for the game but I'm happy to wait and see how it evolves for the moment. Even in its current state I can definitely recommend buying the game, but you should seriously consider waiting to play it, at least to see how much they can achieve in the near future.