A lot to catch up on – a wonderfully enticing special ingredient, and neither of our competitors is wasting much time!
Mysterious messages from an alien object are a sci-fi classic for a reason, and they come in a lot of flavors. The monoliths from 2001 are probably the ur-example, bootstrapping human evolution through the stress of their regard (and the non-diegetic classical music that accompanies them); their descendants can lean arty, like the mirrors in Story of Your Life/Arrival, or pulpy, like the psychic pylons in Mass Effect. I’d note that the artier ones often focus on the form of the message, using the effort of translation to unpack some essential difference of perspective the aliens bring to bear, whereas the pulpier ones care more about the content, as the dire warnings or vague prophecies they carry often help move the plot into motion. Either can work, of course, but as we see what our chefs are preparing, I’ll be curious about the presentation of both the how and the what of the messages.
(As long as we’re talking about the antecedents of the trope, it’s worth noting that both of our competitors appear to have leapt to non-terrestrial languages, not just non-human ones – a logical shift, but I do have a soft spot for Star Trek IV, where a space probe comes to Earth and starts broadcasting to humpback whales, since clearly humans aren’t the ones worth talking to here).
As for what they are doing – well, as predicted, our Iron ChIF has a bevy of tools right at hand for an ingredient that couldn’t be more perfectly suited to them (the fact that Pacian didn’t veto the linguistics ingredient when up against a linguist is surely either bravado or hubris!) As Wade says, while I’m not exactly surprised at the systematic approach to language construction Draconis has deployed, I’m definitely impressed by the kinda-Russian, kinda-Italian melange they’ve developed. It appears there’ll be some rigor here, and puzzle-solving will likely require some inductive as well as deductive reasoning – I’m looking forward to a brain-workout when the meal is completed (and, er, hopefully some hints if things get too tough?)
As for our incumbent champion’s invocation of Chants of Senaar, I admit I haven’t played it, but my vague knowledge of the plot does remind me that all our stories about the challenges of being understood across distance, identity, and culture are downstream of the Tower of Babel. No pressure, chefs, it’s just that your dishes should bridge us towards the divine!
But as mentioned, Pacian doesn’t seem to be feeling the pressure. Besides acceding to an ingredient that might build on Draconis’s home-court advantage, our challenger is also taking the time to doodle and brainstorm and make jokes in his notes to himself, which I can certainly relate to. Again, it’s not surprising that he’s landed on a limited-parser game, with the choice of allowing only one verb meaning that interactivity seems like it will revolve exclusively around the nouns. Typically, the ways to make puzzles work in such an interface rely on timing and path-dependence, so that the player can’t simply lawn-mower their way to victory, though the language aspect also suggests that the player might need to figure out some translations to proceed. While we’ve seen a lot of the design process, as well as the code setting up the core gameplay system, there are still a lot of questions about how it will all come together – we’ll all be expecting someone to be the interdimensional spider, but I think Pacian will still manage to make the eventual reveal a surprise!