CRASH. o. matic.

“Drive to Work #1257 - Enchantment Color Pie”

But then when Siobhan talks about solving it, she describes the bog standard way to break a cipher - like she says herself, it's the method commonly learned by kids obsessed with spy stuff. Don't get me wrong, it's still an impressive trick, but did I miss something? It seems like it was eminently breakable based on the description of it being a symbol-for-symbol substitution, enough that I'd be surprised if the possibility of one of the players doing exactly that didn't occur to whoever designed the coded message. There are plenty of puzzle games and escape rooms where that exact kind of manual cipher cracking via deduction of common words is just a thing players are expected to do in order to progress.

My best guess is that Brennan did not expect anyone to lock in so hard in-ep, and had planned to have them discover a sort of Rosetta Stone, so a few letters would be confirmed and the players would go from there.

Also - like the latin translation - it's sick as hell, it's so fun to watch, we love to watch a smartie flex their smarts - but it doesn't break the game. Like Siobhan said - I know what it says, I don't know what it means. Mechanically, in the game, it gave Emily the help action. I don't think it zipped them ten episodes forward suddenly.

"I'm just genuinely unsure if I might have missed or misunderstood some complicating factor which made it difficult to solve."

I think the complicating factor is that this is easy if you already know what to do. If not, you're more likely to look at a page of symbols and trust that you're going to get a key later down the line. Brennan's HOWWW did you DooOO that? is yknow, it's part of the performance. He knows it wasn't the enigma code, it's still cool to watch.