#44 - Tapa
What's this? A classic tapa puzzle on my blog? A couple posts back I wrote that I intend to publish more puzzles on this space, but that's not why I'm posting this one.
I like playing around with pzprRT, in particular with tapa. I enjoy looking for themed grids (an example), but I'll be the first to admit there's also a very big temptation to make incredibly bashy puzzles. Most of what I set using the tool thankfully never sees the light of day (other than perhaps the CTC discord), but every now and then you stumble upon something special.
This is such a case. A Seeing Double theme (inspired by this excellent puzzle by Sam) and an enormous empty middle - yet somehow it's unique. It took an eternity to find, and finding it was only part one - it needed to have logic too. I had to solve it a couple of times and have it tested by Freddie (thank you as always) to convince myself the path through is fair, even though it certainly has its tricky bits and the logic isn't always easy to spot.
That said, I wasn't sure what to do with the puzzle. On the one hand I do think it's something special, on the other hand it's not something I'd submit to any of the sources I write puzzles for. Since it comes with a bit of a background story too, I figured this blog would probably the best place for it, so here you go!
Difficulty: 3.5/5
(rules from Puzzle Rules)
Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.
Play on puzz.link
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