December 22: The Uber Ultra (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Puzzles)
January 28: welcome to the fold (Brooke Husic, Puzzmo)
February 1: Masterpiece (Andy Yingst, The Gnomon)
February 2: Hard Act to Follow (Rebecca Goldstein and Kelsey Dixon, Defector)
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The Uber Ultra (Ben Tolkin)
Because 2025 is 45 squared, Ben decided to end the year with a 45x45 puzzle. That's a feat which a constructor could easily coast on by itself - "Look, it's worthy of admiration because it's Big!" - like a Jef Koons Balloon Dog or something. And sure, PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS is there because it's exactly 45 letters long. But Ben takes advantage of the larger canvas to incorporate a passel of truly zany fill, including MAN DOOR HAND HOOK CAR DOOR, WHICH ISN'T A LOT BUT IT'S WEIRD THAT IT HAPPENED TWICE, GET A JOB STAY AWAY FROM HER, and the best one, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II: THE SECRET OF THE OOZE, clued delightfully as [Artistic work in which Donatello grapples with a crisis of purpose]. Not only did I never think I'd see that in a grid, I never thought I'd see it with a wordplay clue. [Picture from a water ride?] for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN accomplishes a similar trick, if less flashily.
I could go on listing the nuggets of enjoyment tucked among the shorter answers, too - the consecutive pair of clues [Mischievous little magical guy (derogatory)] for IMP and [Mischievous little magical guy (complimentary)] is a highlight - but we'd be here all day, so I'll just recommend spending some time on this one if you skipped it before because it was too Big.
welcome to the fold (Brooke Husic)
Now we go from a very big puzzle to a very tiny puzzle. Yet again, Brooke displays a masterful ability to do something major with a small canvas. This one is a 7x7 grid split in two by a diagonal line of black squares, like a square of origami paper that's been folded in half, and the four long entries around the edges are all related to origami: CREASE, CRANES, BISECT, and RABBIT (as in rabbit-ear folds).
A side effect of the diagonal line is to create some unchecked squares and some two-letter words. Two-letter entries call for some care, because there are vanishingly few of them that are ordinary words as opposed to abbreviations, and practically any pair of letters can be clued as an abbreviation of some sort, so it's easy to largely ignore them in filling and just clue them however. Brooke makes each two-letter entry seem deliberate: LA is clued as [Spanish article with "grulla" or "papiroflexia"] (the Spanish words for "crane" and "origami"), and SO and ES are given the echoey clues ["You are ___ beautiful"] and ["Tu ___ si belle"]. I also appreciate the extra subtle nod to the theme in the clue for LYRIC, [Solange's "Sometimes, I don't wanna feel those metal clouds," for example], which quotes the song "Cranes in the Sky."
Masterpiece (Andy Yingst)
One reason that the Cool S is so enduring is surely that it's a seemingly complicated shape that should be hard to draw from scratch, but that there's a very easy trick to it: you draw two trios of parallel vertical lines stacked above each other, then connect the ends of the lines with a series of diagonals - and voila, an S shape emerges, as if by magic! That feeling of magic reminds me a lot of the moment when you decode the theme of a good variety cryptic, in which a pattern suddenly emerges from a series of mysterious instructions. So it's appropriate that Andy made a variety cryptic in which a Cool S emerges from a series of dots that the solver has to draw in the grid. The way in which it emerges is quite beautiful, and quite unlike the trick I described above, so it sneaks up on you; I genuinely laughed out loud when I realized what was going on.
Hard Act to Follow (Rebecca Goldstein and Kelsey Dixon)
An absolutely unhinged (in a good way) theme, evoking the Pepe Silvia meme from It's Always Sunny: the theme entries represent a CONSPIRACY BOARD with red string tying together a bunch of assorted evidence (you know the trope). We've got a STREET MAP, an INDEX CARD, a BANK STATEMENT, a POLAROID, and a PHONE LOG, all forming a sort of connected trellis of entries in the asymmetrical grid. Circled letters in those entries spell out the RED STRING connecting everything together. What I love about this theme mechanism is that it relies not on the properties of individual entries or the ways that pairs of entries interact, but instead on the gestalt pattern produced by the way that the theme entries hang together collectively.
It's the kind of theme that elicits a "wish I'd thought of that" from me, but in this case, I'm glad I didn't think of it, because I certainly couldn't have pulled off the narrative verve that Rebecca and Kelsey achieved in the theme clues, which tell the story of a mayor who's using his position to put money in his own pocket via the asphalt company he owns. For example, STREET MAP is clued as ["Are you seeing this?? Like clockwork, every Tuesday, a withdrawal from the city's account for $100,000, and the next day, the Mayor's asphalt company deposits the same amount!!"]. The comments on the puzzle over at Defector seem to largely be complaints about how long the clues are, and to those commenters I ask: Where is your joie de vivre?
