Indie puzzle highlights

November 12: In High Places (Paolo Pasco, Grids Don't Lie)

December 13: healing? (Owen Bergstein, Dissonant Grids)

December 13: The Blabyrinth (Patrick Berry, A-Frame Games)

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In High Places (Paolo Pasco)

Paolo's a natural comedian, and he knows that the key to making a puzzle funny is to stick the landing. In most puzzles, that's done with the revealer, and there's a real art to making sure that a revealer is punchy and serves as an apt capstone to a puzzle's theme. But there's also an art to the way that the theme itself unfolds before the solver even gets to the revealer. This puzzle's theme seemingly reveals itself almost immediately; we've got shaded squares at the tops of eight Down entries, and filling in juts one of those entries will, in combination with the title, make the theme obvious. The first theme entry is PALE FIRE, with PAL shaded, so we're clearly looking at a theme of "synonyms for friends at the tops of theme entries."

It can be anticlimactic to figure out a theme that early, especially when the theme doesn't involve any transformations. But at least sometimes it's not obvious what the revealer is going to be, so there's still that pleasure to look forward to. This puzzle, though, has an extra pleasure, one which (unlike the revealer) the solver is likely not to see coming. The rest of the theme entries are (CHUM)ASH, (AM I GO)OD, (ALL Y)OURS, (BUD)APEST, (BRO)WNOUT, (MATE)R DEI, and (TOM)ATOES. Wait, TOM? Well, if you came of age in the 2000s, like I did, you'll get your aha moment here: the social networking service MySpace had a feature in which your top 8 friends were ranked, and Tom Anderson, a.k.a. MySpace Tom, was always the first friend of a new user by default. And indeed the revealer here is TOP 8, clued as [MySpace profile feature replicated in this puzzle?].

Of course, as important as it is for a puzzle to stick the landing, it's only going to be a winner if the rest of it is well executed, and this one passes with flying colors. I particularly appreciate how each theme entry is completely unrelated to the synonym for "friend" at its top; AM I GOOD and MATER DEI (neither of which were on my wordlist) are particularly creative ways of achieving that.

healing? (Owen Bergstein)

I think a lot of the confusions that I see in crossword criticism could be clarified by keeping in mind that there are at least three dimensions on which a crossword can be judged: as art, as craft, and as entertainment. This is well understood in some fields, but not so much in the world of crosswords, perhaps because crosswords are mainly thought of as vehicles for entertainment. For good reason - I make crosswords because I'm moved to do so by an internal impulse, but the idea of making a crossword that nobody would ever solve is still a "tree falling in the forest" kind of scenario. What would be the point? Whereas the idea of making a painting that nobody would ever look at doesn't seem so outlandish to me.

So, sure, a crossword without a solver is something close to a contradiction in terms. But Owen's new blog, Dissonant Grids, presupposes that it can be worthwhile to make crosswords whose main aim isn't to entertain solvers, ones which might instead be upsetting or enraging on purpose. I'm very excited to see where he goes with this; there are a number of constructors who have leaned into eliciting more ambivalent emotional responses than mere "good vibes," but nobody's taken the concept terribly far.

The first puzzle on the blog is auspicious start, with lots of contrasting effects in the spacy of a tiny grid (just four squares tall!). It's divided into five mini puzzles dramatizing the five stages of grief. Number 1 is denial: all the clues blatantly dupe their answers (for example, [Classic Christmas movie where Will Ferrell plays an elf]) is the clue for ELF), and I take it that the solver is meant to (initially) be in denial that that could possibly the answer, because of the standard rule against giving away the answer in the clue. (For me, the denial lasted at most a couple of seconds, since there was just nothing else the answer could possibly be for 1-Across. Maybe I'm a fast griever!)

Number 2 is anger, and the clues have been manipulated in anger-inducing ways: 4-Across and 4-Down are switched, some of the answers have to be modified in various ways before entry (deleting a letter, anagramming, replacing with a homophone), and one of the clues has been hidden in a Google doc that appears to just be a blank page.

Number 3 is bargaining: the clues all read [Oops! This entry's clue went missing. Luckily, every entry in this section is a common 4-letter entry in crosswords. Try not to use reveal! Good luck!], and the only footholds are the letters TAGE along the diagonal (the letters of THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF appear along the diagonals of each mini puzzle, four per section). Here, I suppose, the solver might want to bargain with the constructor ("How could I possibly solve this without using reveal?"). Well, you can't solve it, because there isn't a unique solution - I tried three valid solutions before hitting on the intended one. But then there's no real solution to grief, either, no regaining something that's been lost forever.

Number 4 is depression: here, every clue blithely violates the "no bummers" criterion, evoking climate change, poverty, and the repressive government of Saudi Arabia. (A nice extra touch here: contra normal clue-writing style, all the clues here end in periods, those punctuation marks that give such a discomfiting sense of finality to a sentence that pretty much nobody my age or younger uses them when texting.)

Number 5 is acceptance: the clues here are a light at the end of the depression tunnel. LEAN is clued as [Rely (on), like a friend during a tough time <3], and the rightmost Down entry is clued as [Someone hurt you / someone died / you did something bad / you were or are miserable / you've already peaked / you're wasting away your life making crosswords for internet people who are only solving them to be nice / this all fucking sucks!!! :) Please enter your response here:]. The answer that works with the crossings is FINE, but of course you could enter whatever you want in that spot. Sure, the applet might not accept it, but who's to say that your way of grieving is wrong?

The Blabyrinth (Patrick Berry)

Speaking of art vs. craft vs. entertainment, there's no better example of expert craft than the puzzles (pretty much all the puzzles, in fact) of Patrick Berry. He's got a new variety puzzle suite out called The Blabyrinth, and on the level of craft, it may be his most impressive suite yet. When it comes to standard crosswords, there are a lot of tools these days that make working under heavy constraints easier: using regex to make customized wordlists, construction programs that let you put filters on individual slots, etc. But such tools don't exist for most variety puzzles, unless you can code something up yourself. So there are no shortcuts here, but Patrick is a consummate professional who can make even the most difficult of constraints look like a walk in the park.

In most of these puzzles, every square is checked (it appears in two different entries), and each puzzle also has a keyword that's extracted from the grid at the end, meaning that the letters in the keyword are doubly checked. Sometimes these letters are scattered sparsely throughout the grid, but sometimes messages snake down the entire height of the grid, and sometimes there are even more architectural constraints inherent to the variety form itself or the way that the keyword is hidden. But the fill is squeaky clean - as clean as most constructors would manage even if they didn't have to work a keyword into the grid.

On top of that, as is standard for Patrick's suites, there's a final puzzle that ties all the keywords together. This one is impressive even by Patrick's standards: the keywords have to pass through a series of doors in a labyrinth, and each door causes a different wordplay transformation (removing the first vowel, deleting all the even or odd letters, etc.). The keywords thus reach the "sound chamber" in the middle of the labyrinth, transformed into a different word. The twist is that each of those words is a homophone for a five-letter word, so the sound chamber itself further transforms those words so they can be placed into a grid from which you can extract the word MINOTAUR. But that's not all! Taking the word MINOTAUR back out of the labyrinth and subjecting it to the appropriate wordplay transformations gives you the word MIRROR, which happens to be what you need to escape from one of the exits. Everything here works together beautifully, on both the micro and macro levels.