Puzzle #20

This is an Numbered Arrows Mashup Loop puzzle, an original mashup genre. Rules are given below the image.


Difficulty: hard

Theme: Secret Santa Gift for IHNN

PDF

Puzz.link (Note that the answer checking and clue colouring are nonexistent here, since this merely uses the Yajilin interface.)

Rules: Draw a loop through non-clue cells and shade the unused cells. Shaded cells may not be orthogonally adjacent (as in Yajilin). Each arrowed clue has a “line of sight” in the given direction, up until the edge of the grid. In addition, each quadrant's clues behave differently:
  • Clues in the top-left quadrant are Yajilin clues; they indicate the number of shaded cells in the clue's line of sight.
  • Clues in the top-right are Castle Wall clues; they indicate the total length of the loop segments along that clue's line of sight.
  • Clues in the bottom-left quadrant are Slalom Count clues; they indicate the number of times the loop passes straight across the line of sight of the clue without turning. (Note that this type of clue does NOT count occurrences of the loop passing through the line of sight when turning, and that the loop is allowed to behave in this way regardless.)
  • Clues in the bottom-right quadrant are First Seen Geradeweg clues; they indicate the length of the first-seen loop segment; if the first-seen cell used by the loop is a corner, both segments incident to that corner must be of that length.
(The small images around the puzzle are to remind you what each clue does.)

Below is an example and its solution:


I actually constructed this one for Puzzlers Club's annual Secret Solver event last year and only just got around to posting it now. Secret Solver is our version of Secret Santa, wherein everyone participating writes a puzzle for someone else. In this case, I had to write a puzzle for IHNN.

A full walkthrough and writeup can be seen here (but please don't read it until you've at least had a good crack at the puzzle). Many thanks to SoftFro for creating the images and PDF.

Even though, having constructed it, I think it's a medium, I'm rating it as "hard" just in case, and in part due to the fact that two of these genres are novel.

Anyway, I should probably get around to porting most of my puzzles to this blog (except maybe the ones I'm submitting elsewhere?). I've been constructing puzzles occasionally for the last 6 or so years, so I *should* have a pretty reasonable backlog. (Then again, a ton of them are "easy" by my standards and I don't necessarily want to flood the blog with them...)

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