Broken Sign Blog
#157: Icelom / Pentopia
7 October 2024This puzzle is based on a (maybe not entirely serious) suggestion by user glum_hippo on the Cracking the Cryptic server.
I think the concept of icy loop/path puzzles with hidden ice has a lot of unexplored potential. I’ve tried making a puzzle in that category once before. I abandoned that earlier attempt, but I might revisit it at some point. The particular combination here seems to work really well, though the puzzle turned out a little harder than intended in order to (almost) preserve the clean visual theme.
Answer check only looks for the path, so you can use blue shading for the pentominoes.
Rules: Shade some pentominoes of cells so that no pentominoes touch one another, not even diagonally. No two shaded pentominoes may be the same shape, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Grey cells containing arrow clues cannot be shaded, and contain arrows indicating all of the orthogonal directions which tie for having a shaded cell appearing closest to the clued cell. At least one shaded cell must appear in the direction of an arrow.
Cells occupied by a pentomino are considered icy.
Additionally, draw a path through the centres of some cells, entering the grid at the “IN” marking and exiting at the “OUT” marking. The path cannot enter grey cells with arrow clues. All other non-icy cells must be visited, and all cells containing numbers must be visited in increasing order. Two perpendicular line segments may intersect each other only on icy cells, but they may not turn at their intersection or otherwise overlap. The path may not turn on icy cells.
Answer check only looks for the path, so you can use blue shading for the pentominoes.