Brian

IKEA STORE is pretty ridiculous. Would you say let’s go to the walmart store? Also: FETES, ZIA, and ERSE all in the same puzzle? Those answers work for this comment section and nobody else at all. I also don’t like when the rebus aspect leaves some clues as just a dumping ground of letters. Eg. The answer for 46. Across technically is DNAWEST. 8 Down is DRINORTH. To achieve its affect so much of the puzzle becomes gibberish. Makes the solve very unsatisfying. Very rickety construction with globs of meaningless jumbles of letters

I don’t like when the rebuses are inconsistent. Like either have the answers be like “BRAVEheart” and “BRAVEnewworld” or have them be like “CARSondavis” and “osCARSstatue”. But having both types seems very slapdash. (Felt this way about the recent roman numeral puzzle as well)

I wonder why the NYT style guide doesn’t put video game titles like “God of War” in quotation marks?

From the “How to Design a Puzzle” post: “Themes should be fresh, interesting, narrowly defined and consistently applied throughout the puzzle. If the theme includes a particular kind of pun, for example, then all the puns should be of that kind.” I feel like this theme is not consistently applied. Eg. The Wall-E clue and Luca clues are applied differently than the Brave clue (ie. a sequence of letters found between words rebus is different from a rebus built around a single word found in full within an answer)

I had 1. across as “denim” and 29 across as “mined” for 30 mins. Had to give up. prolly a sign it’s time for me to pull the plug on my games subscription!