Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!
The sixth level in the game is Cryptic Relics, and while I originally penciled in Letter Weights on the monkey names in the level, that quickly proved to be unworkable. But it led me to another idea, what genre could possibly support the list of monkey names? Word Division is a safe fallback but perhaps less interesting than other word genres. Meandering Words was out because some of the words contained double letters... what could possibly support those?
And then I remembered Word Worms / Worm Search from the first EUSPC (2nd incarnation linked - first doesn't seem to have a live link anywhere). That seemed perfect! Taking the monkey name lists from both the NTSC and PAL versions of Cryptic Relics gave a word list with 91 characters - perfect, that's a rectangle! And there's even a double Z, maybe I could put PUZZLE in my puzzle... several miracles later, I had a 30 point puzzle. The example was much easier to make since I already had some experience - I mostly just wanted to showcase every rule with a much more restricted letter bank.
Rules: Place one letter into every empty cell such that every worm can be found. Worms are words that can be read in a path that may bend and move in any orthogonal direction. Every cell in the grid must be part of exactly one worm. If identical letters are adjacent, even diagonally, they must belong to the same worm.
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