Jared Banta author page
1 puzzle by Jared Banta
with Jeff Chen comments
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Neat idea today; I really like puzzles visually representing something. The formation of a trail of bread crumbs from HOME to the WITCH was pretty neat to uncover. And the trail itself, depicted using circled letters, is beautifully laid out, giving a meandering path through the forest of letters. Very cool debut.
I stay away from rebus puzzles these days, as I personally think they're overdone unless there's a really good reason for them. Today, I really like having just those two rebus squares, making for a surprising a-ha moment when I struggled in the SW. And having the central answer refer to the places where the path started and ended was very helpful. Elegant way to do it.
For me, this felt like a case where "less is more" would have been appreciated. To start, I wasn't a fan of the lack of symmetry in the theme answers (ANDERSEN not having a symmetrically placed theme answer). Many will be okay with that, but I appreciate the beauty in the symmetry required out of crosswords. It's totally fine, even laudable to break crossword symmetry rules if there's a good reason (I did like the asymmetrical winding path, for instance), but I didn't think it was worth it here.
In addition, the huge amount of fill (four long theme answers plus BREAD CRUMBS strewn about) made for a difficult construction. Generally there's some great stuff (super impressive considering it's a debut puzzle) like NEAR BEER, CESAR RITZ, and HOME BREW, but EAT NO FAT felt to me like a strange partial (not really a lexical chunk on its own), plus tossing in the arbitrary TWO ROW, long partial A BEAR and the awkward RELOG felt pricey. And TNS, we shall not speak of ye. I imagine less theme density would have allowed for sparklier/cleaner entries.
Great idea, looking forward to more from Jared.