Puzzle GP 2023 Round 7 - Appreciation for a few Puzzles

I enjoyed a few puzzles in this GP enough to leave this note of appreciation:

Puzzle 2, Kakuro (Small Snake) by Prasanna Seshadri: The “Small Snake” rule worked really well with the puzzle design: a small number of well-placed cues made it pretty obvious where the snake would roughly have to go. And then I reread the rules and realized that *all* digits 1 to 4 had to be part of the snake, which led pretty directly to the solution. I enjoyed this.

Puzzle 14, Kakuro (Number Search) by Prasanna Seshadri: I liked how the puzzle layout and clues helped me determine where the diagonal numbers for the Number Search could be. And the extra rule which required that clues could not overlap made their relative positions quite unique. And then e.g. the vertical 10-clue and the horizontal 26-clue were enough to determine which two 5-digit clues would have to be in the top right vs. the bottom left. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of solving this puzzle much more than I typically enjoy number puzzles (like Slither Link).

Puzzle 8, Snaky Word Search, by Anubhav Balodhi: I really liked the theme here. It’s really hard to evoke themes in text puzzles, and yet both the puzzle name and the snake clues really made it feel like I was trying to fit a bunch of snakes into a box that was way too small to contain them.