MellowMelon for this unique test. This test sounded tough when it was announced, the preview series looked tough and when the test actually turned out to be TOUGH - but it was no surprise and was quite expected. But I am sure those who wandered around in the zoo enjoyed the experience.

Instructions were long. Even after reading the instructions again and again, I was never completely in sync with all the intricacies in the instructions...and had to refer to some of them during the test as well.

My plan was to complete 7 babies in about 45 minutes, and try to get through 5 adults in 75 minutes. I did not like International Borders for some reason - so avoided it totally. But the babies did not turn out to be too docile and took me more time than expected. Probably the babies had grown up a bit after the test IB was released.

Among the ones I did solve, I liked nonconsecutive fillomino baby, the castle wall adult, and liar slitherlink "grown up" baby. Overall, all puzzles were very good and I'll have a go at the rest of them soon.

I myself haven't regularly solved on Palmer's blog at all. The only puzzle I was previous to this test really familiar with was the Liar Slitherlink, as it had already appeared on the Dutch national championship back in 2006 and had made some of those puzzles myself. And I think that's really where the crux in this test lies. Familiarity with the puzzle types. If you know what to look for in the puzzles, you can work through them well. And you had to be a bit more familiar with the puzzles type already for the babies.
I was also kind of surprised most adults were larger than I would have expected. I think it might save minutes on harder puzzles to stick to smaller grids. As a smaller puzzle with harder logic, I can generally work through faster than a larger puzzle with easier logic. Especially in loop puzzles(double back/castle wall) and puzzles where everything has to be connected (out of sight/international borders/line nurikabe) larger grids will take more time to keep track of these constraints. Most babies were the size I would have expected the adults to be. That's what I liked about the hybrids: they were rated as adults, but they were all the size of the babies for other puzzles.

Will has some good points. The baby Liar Slitherlink has a nice path, but it's very tight, you kinda go step by step. The adult one opens up when you figured out the corners and I instantly saw this and actually solved that one faster than the baby.
I tried to do all puzzles I hadn't before retroactively. The Akari EX adult I stilll haven't solved. Actually I haven't even made a dent in it. I already had enough trouble with the baby one, mostly because I just can't see the logic involved at all. I keep messing up the Line Nurikabe as well. Can't find where I go wrong logically, will figure it out.

But all in all I had fun. Learned some new puzzles. I finished in about the same place as with the other tests.

That was a really good test, even though I only got an 180. I think that there were some good puzzles. I solved the Double Back a few minutes late, and finished the baby liar slitherlink afterwards too.
Some of the babies were not easy at all... but otherwise, good job.

I have eventually finished solving all the puzzles and have now rated each one. A lot of very nice logic went into the construction of these, but I'm afraid I didn't find many of the logical break-ins during the actual 2 hours of competition. Like one other commenter, I found the hybrid puzzles OK. However, I didn't see the hourglass constriction in the middle of the Castle Wall adult and, as a result, assumed that all the adults were going to be too ferocious. In fact I discovered afterwards that the Out of Sight and International Borders adults were surprisingly docile.

Congratulations on a lovely puzzle set. A lot of instructions to understand. Perhaps, it might be a good idea to have a farm corner in your zoo next time, where we can enjoy some familiar domesticated animals.

Thank you.

Thank you for all the comments. I'll be keeping them in mind for any puzzles/competitions I write in the future.

Some notes regarding difficulty: The reason I feel a need to apologize about the timing is that I do think the best solvers prefer finishing. For one thing, there's an element of luck introduced when it comes down to which puzzles a solver decided to do, and I think total time is a more consistent separator. Also, from this post by motris regarding the most recent WPC, which was in my thoughts while calibrating the test:

Most of these comments are not too surprising in hindsight, as my post mortem shows, but the Liar Slitherlink baby comments are. The first step, as the solution PDF notes, is that the center two rows have clues only in two columns, so no other clues in those columns can be liars. It is a bit of a different style from the usual ways of breaking in, but I seriously thought this was going to be easier to find than searching for configurations of impossible clues in the whole grid, especially since it was so localized. There was not much indication in testsolvers' times that it would be much tougher to see.

The types being outlandish was definitely an issue. I'll make sure any future contests have, at the least, a less wordy set of rules.

For answer extraction, I considered several different ones for Castle Wall. Re consistency: the Double Back scheme is terrible for Castle Wall because figuring out the general path of the loop is often very easy thanks to the colors, so it's more of a question of whether a loop uses a square or not. That's starting to become possible to brute force. I'm still not sure what I should have used for it. The row/column mechanisms seemed to be the best ones (no counting involved), so I possibly should have just asked for used/unused in two rows or columns. That was considered before the test and thought not to give enough information. Was I right? I still don't really know.

Anyways, I knew from the start that puzzle quality would likely be the main thing I got right in doing this, so I'm glad to hear the positive comments about it. Perhaps one reason the babies were all too hard is that I've always had trouble making a very good puzzle of low difficulty, and I wanted every puzzle on this test to be "very good". I'll be trying to figure this out in the near future.