This puzzle was another entry into Logic Showcase 24 in the Puzzler's Club Discord, in which we created puzzles utilising Tapa-like clues in a puzzle style that does not normally have them. I thought it would be interesting to try to create a Cave puzzle with this style of clue. In retrospect, this was quite an awkward choice. The lack of long-distance information provided by the Tapa clues made it difficult to make a unique solution without the puzzle feeling overclued, and the nature of the clues combined with the structure of a Cave solution meant that clues near edges and corners were necessary to disambiguate individual cells that otherwise could be added to the Cave without affecting anything. I am not normally a fan of using question marks as clues, but here I really struggled to create a puzzle with interesting logic otherwise, as the full clues near the edge of the board are much more powerful than I intended them to be early on in the solve.
I probably won't be revisiting this particular combination, but it was interesting to create, and I hope the puzzle is fun to solve nevertheless.
Rules
Shade some cells so that the shaded cells are all connected orthogonally by other shaded cells to the edge of the grid, and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally-connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and indicate the lengths of the blocks of consecutive unshaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.
Difficulty: 5/10
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