This is a Statue Park puzzle.
Puzzle 361
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You can expect a lot of the harder puzzles of this type to be pentomino puzzles. Probably not all of them, but most.
Puzzle 361 (Statue Park)
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Melon's Puzzles
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Melon's Puzzles 
September 23, 2011 at 4:32 am |
Fun™ fact: this puzzle is less daunting when you read the rules and see that the black circles represent where pentominoes must go, and not where they can’t.
September 23, 2011 at 7:40 am |
Great puzzle and type, thanks! I messed up on first try somehow, failing to place the X. Second try was much smoother also in the beginning.
September 23, 2011 at 6:09 pm |
Brilliant (new puzzle and this one in particular)
TheSubro
September 23, 2011 at 8:00 pm |
Reminds me of City Planning puzzles in Breinbrekers. Except there you draw a loop through the unoccupied squares.
September 23, 2011 at 10:47 pm |
This gave me the feeling of a Numberlink, especially near the end of the solve. I got to a point where I couldn’t see a rigorous logical breakthrough, but geometric intuition started piecing together things until a complete solution fell out. Not sure if that’s considered cheating, it was still quite satisfying to solve. Great puzzle!
September 23, 2011 at 11:06 pm |
Seeing my way to a solution when I’m near the end of a puzzle and the search space is fairly small is an M.O. of mine in competitions for most kinds of puzzles. It works particularly well on things like pentominos, Nurikabe/Tapa, and some loop-based puzzles.
September 24, 2011 at 2:31 pm |
Most of the logic I used involved checking which black circles had to be connected. My favorite part was getting the empty space to find its way out of the top right corner.
Overall, this puzzle type looks VERY promising, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re able to squeeze out of it 🙂
November 28, 2012 at 4:28 am |
This was so nice that i didnt feel it was as hard as you mentioned in the post.