I actually skipped a few genres when going to Nurikabe -- Numberlink and Shakashaka come first! It's time to tackle this beast.
Previously on this blog I said that the standard size for Numberlink was 17×17. This is false -- it's actually 15×15. This made this challenge a bit less daunting, though it still ended up being very annoying to construct. (My first few attempts were wildly nonunique due to the same problem, and finding a solution to that problem was more difficult than expected.)
As with my other Numberlink puzzles, I'm not entirely sure that this puzzle is unique. However, I have at least a proof sketch, and two other solvers have reported the same answers, so I'm at least confident enough of uniqueness. Also as with my other Numberlink puzzles, I have no idea how Nikoli constructors pump these out so often.
Nice puzzle. It's unique. I usually don't like doing numberlinks since there are so many shortcuts available if one assumes uniqueness (especially since one can usually see a solution quite early, and uniqueness implies that its the only solution), but a numberlink where I don't know beforehand whether there's uniqueness is right up my ally.
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