I'm capitalizing on this one during its puzz.link implementation honeymoon phase. (Feel free to deduce the length of my backlog from this information.)
Tile City was introduced by PuzzleSquareJP user _AtomicNeoN_ way back in February 2022. It seems to have been quickly relegated to obscurity, as there are very few puzzles after the initial batch. That said, the recent online interface has resulted in a small resurgence of the type. It's a neat ruleset! It combines a familiar "no 2x2" rule with interesting logical steps that result in a unique feel. (In particular, there's a 4-star on PuzzleSquareJP that I tried but couldn't break into....)
Rules: Shade some cells such that each region is either fully shaded or fully unshaded. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Each group of orthogonally connected unshaded regions must contain exactly one region of each size, from a region with only one cell up to the largest region in the group. Regions containing numbers must be unshaded, and the number represents the size of the largest region in its group.
You may have noticed from the example and ruleset that the potential for visual theming with this genre is ... significantly lacking. The first puzzle showcases a quick and dirty attempt to construct a puzzle with symmetric regions and clues, along with a "1 2 3 4" pattern of givens along the border. It's honestly pretty silly, and the symmetry constraints aren't even that apparent just from looking at the grid. But I had to at least try, just to see how it felt to construct.
The second puzzle is more representative of the "typical" grid for this genre, with a logical theme present throughout the solve.
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