Today's puzzle provides a nice bit of escapism, quite literally - in four places in the grid, Across and Down answers cross on the letters 'ESC'; this is the KEY to the puzzle, as it were (ahem). This is a fantastic piece of construction! For those of us who do our solving online, there's a 'meta' aspect to this as well, as in order to enter multiple letters in a single square, as we need to do in those four squares, one clicks on the square and then presses the ESCape key. My hypothesis is that this was no accident - that it was the inspiration for the theme. (Mr. Marquez, if you're out there, feel free to confirm or deny!)
The revealer answer - ESCAPEROOM - clued as "Puzzling activity..." I found just a tiny bit unsatisfactory. What does the ROOM part signify? Are the four squares the 'rooms'? Or the answers themselves? Quite possibly there's something I'm not getting.
Supporting these eight ESC entries is plenty of quality fill, some of which presented this solver some difficulty. I had not heard of TYR the Norse war god, nor "CHE cosa fai". So much for my Scandinavian mythology and Italian... I liked the somewhat unusual SAUNTERED ("Took a leisurely walk"), and the non-obvious HIC ("Repeated sound that can be cured"). I suppose AMINOR *is* an "apt key for a musical prodigy". And yes, the silly "Part of your body that smells the most" (NOSTRIL) brought a smile.
You know who was zany in THREESCOMPANY, by the way? Not the roommates so much, but Stanley the landlord, that's who.
This was a super good Thursday-level crossword. Hope you enjoyed it too! See ya tmrw...
-philbo
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