Lateral Thinking

When I saw "lateral" I thought football, but when I saw "thinking" I got worried. Fun puzzle. Thanks.

Fun! I've never done one of these. ZOO was what did it for me, then REO.

Nice construction and clueing!

Nice puzzle. It's always a plus when the mechanism and the answer fit together. I've never done an escape room, but I assume it requires thinking outside the box, which might be an alternate title. My favorite instance of this mechanism was this NYT puzzle: https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=1/7/2016

That was fun ! I love escape rooms! Thanks for a great puzzle, Darth!

Very nice puzzle. ZOO was also my way in, and then DEN. Thanks for the puzzle, Darth!

Ery nic!

Enjoyed it!

Glad to be out and with no hex conversion even involved! Thanks, Darth!

FUN. Zoo was a brick wrapped in a handkerchief. RAISE raised an eyebrow while I was doing the grid but was easily forgotten. DEN being the very first entry was ARK at first. Other then Zoo the metanism was subtly subdued. Nice.

Fun puzzle, Darth - thank you!

Fun puzzle all over again! I saw it in development and again now. Nicely done and cleanly filled. Some great internal hints to the correct entry, very clever Darth!

You have a place here anytime you'd like!

When I started this puzzle, "Taking One for the Team" was still on my brain. I must have seen that on the Forum page. The first "turning" word I found was CAPTORS. I remembered "Raptors on the scoreboard" as a clue and was hot on the trail of other words that would become teams if you changed one for the team. Thankfully I shook that off fairly quickly, but not until I had scoured the entire grid and all of the clues!

Backsolved from E_CAPER__M

C-LAMP was the trigger for me, confirmed by PAST-A. Clever construction- thanks Darth!

Nice to see our pal TRIPE raise its (his?) "gusty" head again! :-) And I find PAST(A) always helps. Thanks for this one, Darth! Fun and not out of my vacation brain range!

Didn't see it immediately, but after a couple of intervening meetings it struck me right away when I picked it back up. OREO and then ZOOM. HISS was the only one I had a (?) by until assembling the rest. Fun stuff, thanks.

Very cleverly done, thanks Darth!

Nice one!

I love this one so much I’m sending it to my family meta poo-pooers as a good example of a smooth grid and gettable, clever meta!! Thanks! The themes were so much fun… esp. zoo/zoom, pop/pope!

Loved this! amazing to me that you found words where the truncations were plausible entries!

Nice one, Darth! Very clever clueing!

Fun

Super fun, thanks for the puzzle!

Very fun! ZOO was also my clue in, but no complaints from me — gradually getting more able to tackle the easier metas unassisted, while I still can only gape and marvel at the trickier ones!

Great puzzle Darth! My first string of letters had (T)HIS, then HIS(N), and POP(S). But I eventually escaped...

Fun and well-constructed. Started earlier today, solved grid and expected I would have to add letters to outside the puzzle, but then had to put it aside. Just before going to bed, I took another glance, looked at 1A, said to myself that I'd expected the answer would have EDEN rather than "Daniel in the lion's DEN" - checked 66A for symmetry, saw that the more normal answer was ZOOM rather than the humorous ZOO - and it was off to the races. Thanks.

Here's the solution: If you look at the answers to the starred clues, you'll see that a letter could be added to the side ("laterally") beyond the grid frame (or "outside of the box" -- literally!):