OK, so you don't know who your neighbour is. What does that have to do with this? Remember, everyone in Zozo, except allegedly the "this place is dangerous" guy, is a liar, and all of these people (again, with a few exceptions) mention the clock. That fact ALONE should tell you that they know about the puzzle, and that they have all conspired to tell you lies about it. OBVIOUSLY, this is an organized, coordinated system.
conga line members aside, i see it as less of a coordinated conspiracy than as individual liars. liars whose duplicate clues are kept to a minimum due to space constraints -- the same sort of constraints that make 3 houses and 5 townspeople constitute an average "town" in this game. no town is actually meant to be
that small; the kid with the blonde hair, the lady in the red dress, the old man in the hat, the brown-haired guy in the shirt, and the old woman with the ponytail are a
sampling of what's understood to be a more populated area. sometimes, there are repeats in the sampling, and you'll get the mind-blowing occurrence of two old guys in hats in a single town. likewise, Zozo had a repeat slip through.
i don't see redundant Zozo clues as any more of an assault on logic, no closer to a rip in the time-space continuum, than two old men in hats living in the same municipality.
How about you read the WHOLE paragraph before jumping to conclusions? My point is, if you can't expect two people in neighbouring buildings to know to give different clues, how can you expect the same from all the other thieves in separate buildings?
i don't. which is why having some repetition seems more realistic to me. more repetition yet would be even more realistic, but there's no rule that having one duplicate means you need to have at least two for the first to be intentional.
keep in mind that recognizing the duplicate requires a little reasoning, which i'll discuss in my next post.
uh, a big wall moves right in front of your face, making noises in the process.
THAT'S the "real-time feedback" you were referring to?! OK, yes, obviously I was aware of THAT. You made it sound like choosing a single hand correctly gave you feedback. But instead you're trying to say this is enough? In which case you just negated your own argument about the difference between this puzzle and a Sudoku! 
nope. you're equating the Chainsaw puzzle giving you feedback with having to flip to the back of a puzzle book for Sudoku answers. this is a flawed comparison, because the latter divulges the
whole answer, while the former only tells the solver whether they plugged in the correct answer. vastly different.
why does it matter whether the feedback occurs after a single hand? bottom line: you have to input a whopping three numbers twice. how hard is that to do? how time-consuming? if someone is that short on time, maybe they should be checking off items on a bucket list and saying heartfelt farewells to family members, rather than playing some old video game.
First of all, I don't actually solve newspaper puzzles, I buy puzzle magazines. You can probably find one at your local supermarket. These DO have the solutions printed in the back, so I can check the answer for myself. Second, even if I did have to wait a day to see the answer, I'd still be able to see it eventually, so who cares?
whatever the print medium may be, you're still at the mercy of editors supplying the correct answer -- or else you'd be perpetually wondering whether that "5 7" or "7 5" was right. NOT the case in Zozo, where the puzzle itself will promptly tell you if you're right.
You know what, you're thinking way too much about the "realism" aspect of this. I do still contend that having someone repeating someone else's line is LESS realistic because everyone's in the know, but even if that's not the case, there are times when realism is obsolesced by fairness. If you want a shining example of this, watch this video. Obviously it's about a completely different game, and admittedly the examples given are more extreme, but it still perfectly illustrates my point.
Being an avid puzzle-solver, playing through this puzzle, gathering all the clues, narrowing down the choices as effectively as logic will allow, doing EVERYTHING RIGHT, and still being left with a guess between two choices, is unfair. I don't care that it's only two choices, it's still unfair.
we must define "fair" differently. bringing 150 combinations down to 2 seems _extremely_ accommodating to me. geometrically, that's a factor of 75; arithmetically, that's a reduction of 148. you apparently consider anything short of the answer wrapped up in a big, tidy bow to be "unfair".
We have EVEN MORE themes now, but some old ones are gone...