Being contrived, with puns or other weirdness is kinda on par for this kind of problems. Almost every programming competition I've ever been to have those kind of jokes.

Just a random example: https://open.kattis.com/problems/magicallights

But the Kattis website is great. The program runs on their server without you getting to know the input (you just get right/wrong back), so a bit different. But also then gives you memory and time constraints which you for the more difficult problems must find your way out of.