Gentoo Rescue

Gentoo Rescue is a sokoban puzzle game playing off the classic mechanic of sliding ice puzzles. If you've ever played an old Pokemon game, you've undoubtedly solved some of these puzzles on the way to the Elite 4. And you will also remember that those puzzles are usually kind of uninteresting. Often they're put there as casual time-wasters to inflate the run time and make the journey seem more arduous than it is, and not because the devs thought those puzzles were interesting in and of themselves. GR asks what if you took this mechanic seriously and tried making a full game with it, and it is largely quite successful! Key to making this work is a solid level of curation. Modern puzzle game design has correctly solidified that levels shouldn't just be overcomplications of previous levels, but explore different nuances of the mechanics every time. This is where Gentoo Rescue shines. Rarely will it feel like you're solving the same puzzle twice, and new interactions will appear all throughout the runtime. The levels often feature two-step puzzles that play with your expectations, and make you have to think outside the box. The game has all the bells and whistles you expect out of a good modern sokoban, including a nice hint system, and it's a good bang for buck. It's a terrific puzzle game and easily sits among the modern classics. I've had great interactions with the developer, Jagriff, and I'm really excited to see what he gets up to next. If you're a puzzle game nerd you should play this game. :p Below you'll find me discussing a couple wrinkles about the design of the game in some length, and I wanted to stress before that that I am very positive on the game, and I don't mean for it to come off as a mixed review. Okay, with that disclaimer out of the way, here's some thoughts: I think GR shares an unfortunate property with games like Baba is You, where there is sometimes a lot of friction in parsing levels and figuring out what you have to do, which makes it harder to get into a flow state. In Baba is You, the issue is obvious: the rules for each level are spelled out in the levels themselves, and though the game tries to not introduce extra friction by standardizing rules as it goes - such as making sure walls are always solid, the flag is always the goal, etc - every level still requires a very high level of mental effort to figure out, because mechanics can interact in such abstract ways. GR becomes more like this with the more mechanics it introduces. I feel like one of the strengths of sokoban games tends to be their readability, how the levels rely on inherent geometric properties that we easily parse at a glance, and it lets us narrow our focus to the actual relevant parts of the puzzles. The abstraction in the mechanics and their interactions can make the game feel fatiguing to play for long sessions. Some may find this to be an unfair critique, but I also found that the lack of thematic cohesion holds the game back a little. Stephen's Sausage Roll is a great comparison for this. Once you get over the weird premise that you're this guy with an oversized fork trying to grill sausages, every interaction feels very natural. It's all about how the existing objects interact geometrically given our laws of physics, and no additional objects are introduced that don't feel like they shouldn't be there. Everything being a derivation of the basic building blocks makes every a-ha more powerful, because you hadn't considered that those things could happen, and they'd been simmering under your nose the whole time. In GR, it's like okay, thin ice makes sense, different animals with different goals is fine, mallets are fine, but then you get springs and magnets introduced which starts to get a little more strange, and then it gets really abstract, with laser walls that only penguins of certain colors can cross, teleporters, and objects that root animals to specific axes. They all lead to new and often interesting puzzles, but because they're so thematically incoherent and increasingly abstract, they add to that feeling of friction. I feel mixed giving this critique because it must be extra hard coming up with a set of mechanics that feels sufficiently deep and interesting without adding thematic abstraction, but I think it's an interesting aspect of puzzle design that has a non-negligible impact. And those were my thoughts. It's a topic of level game design I haven't seen discussed, and I thought it was pertinent here and really reminded me of some issues I had with Baba Is You. Both great games!

断断续续玩了半年，多亏游戏内有超级详尽的机制日志，不然这么多道具和联动肯定早忘光了，提示也是在一点点引导，可以说相当友善了。难度比较适中，大部分关卡的步骤都不算太多，总之推荐一下。 （整理了全关卡攻略BV1vEP4zfEi8，希望更多人来玩） （~1.2版本更新完~）

Sevimli penguenlerin başrolde olduğu Gentoo Rescue, ilk bakışta klasik bir kaydırmalı bulmaca oyunu gibi görünse de kısa sürede beklentileri aşıyor. Amacımız yavru penguenleri kurtarırken yay, çekiç, mıknatıs ve daha birçok eşyanın sunduğu farklı etkileşimlerden faydalanarak bulmacaları çözmek. Her yeni bölgede tanıştığımız mekanikler yalnızca tek başına değil, birbirleriyle birleşerek çok daha yaratıcı çözümler ortaya çıkarıyor. Açık dünya benzeri ilerleyişi, 300'ü aşkın özenle hazırlanmış bölümü ve bulmacanın içinde bulmaca hissi veren yapısıyla oyun, her çözülen bölümün ardından yeni bir sürpriz sunmayı başarıyor. Mantık odaklı ve yaratıcı bulmaca oyunlarını seven herkese tavsiye ederim.

I originally bought this game on itch.io, but having finished it in about 45 hours, I bought it again on Steam just so I could leave a review on here as well (and will now return to the other copy so that I can try to get to 100% completion). I really enjoyed this game. The puzzles are really well crafted, and the mechanics continued to be fun and surprising all the way through to the end. The non-traditional way that you navigate between levels works so well, and means you always have lots of options of different parts of the game to try and solve rather than getting stuck beating your head against any one puzzle, which makes the whole experience so much more enjoyable. I also loved the way the journal makes sure you always understand the problems you're dealing with, even when the mechanics (and combinations thereof) start to get more complicated later on, and on the few occasions towards the end when I felt I needed a hint, the tiered hint system meant that I was able to get exactly the right amount of a nudge in the right direction without feeling like the puzzle had been spoiled at all. I probably would have skimmed over this game from the generic art style if I hadn't happened to catch someone playing it on YouTube, but I'm so glad I gave it a chance, because it was well worth it.

Wow, this game is DEEP deep. Even the "learning something entirely new" puzzles will rarely lead you by the hand. The game has so many emergent mechanics on top of one another and does a wonderful job of properly pacing them. I'm sure I'm nowhere near the end as I write this review (and other people's hour counts seem to confirm that). The game's not afraid to deal in large quantity AND quality at the same time and I think it's been brillantly designed in that regard. I also need to point out that the game has a GREAT progression tracker, keeping track of every rule and edge case in a neat little journal, and every single puzzle comes with a set of clever tips that you can progressively unspoiler at your leisure, with the first tips usually asking you the right questions, so you can try and reason about the puzzle with only a bit of a nudge in the right direction.

Phenomenal game. Deserves a place in the puzzler pantheon. Frictionless design, excellent music, great feel. Rules are smartly taught and each solution is readily (though not always trivially) deducible. The interactions between rules make for just plain good puzzling, and you're almost always rewarded for considering a solution rather than trying to brute force it. The overarching nested puzzle layout is a nice touch, and the meta puzzles are satisfying to tackle. The mouse control implementation is also great. I can't remember using a mouse-only option this smooth in any other sokoban-ish game (scroll to undo/redo with a persistent per-puzzle move history, click on a character to select it, and click in a relative imagined cardinal grid to move in that direction. it's so simple, yet I don't think I've seen it elsewhere). All in all it's pure solving in a pleasing package... gentoo soup for the puzzler soul.

我说医死的企鹅越多，医术越高明…… [hr] 其实我吧，自我感觉并不适合解谜游戏，比起动脑子更喜欢动手，一个复杂的谜题摆在面前只感觉一阵心累和力竭。不过本作相对来说已经非常玩家友好了，不如说我就没见过比本作更玩家友好的解谜游戏，不仅有循序渐进的知识锁和尤里卡时刻的精妙设计，每一关内还都会把关卡中所有使用到的知识一一列举，甚至每关都有一条条手工提示可供参考，配合扎实且可以精确逆推的谜题，玩起来确实还是蛮开心的。 最开心的应该还是发现新机制的时刻，颇具类银河拿到新能力的感觉，新的机制，新的知识，新的玩具！以及庞大无比又精妙万分的道具联动，大概就是偶然的尝试间突然跳出的一条新知识，像奥妙无穷的惊喜盒子一样，一直吸引着脑子不太好用的我往前走吧。是一部非常优秀的解谜游戏，无需多言。（可能还有点世界探索要素……谁说得清呢！） 至于简介里说的meta我其实只有初窥门径，等玩完了再更新。缺点就是贵吧，不过值这个价格，而且说是要出中文了，其实英文也非常简单易懂，基本就高中英语水平。[strike]还有一点是我感觉应该写进规则但是没写的：被击飞的单位默认会朝击飞单位前进方向的右侧飞出。难道是底层逻辑所以不用写吗！[/strike]

非常优秀的解谜游戏。 本作的特色在于各色各样的道具，以及这些道具之间可能创造出的天马行空的交互。元谜题是本作不可或缺的一部分，通过关卡间传递道具，可以将不可能完成的关卡变为可能。本作荣获2025 Thinky Awards - Best Challenging Game奖项，但实际体验下来难度并没有那么大（相较于捆绑包里面的麦克斯韦怪物），设计的重心在于规则的广度上。游戏共有90多条规则，玩家需要在解谜过程中逐一发现规则，每个关卡最多只会用到十几条规则，关卡不会使劲堆难度，而是在小巧的棋盘格上启发玩家发现道具的利用或交互规律。难度曲线平缓，从基础的移动方式，到基础道具的基本规则，到更多道具和复杂交互，再到关卡间交互的元谜题，难度层层递进，但由于玩家在前一阶段的关卡中做了大量练习，接受新的道具交互规则便会轻松许多。 （包含大世界最终谜题的轻微剧透）[spoiler]在能获得全部所需道具的情况下，最终谜题所需的操作其实非常少，但关键的一条规则是扎扎实实藏起来的，我玩的时候完全没有猜到这条秘密。不得已返回早期关卡，从之前无法抵达的关卡中学到了这条规则，发现的时候整个人都升华了。游戏全流程应该是没有多少知识锁设计的，但这个最终谜题算一个，如果初期就能获得所需道具的话就更像知识锁了。[/spoiler]

Gentoo is Slide. Circle is Win.

I honestly think this might be the best sokoban style puzzle game I have played in my life. Not only it has great mechanics and beautiful puzzles built around them, the quality of life features for the players are amazing. Truly a game that was done with so much care and love. Couldn't recommended this enough.