Gentoo Rescue

A very good and satisfying ice gym game, which is a rare surprise :O A really excellent metroidvania-adjacent slid-y sokoban-y game, with many great ideas, interesting mechanical interactions, and tough levels. I very much recommend if you're the sort of person that likes large puzzle games with meta-puzzles, but not overly obtuse secrets, it's one of the best of 2025. With that overall review, I I have a few critical comments which you should not take to mean you should not play this game, but perhaps to show that I think it's in a high tier of puzzle game and can take the kind of criticism you'd apply to the best puzzle games out there. (Mild mechanical spoilers below). 1. It feels like some of the interactions between mechanics originate from the designer just having some "resolution order" for the mechanics when they first experimented with it, and then being like "huh, that's weird" and sticking with it. But some of these choices are not that interesting or useful beyond perhaps being unexpected; they're just kind one arbitrary choice of that resolution order. One example that stuck out to me as both weird and actually kind of boring was the interaction between the rocket and the magnet, which gets used once or twice but isn't that different from just no rocket and a magnet. These types of situations feel a bit like "metroidvania filler" of these interactions needing to exist, but there not being anything all that interesting you could do with it. There are one or two levels which are just "spot one new interaction that will then never be used again", which I think the game could just cut. 2. Some of the levels still have a lot of regular sliding puzzle set-up (that I'm not all that great at) to get to a mechanical idea/interaction that is not that hard to spot. Some of these maneuvers are quite hard to work backwards through, which is what you normally want to do with sliding puzzle games, and feels a bit brute-forcey. This content can feel like "sliding puzzle filler", that I sometimes just don't want to do. I think that many games I enjoy have similar things of just "putting things in the right starting point" though, so not a unique problem for a thinky puzzle. I do feel like Headlong Hunt avoided this stuff a bit more, within the same genre, and is consequently easier. I think this game would not suffer from cutting some sliding and therefore being easier. 3. More of a comment than a criticism, but the recursion component is a bit less "recursion" than Recursed or Parabox: it's mostly about setting up the level inputs correctly by replaying it. This is a function of levels themselves not being objects you can move up and down the recursion stack. I'm glad the game did not get the name slicursion despite having a recursion component, or this would bug me a little more. Replaying the same levels with different set-up is one of the games best parts though! Again, overall very good though, and will be working on getting as close to 100% as I can :))

Puzzle games of this sort have always caught my interest (Baba Is You, Can of Wormholes, Snakebird, ...), but I never committed to any of them enough to get very far. So, I haven't approached Gentoo Rescue with the knowing eye of a genre veteran, and I had to develop general "sokoban-style" skills in parallel to learning this game's particular systems. But for unrelated reasons, I [i]did[/i] commit to finishing this game, and I feel like it was an excellent pick for cutting my teeth on some more serious solving. This is specifically because the puzzles are tightly constrained. When approaching a puzzle, I almost never felt like I had a huge bucket of strategies to sort through. Rather, a lot of puzzles look pretty simple, and every time I got stuck it felt like I had tried all the moves that the engine would allow, only to finally discover and correct the one bad assumption I'd been working under. In that sense, I felt like the entire game was just a big, rolling tutorial, and every level was designed as a lesson laser-focused on exposing some specific wrong idea about its systems. At least, it felt that way until the post-game. Once I had really internalized all of the systems (I hesitate to say mastered..), there was still a steak dinner's worth of puzzles left to go, and approaching them with that fresh competence was my favorite part of the whole experience (and exactly the kind of fun I was looking for when I committed to this game in the first place). I focused on Gentoo Rescue for a couple months, and I think I've had my fill of challenging puzzle-gaming for a while. It first piqued my interest when I heard about it from a Thinky Games Youtube video in which the developer talks about using puzzle solvers as a development tool; I'm grateful I stumbled across it. Big, big ups to Mr. Jagriff for putting together a wonderful game. P.S. I want to give acknowledgement to the small handful of "gimmick" levels. A few (I think always optional) levels have a particularly easy solution but behave in a spectacular or quirky way, showcasing the engine's more dramatic capabilities. Usually the main challenge is reaching these levels in the first place, and they were always a sweet reward that put a smile on my face. So, special thanks for that.

Super fun and challenging puzzles.

慕名而来，才玩了一天就看到官方说马上就要出中文了。 所以就算还没好好体验完，也先奔走相告！ 至于就我玩到的部分的感受，确实有（去年的）年度解谜游戏的架势。 这些年顶流解谜游戏都在卷开放世界元解谜，但本作在此基础上更进了一步： 一条一条发现规则，逐步了解这个世界如何运作， 不止是探索世界本身，而且还要探索世界的规则，实属天才的设计。 考虑到这种带有规则怪谈味道的解谜，实际上有点怕剧透的， 所以我也不确定我在更深入体验后，会不会更新更多感想。 但总之，现在我要说：要出中文了，趁着春促赶紧买呀！

庞大的关卡数、精妙的逻辑反推解密、恰到好处的提示、密集的Eureka Moment、平滑的难度曲线、逐步解开的知识锁、递归、关卡间的互通互联...... 难道它真的是完美的？

This game is good, like Baba is you levels of good, this really should be getting more attention.

自带提示，非常友好

peak

也算是所有关卡通关了，完全没有注水关卡，物品锁知识锁机制也很棒 难度也适中，不会毫无头绪也不会无聊

One of the best puzzle games I've ever played. The level designs are astonishingly tight. The game guides you into discovering all of its elements and their interactions, then has you put them together in so many interesting ways.