I always love it when a game features meta puzzles. That moment when you realise a game is deeper than it seems is always special, and never fails to evoke emotions in me. Gentoo Rescue is one such game. On first glance, you're just solving puzzles about sliding cute penguins, but there's a lot more to discover beneath this iceberg.
Gentoo Rescue is a puzzle game about sliding different coloured penguins (and sometimes walruses and fish). The goal is to get the penguins to land on their corresponding colored circle, and for the walruses to end up in water. When every animal reaches their goal, all requirements are met, and the puzzle is then solved. It sounds like a classic sliding puzzle game, but what makes Gentoo Rescue is special in that it is STUFFED with mechanics and special interactions that twist the rules in every way possible.
This is obvious from the game's very first set of puzzles. After learning the game's basic rules, it quickly becomes apparent that Gentoo Rescue is a recursive puzzle game: Puzzles within puzzles within puzzles. The tutorial world itself is a puzzle you can complete once you’ve solved all the tutorial puzzles on the way. Exiting that world then leads to the main world, which is also a large puzzle with several sub-worlds, similar to the tutorial one. The game structure feels seamless, too. Animals can be 'locked' in cages and cannot move until you’ve solved the puzzle and unlocked it. This is to maintain a certain order in which you have to solve the puzzles, as they act as progressive “tutorials”, and to prevent you from solving the big sub-world puzzles straight away.
This very unconventional structure reminded me of games like the puzzle nesting dolls of Patrick Parabox, the world hierarchy of Cocoon's orbs, or the endgame of Baba is You but, while Baba is You mainly used this structure to create a “neverending” feeling, Gentoo Rescue completely embraces it from the start. But let’s put the meta aspect aside for a moment, let’s talk about the gameplay and the core of the game.
What makes Gentoo Rescue so fun to play is the items. Each sub-sub-world (yes, sub-sub-world) is based around an item. They can be attached to any animal, and all have special properties and interactions. The spring makes you bounce one space from a wall, for example… but what would happen if the space in question is already taken? Well, I’ll let you figure out! The game keeps a gentle approach and progressively teaches you all these subtleties.
The base puzzles - or the sub-sub-sub-worlds (oh god) are all very small, but extremely well designed. They're difficult to describe, but the best description I could come up with is that they are “hardcore tutorials”. They are not designed to have a lot going on, but you’ll still regularly struggle with them because of how much they ask of you as a player. What I can say for sure is that creativity is through the roof, and so is the pure fun I felt throughout the game. The last time I said that in a review was for… Baba is You. While I don’t think Gentoo Rescue’s puzzles are better than Baba’s ones, the game still has something up its sleeve that, I dare say, ultimately propels it amongst the very best puzzle games.
Another fantastic element is the quality of life features. Gentoo Rescue is incredibly well thought-out. You can rebind the controls (even on the mouse wheel or mouse buttons, which I always use when available), there is a journal to keep track of all the special rules you discover, you can undo but also redo, you can instantly exit or warp to any reached puzzle, the game even stores your current progression in a puzzle when you quit the game. Your current puzzle becomes the menu screen. It’s a minor thing, but I really loved that.
So let’s go back to our meta puzzle discussion! It’s a bit of a spoiler, but I’m going to detail how the meta shenanigans work, even though that’s something you get a glimpse of relatively early into the game.
The meta aspect is where Gentoo Rescue shines the most. It was heaven to me and, as expected, the difficulty skyrockets compared to the normal puzzles. Some puzzles, mainly the sub-worlds, spawn a rainbow spiral once completed. If you then move an animal onto it, you can export it to the previous layer along with its item, transforming the animal that was standing on the level. And that’s not all! If a puzzle features a red penguin, for example, you can import an item by entering the puzzle with a red penguin carrying an item. Each time you successfully import or export an item, it will be permanently saved and selectable for the connected worlds.
This creates an abundance of puzzle options and solutions, and you can probably imagine how crazy it can get. Exports will lead to more potential imports, which can in turn unlock new exports… and yeah, that’s exactly how you eventually end up reaching the difficult, out-of-reach puzzles. The puzzles themselves are usually not very hard but showcase these special interactions in a fun way, which I think is the perfect reward after a challenging meta puzzle.
Aaaaand no, that’s not all. I can’t exactly tell when they showed up, but when you’re far enough into the game, special challenges also appear in some puzzles. Every puzzle has the default challenge “don’t import an item”, which simply means you need to solve every base puzzle normally, but these special challenges task you to complete the puzzles with restrictions, such as completing them in one move or not moving a particular penguin. Those are absolutely impossible without importing an item, which means you need to figure out which item you need and how to import it. Reaching isolated puzzles was already very hard, but some of these challenges are just straight up brutal. Fun, but brutal.
That’s still not all. There are also two hidden achievements if you still want more puzzle-solving. You’ll know what to do when you complete the game, but they're essentially special challenges on a greater scale.
Total mastery of the game’s mechanics is required if you want to fully complete everything, which just goes to show how skillfully designed Gentoo Rescue is. Every mechanic is taught to you through very clever but approachable puzzles, and then you’re dropped into the meta madness where your ingenuity and understanding of the game are put to their limits.
Gentoo Rescue is a gem. And I truly mean it, I can’t even find a single little flaw. Congrats to Jagriff, I really hope his creative mind will grace us with another immaculate piece of meta heaven someday.
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