This charming little sliding puzzle indie game has layers AND LAYERS
I love to check out the work that independent developers are doing because they often have fewer self constraints when it comes to being creative, innovative, or just having fun. And one of the best ways to find out what they’re working on is to ask them directly! With Hello, Indie! I’ll be popping in to say “Hello!” to the devs and ask about their latest projects.
Each mini-interview is a series of the same-ish questions that I hope bring a little insight into the developer, their project, and what we can look forward to.
I had the chance to chat with the folk behind Gentoo Rescue, which is a game that has players solve puzzles-within-puzzles-within puzzles in a really novel and fun way.
Hello, Jagriff!
Who are you, and where are you located?
Hey, I’m John aka Jagriff. I’m a 34 year old solo developer from Texas. I work on my game(s) after-hours and on weekends.
What’s the name of your game?
Gentoo Rescue
If you could summarize your game in a 140-character tweet, how would you describe it?
A puzzler about saving penguins in a world of nested puzzles. It’s a “hidden-depth” game that looks simple at first, but gets very wild.
What are you trying to achieve with your game?
I’ve always heavily valued gameplay over visuals/narrative as an avid gamer, so the game began and mostly still exists as an entirely gameplay-focused project. I started working on it just because I wanted to play a game like it. Around the time I was really into the board game Ricochet Robots, which is a competitive game about solving and optimizing multi-agent sliding puzzles. I thought it would be cool to have a similar premise, but with some items that the characters could pick up to change how they move and interact with each other. Baba Is You was also an inspiration, as I wanted to create a system where players had to experiment to learn how mechanics interact, and then apply that knowledge to logically solve puzzles. In a way, I think I enjoyed this style of gameplay so much because I saw it as an analogue to my studies (and research) of mathematics.
While I feel like I have met these initial gameplay goals, the game has evolved into something much bigger. I attribute this mostly to the nested world system that allowed me to play tricks with progression, secrets, and eventually (light spoilers) create a system where different puzzles can influence one another. While it’s still solidly a puzzle game, it also has some metroidvania and metroidbrainia elements that make the whole experience more cohesive and original.
How long have you been working on this project, what platforms are you aiming for, and do you have a release timeframe?
I began working on it at the end of 2022 as a brand-new game developer. It released to Steam and Itch last year in May 2025 for Windows and Linux. Since then I have continued post-launch development, where I have since added MacOS and Steam Workshop support, released a major (free) content update, and will soon officially have the game fully localized into Simplified Chinese.
One day I would like to branch out to other platforms like Nintendo Switch or (gulp) mobile, but it’s more likely that I move onto creating other Steam games.
Thanks to Jagriff for sharing some of their background with us!
