Guide · 4 min read

Gloop

Gloop is a sliding block puzzle where the block is soft. Walls squash it, loose bits stick back on, and you win when your slime fills the drain grate exactly. Fewer moves earns more drops.

Play Gloop →

1Slide a sticky slime around the room until it exactly fills the drain.
2Walls squish you into a new shape, and anything that loses touch with your face gets left behind.
3Loose slime sticks back on when you touch it. That is how you reshape yourself.

The basics

Move with the arrow keys or WASD, or swipe on a phone. Your slime is a set of cubes, and one of them has a face. Undo is Z and it is free, so try things.

The room is solved when your slime exactly covers the drain grate. Not bigger, not smaller, and the same shape. Each daily room has a par, which is the fewest moves a solver could find. At or under par earns three drops, within half again of par earns two, and anything else earns one.

When you have finished the daily room, practice mode has more rooms in easy, medium and hard.

Try it

A tiny version of Gloop to play with. It is not today's puzzle, so nothing here spoils anything.

How the slime moves

Most of the puzzle is learning these four rules.

Your face leads. If the face is blocked, nothing that would pull away from it moves.
Cubes that run into a wall stay put. Any cube that ends up no longer touching the face is left behind as loose slime.
Loose slime that touches you sticks again. Walls are how you tear pieces off, and touching them again is how you put them back somewhere else.
Blades cut off any cube that touches them, and it goes limp for good. Pits let you hang part of yourself over the edge, but never all of you.

Reshaping is the whole game

Almost every room starts you in the wrong shape for the drain. A two wide slime and a one wide drain is the classic case. You cannot rotate, so the answer is always to peel a piece off against a wall, walk your face round, and pick the piece up again from the side you need it on.

Once you see that, rooms stop being about routes and start being about where you want to drop a piece and where you want to collect it.

Worked example

A worked room

You are two cubes side by side, face on the left. The drain is a column two tall, tucked behind a wall. Moving down drags the face into the open floor below, but the cube on the right is sitting over a wall, so it stays where it is and gets left behind.

Now walk the face left, up and over the top until it is sitting directly above that loose cube. It sticks, but this time it hangs underneath you instead of beside you. You are now one wide and two tall, which is exactly the shape of the drain. Slide across and drop in. The try-it board below plays exactly this room.

Tips worth remembering

1Work out the drain's shape first, then ask what shape you are and which pieces need to move.
2A cube left behind is not lost. It is parked, and you can come back for it.
3Count the cubes. If you have more than the drain holds, a blade or a pit is usually how you get rid of the spare.
4Undo is free and does not cost moves, so test a theory and step back if it fails.