Ooze

About Ooze

Ooze is a dungeon puzzle about being the right slime at the right moment. You start as a plain blob of green ooze, and every creature you step onto is absorbed on the spot — you take its nature, and you lose whatever you were before. Fire slime burns through vines and melts ice walls, but touch water and you fizzle out. Ice slime freezes a river into a bridge that stays frozen for good. Stone slime crushes spikes flat and is heavy enough to slam pressure plates — and heavy enough to fall straight through a cracked floor. Gas slime drifts over every hazard on the map and cannot touch a single thing.

That trade is the whole game. You can only be one thing at a time, so each level is a question about order: which creature to absorb, when to absorb it, and when to find a mushroom and wash yourself back to plain ooze — the only shape soft enough to squeeze through a grate.

There are 72 levels, and every one of them has been through a solver before you ever see it. The solver proves the level can be finished, proves it cannot be finished without absorbing creatures, and finds the mathematically shortest solution — which becomes the level's par. Finish inside par and you earn three stars, which means you matched the machine move for move. The later levels were bred rather than drawn: thousands of generated dungeons were run through the same solver and only the ones that demanded real property play survived.

Mistakes cost nothing but thought. Undo takes back any move, including the one that dissolved you, so the game never punishes experimenting — only the star count remembers how directly you got there.

The slime itself is a small soft-body simulation: a ring of sprung points that stretches as it hops, squashes as it lands, jiggles when it stops and breathes while it waits. Each form has its own physical temperament — stone barely wobbles, gas floats and drifts, fire flickers at the tip.

The daily dungeon is generated fresh from the date, proven solvable by the same machinery, and identical for every player in the world. One attempt, once a day.

How to play Ooze

Move with the arrows, WASD, or a swipe. You slide one tile at a time.

Step onto a creature to absorb it — you take its nature and lose your old one. Step onto a mushroom to return to plain ooze.

Use each form where it is strong, and get rid of it before it becomes a weakness. Reach the gold star to finish the level.

Press U to undo any move — including fatal ones — and R to restart. Finish inside par for three stars.