Pingus is a free and open-source puzzle platformer in the classic Lemmings mould — except the crowd you are trying to save is a troupe of small penguins. Each Pingu walks forward on its own, so you can only influence the herd by handing out the right command at the right moment: build a bridge across a gap, dig through the floor, block the others from walking off a cliff, or send one heroic pingu swimming ahead. Levels are solved by combining those actions in the right order, and there are several ways to finish most of them. The project was started at the end of 1998 by Ingo Ruhnke, has grown well beyond being a straight clone, and today ships 77 playable levels across hand-made and community levelsets, with original artwork, a built-in level editor and its own ideas such as the worldmap, secret levels and new actions like the jumper. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, and the latest stable release is 0.7.6 (December 2011) — long-lived, still installable from every major distribution, and under active maintenance upstream.

Key Features

• Lemmings-style puzzle gameplay — indirect control: your only lever is the command you give, and every action is a limited resource counted per level.
• 77 playable levels — a main campaign plus Halloween and Christmas levelsets, easy-to-hard tutorial levels, and a worldmap connecting the levels.
• Built-in level editor — design your own levels with the in-game editor, add hotspots, backgrounds and objects, then share them as a levelset.
• Extra actions and ideas — the jumper, along with secret levels and unlockable worlds, go beyond the original Lemmings formula.
• Multiplayer and developer mode — hot-seat/network play and a developer mode (Ctrl-M) that unlocks all levelsets for experimenting.
• Original free artwork and sound — hand-drawn penguin sprite animations, tile sets and music, all released under the same free licence as the code.
• Small footprint, cross-platform — builds on SDL2, so it runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, plus consoles and handhelds via community ports.

Why Use Pingus?

Pingus is one of the longest-running free software games still alive: nearly three decades of development, a complete single-player campaign that runs offline, and no accounts, ads or storefronts involved — install it from your distribution’s repository and play. It is genuinely good at what it does, too. The puzzle design assumes you will experiment, fail and replay, the levels are short enough for a coffee break, and because the failure state is instant and retrying is cheap, it works as well for a five-minute session as for an evening of grinding through a hard levelset. Because the level editor ships with the game and the levelset format is plain and well documented, it is also a friendly first project for anyone curious about how open-source games are built: install the game, load the editor, and you are modifying a real game the same afternoon. Development continues openly on GitHub, where the master branch has moved to a Nix-based build with Windows cross-compilation and new tooling.

Use Cases

• A complete offline single-player puzzle campaign for a laptop with no store account or internet connection.
• Short coffee-break sessions — levels are quick to retry and can be played one at a time.
• Playing together on one machine through the multiplayer modes.
• Making your own levels and levelsets with the built-in editor and sharing them with other players.
• Learning game design and C++/SDL game code from a small, mature, fully open codebase.
• Running on old or low-powered hardware, including hand-held and single-board computers via community ports.

Platforms

Linux · Windows · macOS (SDL2-based; community ports exist for other systems)

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later — open source; code and game data (artwork, levels and sound) ship under the same free licence.

Website

pingus.seul.org · project site · source on GitHub

Similar open-source game

SuperTux — another long-running free 2D platformer with penguin mascots, hand-drawn levels and an included level editor.