Face developed Gururin for the Neo Geo with assistance from Minato Giken, and SNK published it on 25 May 1994. It was Face's first project on the hardware, and it never left the arcade: no AES cartridge was produced, and the announced Neo Geo CD conversion was shown running at a trade show in early 1995 before being quietly dropped. The game only became easy to play again in 2018, when Hamster added it to the ACA Neo Geo range.

On the surface this is a colour-matching puzzler in the Columns and Puyo Puyo tradition. Line up three little people wearing the same coloured outfit, horizontally or vertically, and they become warriors. What sets it apart is the verb in the title. The A and B buttons rotate the entire playfield left or right; every piece on the board tumbles into a new position at once, and you look for your matches in whatever arrangement falls out.

That single mechanic is both the appeal and the barrier. Planning a move means predicting how a whole screen resettles rather than where one falling block lands, and there is a further wrinkle: characters sometimes cling to each other's hands and refuse to separate, so the clean solution you spotted before the spin may not survive it. Occasional on-screen arrows hint at a workable match. A versus mode against a human or the machine is included, and a memory card preserves high scores.

Critics were divided on release and have stayed divided. The rotation is usually acknowledged as clever and the loop as addictive once it clicks, but the complaint that recurs is the learning curve, which runs directly against the pick-up-and-play logic arcade puzzlers depend on for survival. The art and music get called surreal or psychedelic, which is a description rather than praise. If what you want is a Neo Geo puzzle game, Magical Drop and Puzzle Bobble are both on the system and both far more welcoming. Gururin is for people who collect the odd ones, and it asks for patience before it gives anything back.