InFlux Reviews

Very pretty marble-based puzzle game. It's a collection of the same kind of puzzle, distributed around a world map; Very pretty. It really reminds me of Exo One. Only real qualms are the fans have a confusing point of lift - spent a lot of time trying to use them, and you can shoot yourself through a wall if you boost at the right angle. I went out of bounds on many occasion. often on purpose, and was able to glitch into a level without unlocking it :). Good Speed-running strat.

Intriguing but ultimatly pointless game. Racing a ball in an open world environment sounds fun. Unfortunatly, the execution is flawed. The open world is full of bugs (I played 10 minutes, I got stuck about 5 times) -you cannot explore the world per say, you have to follow a path from one puzzle house to the other, any sort of deviation and you will either stay stuck bugged out and reset, or you will drown and reset; in other words the open-world feature is useless, very demanding and moslty left unseen- and the camera/controls feel unatural (I played with a PS3 controller). Now that I purchased it, I wonder what's the point. Oh well. If you want rolling balls, don't get InFlux, buy Rock of Ages instead !

Chill and beautiful. Puzzles aren't too hard, and the mechanic of flipping cubes around is fun. The outside world is fun to explore. There's just enough story to keep you going. And the whale <3 It has some bugs here and there - enough that I put the game behind me for a year or two after getting stuck. But I'm glad I finished it - it's a lovely experience. I'm sure our heroic glow ball had important buisness to attend to in outer space.

I have got to say, this is a both relaxing and challenging game. I fell in love with the lovable ball character and can't wait to play more. Although there might be a few cracks in the textures, InFlux can be described as a hands down beautiful game! Bravo!

Amazing environment and love the interactions with objects. If you are a bang bang shooter up type you won't like it. If you are of the MYST genre and like atmospheric environments, you will love it. That being said, there is a lot of inconsistency in the game saves and it's down right frustrating. I don't understand why the developers made this feature so user unfriendly since the ability to save your progress is probably the most important feature of any game. Be warned that unless you just leave the game running on your computer, you won't be able to save any progress that you have made on your own. Rather, it seems mostly random. For a while it seemed like it was saving at each glass building once you entered. But I found that NOT to always be true. Occasionally after you have finished in the glass building and are dumped into the next environment, thinking that your progress has been saved, you exit, you find upon reentering you are back at the beginning of a glass house puzzle, and not necessarily the one you were last in. Also, if when bouncing around and playing in an environment, you land "inside" a rock or piece of graphic, you often can't get out, even with the power surge. And if you bounce into a section of the game you've already completed (because they sometime run side by side) you more than likely can't get out. Murphy's law dictates that these are the times when the game chooses to save for you. So I would rate the in game exerience an A+ but the whole saving thing a big fat "F". Oh, there is a feature called go to last checkpoint. But that again is up to the game to choose and not you.

THis was a game unlike any other in my collection, something chill and relaxing that I could just throw on at the end of a long day and kind of fade away into. The puzzle engages just enough grey matter to be enjoyable, but are spread out enough that just exploring the world and finding neat landscapes in between breaks up the experience into a joyful take-at-your-own-pace eerie wonder. It's so rare to find a game which favours and rewards self-exploration for those of us who just like to meander through every nook and corner for idle amusement.

So, this game really is loads of awesomeness. It has an incredibly calm atmosphere, lush graphics, ridiculously smooth gameplay, and aims to bring a new light to problem-solving and virtual puzzles. Its originality in terms of both puzzles and overall gameplay really gives off a great vibe, and in my opinion, it feels like the developers really knew what they wanted from this game. They executed this indie game extremely well and it really shows. I have not had the chance to play this game with a controller, but for a mouse and keyboard(which feels more natural to me than a controller), the controls are perfect. The developers really struck a beautiful balance in terms of how you control the gameplay, and subsequently, how the gameplay controls you. They left the complexity and problem-solving to the puzzles of the game and made the controls simplistic. Perfection. On the topic of the puzzles, they also match this game perfectly. As you can see from the teaser video clips, the puzzles take on this abstract form of obstacles within multi-dimensional cubes of glass and steel. Without spoiling anything(or too much anyways), at first glance you would figure this combination to clash with the original atmosphere of the game, but it's quite the opposite; the transfers are done so seamlessly that the player remains undisturbed, and continues to flow through the calm, dream-like gameplay that is InFlux. Most of the puzzles are simple, a couple of them frustrating, but not so frustrating that you want to turn the game off or bang your head against a wall. They always keep you coming back. At the end of the day, this is a fantastic game with an amazing atmosphere that keeps you coming back for more; and honestly, that is the kind of result you want from a problem-solving game of this caliber. If you are on the edge about whether to buy this game or not, just go ahead and buy it and thank me later. For its miniscule price, you get an experience easily worth ten times the amount(was on-sale for $2.99 when I wrote this review).

The main problem with InFlux is that it doesn't matter that you're a ball. Rolling physics games, like Marble Madness, rely heavily on conservation of momentum as a game mechanic. InFlux does not. You have very good control over your movements and can arrest your forward momentum at any time. Moving slowly often makes the uneven ground difficult to traverse, but that's more an annoyance than a gameplay mechanic. There's no incentive to dash madly through levels, not in the least because you spend the navigation levels searching for hard to spot motes of light that you need to unlock the next puzzle. The game has some ramps, but you don't so much roll up them as you hit them at speed and bounce into the air. Once the game introduces the boost mechanic all semblance of ball relevance goes right out the window, as you can use it to easily turn on a dime at tight angles and even essentially freeze time in mid air to target perfect landings. Overshot your mark? No problem, just boost again and turn yourself around. There are some puzzles that involve rolling a ball into a receptacle but that ball is not you. It's a different ball. And you don't manipulate it by hitting it like a cue ball or a bowling ball -- you have telekinetic powers. These puzzles would have been much better if you were the "scoring" ball and the game actually forced you to behave like a ball. But instead, InFlux is just a mediocre first-person puzzle game with some reasonably pretty landscaping that is in no way relevant to navigation by a ball. You might as well be a tiny person with a gun that fires attracting and repulsing waves -- in fact, I have definitely played games where I was a person and my momentum was more difficult to control than it is in InFlux. At the end of the day you are a character with a motor skills deficiency trying to solve spatial puzzles. The net result comes across as unfortunately frustrating. It's obvious that the developers put a lot of work and care into this, but it suffers badly from some poor design choices. I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone but the most diehard of spatial puzzle fanatics. I definitely don't recommend it to anyone looking for a ball physics game.

As a fan of marble games like Marble Blast Ultra, and Switchball, it's an interesting blend of the two. It's broken apart into six different hub worlds, each containing 3 puzzle areas. These hub worlds are wide open natural vistas, whereas the puzzle rooms look a lot like those Marble Blast Ultra. Most of the puzzles deal with world rotation, and getting other marbles to designated areas. The movement feels pretty different than Marble Blast Ultra, mostly in that you carry much more momentum, and you don't have a button to jump. They introduce a charge boost though, that accomplishes similar goals. It has a small story being told organically through the world, and it's just a really satisfying time. I'd highly recommend it to dudes that dug Marble Blast Ultra/Switchball/Spectraball.

Very relaxing, very enjoyable. The zen vibe is palpable. Aided by a cool soundtrack, chill atmosphere, and beautiful landscape even at lower settings. For some reason I had trouble installing it, but once I got it working it was totally worth it. It's largely free roaming exploration and it's quite easy to understand what to do due to it's simplicity. Due to how enraptured I was into the game, it was actually a little shorter than I anticipated. It could really benefit from an additional level or two under a different kind of landscape, like perhaps a snowy tundra, a space level, or a man made system of some kind. Still if you need to relax, but you also want to have fun while doing it, then I highly recommend this game.