best game ever 10/10 i'm totally not the developer (i am the developer)

Beautiful and mysterious, though more for lovers of tranquil exploration and spherical geometry than serious puzzle fantastic. Some puzzle areas are well put together, but inaccurate controls bring about a lot of frustration. On top of that one half of the game lacks challenge, while the other half lacks surprise. Add those together and you’ll get a game that never becomes more than the sum of its parts.There are some puzzles worth cracking, but as the scheme behind most challenges can hardly be made out at the get-go, most solutions are revealed by annoying trial&error.Overall 6/10.

The entire time I spent playing InFlux, I kept wondering to myself and trying to discern just what about it was causing me to dislike it so much. But ultimately it became clear that there was no one thing that was so abhorrent as to destroy the game, but a long list of mediocre mechanics, frustrating moments, and missed potential stacked upon each other to create a game that is not fun to play.

And you really wouldn't notice this from the outside, so much is the subtlety of InFlux's deeply permeated problems. What appears to be an average, but solid physics based ball puzzle game is instead a amalgamation of poor design decisions and tedious level designs.

The most easily called out of these issues is the sluggish and clunky controls of your ball. There is such an absurd amount of momentum attached to movement that it's nearly impossible to retain any control even when moving slowly. It's as if there's a second invisible player playing beside you which constantly wants to go in the opposite direction, and you are left to try and wrestle control back away from them as you try to move forward with anything resembling precision.

This of course bleeds into the actual puzzle designs, which naturally require excessive amounts of control and constrained movements in order to complete, something which is nigh impossible given the previous paragraph. Compounded upon this is the astounding amount of tedium built into each and every puzzle, often placing you back at the beginning of long sequences for the slightest mistake, and making completion feel like a brief relief before you're put right back into an even more aggravating level. There's nothing clever or satisfying to find here, just an abundance of cheap failures and unrefined design.

This finally ties all the way back around to the clash of styles presented with the presentation. The game is split into two parts: that of navigating a realistic, occasionally rather pretty world ripe with nature, and that or completing the actual puzzles in a sterile white box floating somewhere in the cosmos. The transitions are glaring and abrupt, and turn the parts of the environment that are actually interesting to look at into little more than glorified conduits to carry you from one stale puzzle to the next. This isn't to say the overworld (for lack of a better term) is actually a compelling place to explore, as it feels as barren and underdeveloped as anything in the game, but in comparison to the drab color pallet of the puzzles at least presents an occasional bit of eye candy to counteract the monotony of constantly being in the same room.

There might have been some point where InFlux was coming along into something decent (I'd like to think so at least), but if so something went terribly wrong at some point and sent the entire game careening down the crapper. No matter how hard I tried to enjoy it, every single moment I spent with it was nothing but dull and frustrating, leaving me feeling like the game was just waiting for me to give up on it so it could roll over and die like the lifeless creation it is.

Beautiful and mysterious, though more for lovers of tranquil exploration and spherical geometry than serious puzzle fantastic.

After compelting the second puzzle-cube I must have exited out of the wrong side of it, because the game locked my progress. I could no longer enter the cube (there were not enough 'blue orbs' left to activate the torch), I could not get around the cube. After jumping into the ocean the game reloaded me back onto the wrong side of the cube; my progress was completely haulted.
Up until this point I found the game boring and full of perplexing design decisions. More than half of my time investment consisted of "non-game" elements: rolling the ball through long boring forest corridors, collecting blue orbs with no explanation, no decision-making, and no challenges to be found. I can't comment on the difficulty of the puzzle elements because the game broke on me so early, but what I experienced was a frustrating camera and somewhat janky controls. The two puzzles were uninteresting.
1/5

A game about rolling.

This was an incredibly good game as an interactive piece of art!

The gameplay is also fun and casual, but by the end, I felt a deep and lingering sense of attachment to the ball, the whale and the setting - despite the lack of dialogue or any obvious displays of narrative. It may be the fact that the ball had no way to communicate and no one to communicate with, and must therefore keep the experience of its journey internalized throughout the game, that you feel for it more: the silent protagonist. But this feeling may depend on the sensitivity of the player.

Another point of praise goes to the soundtrack, which was beautiful, relaxing and fitting to the game.

Technically, the game was sound, with some areas left for improvement. The camera reaction to world collisions can be jarring, and coupled with the strong motion blur used by the game, may cause a few people eye strain or motion sickness. Loading models sometimes caused momentary pauses in the middle of gameplay; and jumps in model level-of-detail are sometimes incongruent.

Overall, I recommend you in buying this game. :)

Tl;dr: Only buy it if your specs are way above the recommended.

I really wanted to like this, mainly because eh... go Melbourne? ;) But running this on a machine on the higher end of their recommended specs (with which I can play alot of AAA games just fine) and even at the lowest possible graphics settings, I'm having serious performance issues. Lag, stuttering, constantly clipping through rocks, together with controls that feel sluggish make this just impossible to enjoy for me.

Judging from the split reviews, I'm assuming a higher end PC might be able to play this game fine, and that it may be actually fun. It's certainly an entertaining idea and visually potentially pleasing (if you can run it). I also enjoyed the soundtrack. But seeing how I can't really play it enjoyably despite having the devs recommended specs, this is getting a downvote from me.

P.S. (A demo might have been a smart decision, at least then one could test whether they can play the game or not).

Hello,

I loved the game concept; I've had InFlux on my wish-list for ages, and finally got it from Humble Store 2 days ago.
I'm a little upset at some of the issues I've had so far though :|

There is lag, which is ridiculous. I'm playing it on 800x600 and normally I run games at much higher resolution with zero issues.

The flash when you get into a puzzle or out of it, is pure pain. I had to emphasize that, it's just that bad. I hate sudden full screen flashes in games, and have left many games as a result of them, if there is no way to dim or remove them, I will not bother any further.

And the worst issue of all was, if I get a puzzle that takes longer than a minute to solve, I get nauseated, might sound like I'm exaggerating, but I am not. I get a headache and feel sick...

I was looking forward to playing this game, sigh...

Great little game to chill out to if you like puzzles and exploration. :^)

chill sountrack, pretty landscapes and a ball/whale relationship better than joel/ellie in the last of us
~3 hours of ballsy puzzle solving
embark on a journey to go home while ♥♥♥♥ing up a village on your way

what can i say i like balls

This is a very relaxing, easy going exploration and puzzle game. The puzzles are just enough to make you think but not enough to stump you. The exploration has very gorgeous setpieces and scenery. The soundtrack is alright and the controls are good, but not stellar. That can really be a blanket statement for the game as a whole: "good, but not stellar". Still, I'd recommend it if you can pick it up for a couple of bucks.

Beautiful, granted. but ultimately boring and unintresting,

First of all, the game is short, i usually have no problem with short games. they are good as a little appetizer for when you don't have enough time on your hands.
but there is two kinds of short:
1. Short and sweet
2. WHAT?! THAT'S IT???
Guess which one influx is.

Second of all, the puzzles are super simplistic and braindead. i never had to stop and think, i just mindlessly blazed through them all.

And lastly: technical issues. i experienced screentearing even with vsync on. and there was plenty of framedrops and stuttering here and there. and the controls -while responsive- was frustrating, this was due to the physics. it reminded me of the vehicle sections in mass effect 1. i.e steering a shopping cart through a bouncy castle.

EDIT: The game isn't actually 5 hrs long as my playtime would suggest. i had the game paused but running for a couple of hours while i was eating pizza. i would estimate that the actual playtime would be about 2.5 hours. might very well be shorter than that if you don't stop and smell the roses.

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.

I really want to enjoy this game, serious, but after I had reached to middle I'm tired.

- first, dev still trying to help, it's good news, but...
- game crashing often, not for everyone but more people are have this problem. It could be "UDK stop working" or "run out of video memory"
- optimization is poor, I had off all effects, changed to lower screen resolution, but game still shuttering
- it's hard to control ball, you just can't feel it
- problem with collision system, a couple of time I get out of map or ramp
- orb (important things) could get stuck and it's hard to get them out
- checkpoints don't work too good
- before I wrote this I have been in underground and air flow must send me to next cave. It's always sends me to central where are blockade, and one time when I didn't fall I was trying to jump in, but I found invisible walls

Anyway I want to finish this, but it could be hard.

The visuals are decent, but everything else is bad. I really wanted to give up on this game mid way, but I was hoping something interesting would happen. I completed the game after 5 hours and was very disappointed. I felt it was tedious, boring, and pointless. You just move a ball around through the world and complete short mini puzzles that are a slight variation of the same thing every time.

Life as a sphere is not easy. This game will show you that.

I developed a deep emotional connection with a humpback whale.

10/10

Simple concept, easy to pick up and the puzzles aren't too taxing.
You roll a ball around a-la marble madness. You have the power to attract objects with left mb and repell with right mb.
It was one of very few that I picked up in a bundle somewhere or other that I actually spent more than 30 mnutes with.
Nice relaxing soundtrack too.
A few stutters and glitches when loading but overall a fine little game that I'll think of fondly, yet never play again.

a visualy stunning platformer/puzzle/exploration game with a great sound track.