InFlux

Roll a ball around.
Look at some graphics.

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.

Previously, I had a rather negative opinion on InFlux. BUT! Previously, I had no idea what "Foilage" Meant. It turns out, it's the extra details like visible grass, among other things, but for me, IT WAS EXACTLY WHAT I'D FORGOTTEN TO TURN OFF WHEN I STARTED. Once I turned the foilage off, LITERALLY EVERYTHING GOT BETTER, AND NOW I HAVE A SOLID OPINION ON THE GAME. I find InFlux VERY similar to "Journey" On the Sony Playstation 3 (PLEASE DON'T SUE ME, SONY!), as in, in the words of YouTuber "SomecallmeJohnny", it's more of an "Experience" Than a game. Yeah, there are MANY points where InFlux is DEFINITELY a game, aka the Glass House puzzle sequences, but most of your playthrough will be exploring the main world, and marveling at the gorgeous visuals and HEAVENLY soundtrack. Now that the graphics problem has been solved, what's my "Solid Opinion" On InFlux? Well, I don't really have a SOLID solid opinion on the game since I haven't completed it yet, but I can definitely recommend InFlux now! just make sure you either tone down the graphics, or make sure you have a decent graphics card. Once that's all figured out, have fun!

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.

The orb you're piloting is always bouncing, making it impossible to move like you want and to use halfpipes properly.
Furthermore this game needs to load way too often (you're moving one minute to close an unsual distance and then the game loads new surroundings so that you're fps rate drops way too low to run fluently.

Pretty little game. You go to and from natural landscapes and Portal-esque puzzle rooms. If you like relaxing puzzlers like Night Sky, you might enjoy this.

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!

Great scenery graphics but Using High RAM
The Optimization of the GTX560 is not

Great atmosphere. Puzzles were a little easy but provided enough stimulation to make me think without breaking the relaxing world.

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.

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.

This is a rather long review, so if you just want a brief summary of why I recommend this game skip to Results and read from there.

Impromptu Games creates a fantastic puzzle mystery which keeps the gears in your brain continually grinding. InFlux offers a serene ambience with melodic music that produces a peaceful environment that is calming.

Campaign:
Influx is the story of a small ball and its adventure to complete mazes, explore an island, and collect orbs. You must collect orbs in each area in order to unlock the maze that allows you to progress to the next section. The island continually grows as you progress through this amazing campaign and the emptiness keeps you wondering at every turn. I completed the game in about 3-hours, which means it’s not a very long game. You could spend more time exploring the landscape although because of the poor mechanics of the protagonist exploration can seem rather annoying at times.

Ambience:
The rhythmic music and simplicity of Influx creates at times a very peaceful experience. The game offers a very vivid environment without any traces of even the simplest story. Without a story to follow Influx produces something most games lack, answers. I found myself continually wondering why there were empty houses on the Island, how the modern maze structures formed, why I was even solving the puzzles, and the list goes on and on.

Gameplay:
The protagonist, a small ball, is able to roll and boost in order to accomplish tasks. There is no point where this character can jump, but by using boosts correctly you can launch yourself into various places. An interesting feature behind controlling the character is that you can boost while in mid air allowing you to change direction. Boosting also slows down time which allows you to gain a view of your environment while deciding how to act in a fast paced situation. Although there are time where controlling the character can be tricky the overall experience is relatively easy.

Results:
If you like puzzles, modern graphics, beautiful scenery, and melodious music then this would be the game for you. Despite there being more cons than pros I would recommend this game, but only if you can find it on sale for at least 75% off. InFlux is a short, but very riveting puzzle game. If you are a fan of puzzle games then this is the game for you.

Pros:
+Interesting puzzles and mazes
+Beautiful serene scenery
+Smooth loading transitions
+Peaceful and elegant music

Cons:
-Poor controls (can be annoying to control the protagonist)
-Lack of explanation
-Listed control to boost, but doesn't unlock till half way through the game
-Attract ability can be infuriating as it forms an orbit rather than just pulling an object to you.
-Too short of a campaign

Got this on the week long deal, and for what I paid, I'm pretty impressed. Makes good use of the Unreal engine, the environments are well built and with the settings turned up it's a good looking game. The natural hub environments contrast nicely with the more artifical puzzle aspects. Gameplay wise, this doesn't provide any real additions or major change-ups to the puzzle-platformer genre, but executes it nicely in a comfortable and relaxing style. Usually the goal is to move color-coded spheres into the matching recepticles using a fairly diverse set of standard puzzling mechanics, including push/pull, lifts, buttons, and level rotators. Gamepad support worked flawlessly for all aspects (I used an Xbox controller, you'll want something with two joysticks), and I didn't encounter any bugs. It was a bit annoying that sections of the hub environments would load during roaming, and this did create some lag, but the load times were fast so they didn't last long, and didn't occur too often. Overall a good game for the price.

This is a very mellow game, great chill soundtrack, and puzzles which can be at once simple and frustrating. The environment is lush and welcoming, and control of the sphere feels natural. However, I felt that the game seemed short. There is a fine line between having too few puzzles and too many, and the size of each of the levels could have crossed that line with another set of 3-5 cubes, so I understand why the developers made this decision. As with numerous other exploration/puzzlers, plot can be a secondary concern, but the motivations and background of the events in this game were murky at best. A sphere falls from the sky and powers up the machines for the next part of its journey. Why were the machines here? Who built them? Sadly, one is left with more questions than answers, but it may be left to the player to ponder and draw one's own conclusions.

I will say too that I initially had some issues with it stuttering fairly heavily when loading new areas of larger maps, even after turning my settings all the way down. I was ulitmately able to solve that by counterintuitively turning the settings up or on, but is more likely an issue with the Unreal Engine.

All in all, though, this game is definitely worth a few hours of your time if you enjoy puzzle-type games.

Take this yes with a _massive_ grain of salt. I can't simply bring myself to say "No, do not buy this game", because to be honest I enjoyed it. However, there are a lot of things holding the game back.

First off, let's talk about what I enjoyed about the game. The premise of the game is to complete a bunch of puzzles by activating a certain box, which is by far and away the most inadequate explanation for a game, but it's the most I can say without spoiling the game. This is a very interesting concept, and I did have fun solving the puzzles. It's very important for a puzzle game to leave you thinking "Boy, I solved that puzzle! I'm pretty smart!" On another topic, this is a very "artsy" game, and the atmosphere has to be (and is definitely) executed beautifully. The "story" had me wondering what on Earth, or where on Earth, I was. The minimalism put me in the position of having to wonder exactly what I was doing, and it definitely had me guessing, in a sort of existentialist way. This all comes together to make a nice game, and I believe that lots can be done with this premise!

Now let's talk about all the glaring downsides of the game. This game is absolutely gorgeous. I think. I wouldn't know, I played on low graphics settings and at times I found myself rolling up a hill whose texture looked like I was rolling up / through a set of stairs. Then again, I'm playing on a Dell i5 laptop, so I wasn't expecting much from the graphics department. The low settings may also explain why whenever I plunged into water that kills me, I see myself falling below the game world for half a second. Or is that the physics engine? One of those two departments has to fix that.
Speaking of game physics, this is to me personally the most infuriating flaw of the game. More than once I have found myself stuck _inside_ the ground. Other times, when I break the sound barrier, I fly _into_ rock formations. No, they don't shatter, I just seem to become one with the rock. That's easily escapable though since rocks are actually made of air in the middle. There's also this one part where there is a current that drags your ball to the edge... of a pool... for some reason... and if you don't act quickly you're going to be stuck there for the next few minutes trying to boost your way out. Finally, there are parts where you will encounter the infamous Invisible Wall. Even though the game is trying to take you in one particular direction, it does it in such a way that, if you didn't have the Invisible Wall blocking your way, you can hop onto the top of the edge of the area that you're currently in. I was incredibly let down when I saw this. If I was able to roll on the edge of the arena, that would have given me the feeling that I'm "beating the system", and mastering how to control the game.
On a personal note, I was disappointed with the lack of difficulty of the game outside of the puzzles. To access each puzzle, you had to wander around a world collecting X-thingies to activate Y-thingies, and open the puzzle. It turns out that you only need to collect three X's to unlock each Y. This killed my ambition to go hunting for X's, or spending effort to catch the X's that are hard to reach, essentially eliminating a possibly very interesting game mechanic.
This last oversight is so big to me that I have to count it as a flaw. No level editor? Really??? The level designs were really impressive in the game, and here they are not taking advantage of the potential creativity of their audience. A level editor would practically have the players make the game themselves, minus the artsy portions.

So why do I say "yes" when the list of downsides is more than thrice as long as the list of upsides? I feel that there is so much potential with this game, and I am willing to bet that Impromptu Games is not done with it yet. It may not be the longest game (though I feel that for the given premise the story length is perfect), and it may look incomplete, but I firmly believe that the Devs have more planned for InFlux. Perhaps a game patch, a level editor, or multiple story arcs with each journey eliciting different emotions. Whatever it is, I'm excited for the future of this game.

As for the price, I'm very confident that the Devs can make this game easily worth $10 and then some. But for now... it'd be best to wait for the Steam sale.

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 !

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.

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).

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.

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.

Do you remember that joy of discover you had when playing Portal? This game has that. No obvious tutorials, it's a fascinating and weird landscape where mechanics are gently added to your repertoire. Absorbing and fascinating.

It's not going to be for everyone, sure. And it does have a few quirky things. But there's just something about it that I found to be compelling.