Let's Talk... InFlux

The peaceful natural landscape and wonderfully ambient soundtrack make InFux an ideal way to unwind after a long day. There’s something very calming and oddly compelling about rolling a mysterious disco ball around a serene landscape solving puzzles as you go. Whether you’re there for the exploration or the psychics-based puzzles, Impromptu Games’ first title is still a real charmer.

The core of InFlux’s gameplay is that you are a small metallic ball, equipped with a powerful boost, which can use forces of attraction and repulsion to manipulate objects in the environment. Your aim is simply to progress through a series of natural and abstract environments gathering orbs that will open up small puzzle areas, which you need to complete in order to open up the next area. General traversal of the environment will require heavy use of speed and momentum, which is greatly enhanced by your ability to boost through the air at tremendous speed, something that looks and feels awesome. Many of the landscapes you’ll encounter are fairly vast and the game gives you plenty of room to do some relaxing exploring.

The mysterious yet beautiful world offers plenty of free exploration

As far as some kind of narrative goes, there isn’t much of one. The game opens with the mysterious ball falling from the sky onto a planet presumed to be Earth. It’s never explained why you landed here, who or what you are, or even why you must continue to proceed, the game just sort of leaves it for you to ponder about. Some will no doubt criticise the extremely vague narrative as being artsy and “pretentious” but I rather liked that they leave it up to the player’s own interpretation, I think a grounded story and fixed explanations of the world would take away much of the wonder and curiosity the player feels when they’re exploring. The loose, patchy story also somewhat reflects the non-puzzle aspects of the gameplay since you’re never explicitly told where to go, and although you are given the most basic of tutorials you’re still expected to largely figure everything out on your own.

However, this is still a puzzle game and so the quality of the game is still largely dependent on the quality of its puzzles. Thankfully InFlux’s puzzles are both fun and thoughtful. Although traversing the world is a testament to your skills of speed and momentum, the actual puzzle segments require you to push and pull one or more coloured balls to similarly coloured areas. The puzzle segments take place in bright white four-sided room that can be rotated clockwise and anti-clockwise through pressure plates and switches. The puzzles of increasing difficulty provide a hefty but satisfying challenge as they incorporate elements of height and momentum.

An example of the game's clinically white puzzle sections

The aforementioned visual design of InFlux is both gorgeous and impressive. The varying natural and more bizarre environments are consistently interesting and beautiful, taking you through serene grasslands, dry deserts, and deep caverns. The peaceful, ambient soundtrack could calm anyone down with waterfalls calmly flowing and the quiet sounds of your little ball whizzing around. Unfortunately I did experience more than a few sharp frame rate drops whenever the game was loading a new area, which it was doing a lot of the time. I also stumbled across a couple of game breaking bugs that required me to revert to my last checkpoint (fortunately the game autosaves frequently) which usually involved me falling through the map. InFlux certainly has a handful of issues but hopefully they are swiftly resolved.