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Infini Review (Nintendo Switch )

Game: Infini
Genre: Arcade, Adventure, Puzzle, Platform
System: Nintendo Switch
Developers/Publishers: Barnaque|Nakano.io
Price: UK £10.80| EU €10,00|USD $12.00| CAD $15.75|AUD $15.00
Age Rating: EU 12+| US T
Release Date: July 3rd , 2020

Review code provided by nakano.io

Infini grants players an experience to, in a way, manipulate the environment of its puzzles in order to progress the story. It’s different from normal puzzle games in that there is no one correct route or solution; rather, the game hands you “mind-bending” tools effectively progress from one puzzle to the other. Coupled with its intriguing gameplay, Infini also invites players to uncover a story that is as much a puzzle as the game itself.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

A Manipulation of Mechanics

Though Infini is classified with the terms “arcade” and “adventure”, this game is, at its core, a puzzle solving mania. The puzzles start off fairly simple. The character you play as, Hope, is falling in an endless loop, from the bottom of the screen to the top, and you must maneuver him into the portal like finish line that moves you on to the next stage. As you progress through the stages and eventually through the “worlds”, you will acquire various features that allow you to either manipulate Hope or the stage itself.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

Here’s what I mean by this. Some of the earliest mechanics you get in the game is to either speed up or slow down Hope. These tools become strategic when trying to help Hope escape an endless box of moving fish that would otherwise trap him (Yes, moving fish. This game is weird, more on that later). The feature that really made me appreciate the puzzles was the, what I’ll call, zoom out feature. Once you reach a certain point, you essentially are able to press a button that will zoom out, allowing you to see the entirety of the level. However, in order to progress, you will need to decide carefully just how much you want to zoom out. At certain points you can zoom out just enough, but not too much, to where you can in a sense eliminate a wall that was otherwise blocking you. These walls turn into dotted red lines that allow you to pass through them.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

This feature may seem like it makes the game very easy, but it is actually quite challenging as you have to be careful not to expand the scene too much or not enough. Precision and ingenuity are the key to solving puzzles in this game. Quite early on in the game, even before this feature was introduced, I found myself struggling to get past a certain level. Because of the precision sometimes necessary to solve certain puzzles, as well as the imagination to decipher how to manipulate the levels, I would say this is puzzle game that doesn’t take long to get the player scratching their head.

Retrieving the Wings of Hope

Infini is marketed as not just a puzzle game, but a story game as well. I must say, however, that the story is not a simple or coherent one. You play as a character named Hope who has to drift through Infinity in order to find his lost wings. The “incident” is how Hope lost his wings, and various scenes throughout the game will tell the player what point in time is it. You start off just short of one billion days since the incident, and different levels feature different time points around the “incident”. In your quest to retrieve your wings you will also meet various characters like an elephant named Memory.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

If you haven’t guessed by now, this game is definitely experimental in its storytelling. The characters go by names like Time or War; things that are intangible and more akin to a state of being than an actual physicality. The very dialogue itself feels jumbled, as characters speak and converse with each other in strange settings and it feels as though everything is set up in a riddle.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

I have to say that I’m personally not a fan of this type of storytelling. Not only is it not coherent, it feels as though the story is trying to discuss or touch upon something philosophical, but doesn’t quite reach it. Instead, it comes off as somewhat pretentious and pseudo-deep. I can definitely see players feeling frustrated for not “getting” what the story is trying to tell them. And frankly, I don’t really think it’s conveying anything new or meaningful.

Experimental Visuals

I’m familiar with the games nakana.io publishes, so it wasn’t a surprise seeing some very odd or interesting, whatever your perspective may be, visuals in this game. Infini purposely has awkward and even slightly creepy characters as well as environments. I think this is to play into its storytelling. Every aspect of this game tries to present its self as disturbing, maybe even a bit contemporary. This isn’t really my taste in artwork, but again, I expected something like this from the publisher. What I found frustrating, however, was that sometimes the garishness of the background in the puzzles would be too strong and it would actually be quite difficult to differentiate the puzzle itself from the images in the back.

Infini LadiesGamers.com

Conclusion

Despite my criticisms, I don’t think Infini is necessarily a bad game. I think it’s a game that is trying to tell a story in a very non-linear or traditional way. I just can’t say that this was done effectively. However, I do think the puzzle mechanics are quite interesting and sometimes even refreshing.

This is definitely a game you would play for its puzzles rather than any story its attempting to tell. With that said though, it feels to me like either a hit or miss. Personally, it was a miss.

Final Verdict: I’m not sure

 

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