Flux Caves is a 3D puzzle game. The author Várady Zsolt aka
fubenalvo created a game that is challenging, yet enjoyable. He found inspiration in
Sokoban, classic pipe games,
The Witness, and
The Dungeons of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In Flux Caves the player has to build/complete a path made of pipes, so that balls roll through it, from a start to an end. It is done in first-person-perspective, which is part of the challenge! It is sometimes hard to get an overview of the pipe system. When everything is done correctly, a door unlocks, and the player can venture onward.
Visually the games present a nice neon enhanced environment. With funny little details found in many levels. The relaxing atmosphere is supported by a nice piano soundtrack, running in the background.
Flux Caves was made in Unity. fubenalvo has decided not to remove Unity's startup option dialog, where the player can select the screen resolution, fullscreen mode, and even remap the keys. I appreciate that a lot.
There is a minor issue about the rebinding of keys. Per default blocks in the game are moved with the left mouse button, and moves can be undone with the right mouse button. This undo function seems to be hardcoded into the right mouse button. I tried to map another function to it, which worked, but a right mouseclick also triggered undo.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't have a scalable UI. But since it only affects the main menu, and not the gameplay itself, I don't consider it a major problem. However, I would be happy if fubenalvo added an option to scale the UI or at least the font size.
Flux Caves can be found either on
Steam or $4,99 or DRM-free on
Itch.io for $3 (the Itch.io-version comes without a Steam key).
I've test played Linux build 1.08 of FluxCaves, the DRM-free version from Itch.io as well as the Steam version. My gaming PC uses Manjaro Linux (https://manjaro.org/) (Kernel 5.1.15) with MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/) (version 1.22.1) desktop. It runs on an AMD Ryzen 7 1700x CPU, 32 GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. I use Nvidias proprietary drivers (version 430.26).
I used the maximum graphics settings and didn't encounter any problems. It is reported that using the launch parameter -force-glcore42 makes it run smoother. I didn't use it since I was happy with how the game worked.
I've streamed Flux Caves on July 20th, 2019. The VOD is available either on
Twitch or
YouTube. It's not a full playthrough, but I played most of the game.
Disclaimer: The Steam key of the game was provided to me by the developer. But I bought the DRM-free version myself.
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