- Title: Influent, by Three Flip Studios
- It’s a language learning RPG, where we play as a character who is trying to raise funds for a lawsuit.
- This game facilitates skill-based play and experience-based play: the list-quiz feature challenges the user to match objects to their pronunciations, and there is a narrative too, hence experience-based play. The game opens with an animation explaining the main character’s predicament, and his goals, and further dialogue is used in the game to create a story. Aside from cinematics and dialogue, the environment itself was a big part of the experience for me. I enjoyed looking at all the details in this guy’s room, like his computer screen, and the words on his posters. Details like the pair of pants on the floor was relatable. I was also relieved to see deodorant in his bathroom. While I was adequately challenged by the actual language learning parts of the game, the personality of the environment and the silly easter eggs brought me the most joy in this game. Here are some details I enjoyed:
- The objective is to improve the user’s vocabulary in a foreign language. I do wonder if more work could have gone into defining the objective of this game. Something that struck me as I was playing was the fact that the main character is very clearly a white male software engineer. While I could appreciate the CS jokes, I know that it would definitely throw off other kinds of people. For example, I think making the “sudo undo” joke was already going too far. I think it would have been better for the developers to set aside their personal sense of humor and think about what demographic would benefit most from a language learning game, and build their objective and aesthetic direction with sensitivity to a specific target demographic. It would definitely be bad if someone who could have benefited from the game put it down because they didn’t understand that Flinch was a Twitch analog, and how streamers can make money.
The aesthetics are narrative, sensation, discovery, and challenge. The aesthetic of discovery emerges from the mechanics of piloting either the character or the robot around; Together with playful environment art, this mechanic gives rise to exploratory player behavior. As for the aesthetic of sensation, the sound design (and maybe haptic responses?) was juicy and enjoyable, and interacting with the low poly models was satisfying. I think that one thing that helped the game feel gratifying, and also helped me engage in a discovery mindset is the fact that almost every single object, even the ceiling and wall, was interactable.
These other aesthetics motivated me to engage in the language learning aspect of the game, in which you add vocabulary words to a list by interacting with their 3d models, and then are quizzed to find them again. It was challenging to remember all the vocab words, and rewarding when I somehow got it right. This quiz mechanic created the dynamic of me engaging with the environment for actively, and vice versa.
