The Flame in the Flood Review
I had been entranced by The Flame in the Flood from the moment I discovered the game, and continued to be impressed as each in-game (and in-real-life) day passed. Boasting the combined prowess of a game developing supergroup, developer The Molasses Flood had been born of veterans from iconic franchises such as Bioshock Infinite, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and even Halo; now it’s finally time to experience their first title. If only they included an original soundtrack written and composed by singer-songwriter Chuck Ragan….
Good news, folks: that’s exactly what they did.
The Flame in the Flood is a roguelike survival adventure game with a large ambiance and an even bigger river. The lengthier genre description does little to accurately depict this game’s identity; each river has its own story, and each story has its own share of successful milestones. And death. Don’t forget about death. If you take anything from this review, it’s that.
Scout, the game’s protagonist, is as mysterious as her environment. A dog by the name Aesop finds a backpack on a corpse — an integral piece of equipment a deceased owner no longer needs. Aesop then drags it to Scout, giving her enough motivation to remove herself from the shelter she’s established (how long she’s been there is left ambiguous). After a expedited tutorial, Scout finds her raft and jumps on with Aesop. Chuck Ragan’s encompassing soundtrack begins simultaneously with the journey, and the game immediately makes sense of itself without relying upon text-based tutorials or slow introductions. The player is just as clueless as Scout herself, and navigating the river is the first of many life lessons to be learned.
As the music begins and the camera pans out, the strength of the river is revealed; this visual communication introduces one giant motif that carries the game to its conclusion: this river is alive. Wind blows by in the form of captivating sound effects, creating observable currents in the river denoted by slim streams of light blue. Fighting this current will cause more difficulties than it’s worth, so going with the flow is quickly understood.
The Flame in the Flood‘s roguelike nature is reinforced by a procedurally generated river — no two journeys will ever be the same. Multiple deaths and restarts showed absolute validity to this claim. Randomized obstacles will appear from under the water’s surface to add more difficulty to navigation. Exacerbating matters further, Scout and Aesop eventually encounter parts of the river turned rapid. Traversing these segments becomes exponentially more challenging as delayed movements and uncontrollable currents turn your raft into a haphazard plank of wood tossed and turned by the water’s will. Having survived the river’s deadly introduction, docks at randomized locations will begin to appear. Parking your raft will allow you to explore these locations, enabling Scout and Aesop to gather resources to survive.
Four circular meters remain at the bottom of the screen at all times: hunger, thirst, body temperature, and fatigue. Hunting local wildlife and gathering edible flora can stave hunger, while jars (if found, they cannot be crafted) can be used to hold water. Body temperature isn’t an immediate threat, but the farther down the river you go, the colder it gets. This dilemma is intensified when the rains come, giving Scout the ailment of being wet which further decreases your body temperature at a much faster rate. Along with fatigue, this can be remedied by sleeping in discovered shelters or campfires. Managing all four resources can be a tall order, but the game does well to throw everything at you incrementally, at least at first.
Locations have an specific archetype associated with them. Finding a church will bestow you mostly with bandages and stitching kits, while docking at a Farmstead will usually yield useful plants to act as ingredients (or food if your hunger situation is dire). Camps, workshops, forests, bait shacks, and much more can be explored, each containing specific resources and possibly threatening wildlife. Charting your course and prioritizing what items you need is only one of many necessary stratagems to employ.
Each region — of which there are 10 in the game’s Story Mode — caters to specific types of locations. If you’re in need of some bandages to fix up a laceration so benevolently given to you by a wolf, the region you’re currently in may not contain a church (filled with bandage ingredients). There’s no noticeable telling that the region will switch to another, so proactive collection of inevitably needed resources is a must. Inventory space is small, however, and will force you to make some hard decisions. Wrong choices will be made, and upon restarting at a checkpoint you will find that maybe having two stacks of dandelions may be a bit overkill.
Hitting “I” will bring you to your menu; you’ll be spending a lot of time here. Slowly strummed guitar chords from Ragan act as audio notifications of in-menu actions, imbuing even the game’s menu with a sense of atmosphere. Goals, afflictions, crafting, inventory, and the outfitter is all the information you have at your fingertips, so you’ll have to make due. While there’s one overarching goal from the beginning of the game that changes as you progress, other minute goals can be achieved by finding Caches at random locations. They’re usually as simple as traveling to a specific location or crafting a certain item. Rewards can be collected at Caches, as well; they tend to be small but can save your life if you find yourself in an unfortunate circumstances.
Scout, Aesop, and the raft each have their own inventory for storage. Managing this is just as important as managing your overall health, so carrying only what is necessary is essential. Inventory space can be increased via crafting and upgrades as you travel down river, but inventory management is promoted as a skill to be learned beforehand. Clothes will collect in this section, but they can be moved to the Outfitter tab when they are equipped. Outdated duds can be dismantled into rags, an ingredient for bandages. In my trek, there were multiple occasions where I had to destroy my hat to create a bandage to cure a laceration, thus taking a hit to my body temperature. Balancing all of these elements is a lot of responsibility, but it feels extremely rewarding when you survive a disastrous situation.
Eventually a marina will pop up. This is the only time Scout can upgrade the raft. If the right ingredients are collected and crafted, the raft can be modified to include a rudder, shelter, stove, and even a motor that requires gas (found at marinas). Strategically upgrading and repairing the raft at the right times can make for a much easier travel down river. Many of these components have multiple uses, so adding more storage may prevent a necessary campfire until more resources are found. Containing too many items for raft upgrades can intrude on necessary space for immediate survival; combining current needs with future necessities is yet another act of balance The Flame in the Flood introduces early on.
Crafting pairs with inventory management as the most inconvenient aspects of the game. While gathering items and resources will automatically update your crafting log with unlocked recipes depending upon the contents of your inventory, you can only craft one item at a time. When trying to craft 20 ropes out of cattails, it can be annoying to sit there and craft them one by one as you starve to death. Once crafted or collected, items have a tendency to sort themselves separately. Not all items can be stacked, and each item has its own maximum amount to be contained in a single stack, which is usually either 5 or 10. This does effectively emphasize inventory management, however the problem lies in having 2 stacks of 3 flint instead of 1 stack of 6. A minor gripe that can be actively fixed, but the convenience of it consistently and automatically tended to would save a few moments of time. And it only takes a few moments to slip away into death if the situation is bleak (which it will be).
Afflictions harbor a multitude of threats. Snake bites, ant bites, lacerations, broken bones, poison ivy, and so much more join the ranks of hunger, thirst, temperature, and fatigue as potentially fatal statuses. As long as you have the required remedy in your inventory, you can cure them right quick; otherwise, crafting them takes immediate priority. Ailments left unchecked can turn into more deadly afflictions, or just go ahead and cause death on their own. Succumbing to any of these feels dire and affects Scout’s movement at times, creating an immediate change in mood. The dichotomy between staying healthy and creating a cure for a snake bite creates a near helpless feeling of desperation, which in turn made me more attached to Scout and Aesop than I had anticipated.
Feral animals hiding among the wilderness will inflict the some of the deadliest ailments, and they are not to be messed with if unprepared. Boars and wolves will nearly always require spear traps to take down, but The Flame in the Flood adds a few more options to avoid them altogether. Live rabbits can be caught with box traps, then thrown at attacking wildlife to distract them. They can also be lead into stationary snakes that will attack anything that nears them, so multiple strategies can be implemented. With that said, there were many locations I was unable to explore because of almost immediate encounters with wolves that I had no means to deal with, causing me to immediately jump back on my raft and venture to the next dock.
Dying presents a map of progress made throughout each journey and marks each visited location on the river, where afflictions were encountered, and eventually where the journey ended. The game then allows you start over or restart at a checkpoint. These checkpoints are few and far between, however, and there’s no noticeable notification that a checkpoint has been made. Autosaves share the same visibility issue of confirmation, and it always felt scary to exit the game without knowing exactly where I’d return during my next session. Thanks to the nature of the roguelike genre, the randomized river and locations never failed to entertain, so restarting from checkpoints never felt mentally draining. These features (or lack thereof) never deterred me from looking forward to my time with The Flame in the Flood, but a couple aspects certainly came close.
As fitting as Ragan’s music is, it would abruptly stop playing in the middle of a song. Other audio glitches like hearing the wind or rain on a clear sunny day would additionally interrupt the immersion factor of the game, and would cut out completely in rare events. Game breaking glitches and crashes to desktop reared their heads over time, but they were too infrequent to cause much damage to The Flame in the Flood‘s experience. If The Molasses Flood decides to hotfix these issues, most of the game’s drawbacks will be eliminated. As it stands now, there are definitely some stability issues that could use some attention.
Those looking for narrative will find enjoyment in Story Mode, a series of 10 regions that host randomized NPCs that can offer pieces of advice or useful items. The writing here is fantastic. I’ve met an older Victorian woman with a shotgun who told me vague advice about snakes, a pair of feral children with a barebones understanding of the english language, and a small wealth of never-to-be-found characters discovered by examining quilts on clotheslines.
These quilts display a text box with a very well written paragraph, adding inexplicably obscure insight into the game’s universe. It would have been nice to find closure by meeting these characters alive or dead; however, the absence of them fleshes out The Flame in the Flood‘s world to the point of ominous curiosity that promotes traveling further down the river for answers to the unknown. Story Mode took me about 20 hours worth of gameplay to learn the ropes and get through the final region, but I definitely took my time to soak everything in.
Others who place importance on progress instead of story will find solace in the game’s Endless Mode, where the river goes on forever. Players can utilize this mode to see how long they can survive and how far down the river they can travel before their inevitable death. This game isn’t one to get easier as you progress, nor does it necessarily get harder. Each day is its own day, and one encounter with a bear (yes, I said “bear”) won’t go as well as the next. This is a promise.
The amalgamation of an esoteric folk soundtrack and a seasoned development team comes together in The Flame in the Flood to create a very macabre experience, and the game’s entire presentation furthers its grimness. The game looks beautiful, feels great to play, and is overall an enjoyable experience that has made me excited to see what The Molasses Flood has planned for the future.
The Flame in the Flood is certainly not without its flaws, but it hasn’t deterred me from playing it on a daily basis. Each journey is a new one with different crafting and collecting priorities depending on the situations that appear (thank you, procedurally generated river), so it’s hard to tire of the stressful fight for survival.
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Review Statement: The author of this review received a Steam code from the publisher for the purposes of this review.
The Flame in the Flood is a roguelike survival adventure game with a large ambiance and an even bigger river.
Originally published at www.entertainmentbuddha.com on February 24, 2016.