The Flame in the Flood is a crafting-based survival game developed by The Molasses Flood that released in February. You can watch me experience the game through my 12-episode Let’s Play The Flame in the Flood series, or you can just stick around here for a bit and listen to me tell you why I didn’t really like this game.
One thing that I did like, and it’s probably something you’ve just noticed if this is your first time seeing the game in action, is that The Flame in the Flood has a very unique art design. It reminded me of something between a pop-up book and the movie Coraline…which I think is just a fantastically unique art design for a game to have these days. The visual design was by far my favorite aspect of the game.
Unfortunately the rest of my experience with the game was all downhill….or should I say, down river…from there.
As many of you probably saw, I struggled with just exactly how to handle the animals in the game.
Initially I expected to be able to build weaponry, but it was clear that The Molasses Flood didn’t want combat to be a key component in their game. And that’s their artistic decision. The entire game revolves around rafting from location to location, scavenging in these randomly generated little pockets of wilderness along the riverbank. Animals patrol these areas and make it nearly impossible to simply waltz in and pick up the supplies that you need. Due to the ferocity of the animals and the fragility of Scout, the protagonist, one botched animal encounter usually was enough to severely hamper my chance at success and I’d have to restart my progress from further back upriver. So my go-to strategy for dealing with the animals was simply to just run away.
This led me to miss out on a lot of potential loot that each little area offered; loot that I desperately needed to succeed later in the game. My survival method of vacating an area snowballed into a severe supply shortage by the end of game.
It’s worth pointing out that the Steam store page for the game is stocked with art, and not actual screenshots of the game.
A few hours into The Flame and the Flood and it became evident that the game stacked the odds too heavily against me. But, the reward for success wasn’t enough to entice me to deal with all the hardships I was enduring.
The story was vague and largely absent, there wasn’t that much to discover, just more of the same supplies, and there are only four enemy types to deal with in the game: boars, snakes, wolves, and bears. There just wasn’t much the game was offering me, other than the forced satisfaction of seeing myself progress down the river mile by mile.
After having to restart my progress for the fourth, fifth, and sixth times, The Flame and the Flood went from being a challenging adventure game to a monotonous voyage where I braced myself for how the game was going to screw me over next.
This is what the game actually looks like. (Still good!)
If it wasn’t areas that were essentially barren of supplies, it was weather that relentlessly drenched Scout and brought on deadly hypothermia. I knew the ways to deal with all these issues, but I just didn’t have the supplies to do so as I had no real way of sustaining myself AND creating the tools I needed to fend off the animals.
Scout comes with a little dog named Aesop, who serves no purpose but to annoyingly bark every few feet and provide you with some extra inventory space. You can’t get Aesop to do anything for you, he just is there, and that’s it. He doesn’t need food, you can’t eat him….I really have no idea why The Molasses Flood decided to give me this dog. You can upgrade your raft in various ways, but you can’t teach Aesop to be useful. It never made much sense to me.
The Flame in the Flood isn’t a bad game. It’s just not great. I will recommend it to those of you who really love crafting/survival games, and I will also point out that The Molasses Flood claims they stamped out the audio bug that I encountered multiple times, but even then, the frustrating mechanics of the game still remains intact, and that’s a game I just really didn’t enjoy much of.
Give me a readily available way to fight back against the animals, or make them territorial and guard only a portion of the area that might have better loot while still allowing me to explore the rest of the area. The Flame in the Flood had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the mediocre gameplay really holds it back.
A review copy of the game was provided for the purpose of this review.
