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The Flame in the Flood is a gorgeously stylized survival game that takes the trappings of rogue-like games and morphs it into a combination of nearly every other survival game you’ve ever played, frustrations included. There are some interesting choices that make the game worth exploring if you’re a long-time fan of the survival genre, but for everyone else, there’s a frustrating experience hidden below this beautiful gem. <\/p>\n

Gameplay<\/h2>\n

I admit that I have a love\/hate relationship with survival games. Theoretically, I like the idea of being pitted against nature in a one vs. one setting with only my wits to keep me alive, but in practice, most games end up dealing you a cheap death that feels wholly undeserved in a game where making progress is about painstakingly clawing your way up the ladder of gameplay. <\/p>\n

The Flame in the Flood starts out like any survival game, with you and your trusty companion alone in a flooded wilderness that’s been ravaged by some apocalyptic event. Digging around you’ll find a few things that you can craft into other useful things and then you’re on your way down the river, managing rapids and trying to find new places to stop to gather gear. <\/p>\n

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The river itself should present an obstacle or challenge in reaching the next area for survival, but in reality, it feels like a boring mini-game that you have to pay attention to before you can begin the real survival aspects of the game. The river doesn’t feel dangerous. Aside from a few scrapes to my raft before I got the motor for my boat, I never really felt like the river was a challenge and that’s a problem when you spend most of your time on it when navigating to new areas.<\/p>\n

The areas on the river are randomly generated to try and spice things up, but the very restricted inventory your character starts with turns loot gathering into an exercise in patience. Since you only start with 12 inventory slots and much of the game is spent crafting items to help you along your journey, you can’t be willing to grab everything useful unless you know you can craft it into something later.<\/p>\n

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Your furry companion and the raft itself have inventory as well, but it’s irritating that the items they’re holding don’t show up in the quick crafting inventory for use. I found the resource management to be irritating and not fun, which is half the draw of a survival game. There’s so much crafting available that managing your inventory becomes a chore to do, rather than an enjoyable experience in crafting new things to help you survive in this beautiful world a little longer. <\/p>\n

Part of the frustrating experience is that the essentials feel as though there is no rarity to them. The game makes a big deal out of creating water filters to help you drink the polluted river water without becoming sick, but every time I started a new game within a day or two it was raining and I could collect fresh water in my jar. I never needed to use water filters because water was always plentiful. <\/p>\n

Encountering wildlife randomly in the game without being properly prepared is pretty much a deal sentence, until you figure out the trick to dealing with boars, wolves, and bears with spike traps and the bow and arrow. After being mauled to death a handful of times by boars and wolves, soon I was expertly dispatching them with crafted spike traps. And soon the fauna element of the game felt like a chore, rather than something new to overcome. You can predictably dispatch boars and wolves with two spike traps and bears with three once you aggro them with the bow and arrow. The fun gets sucked out of the challenges quickly when you realize this. <\/p>\n

There are a handful of randomly generated “quests” you can pick up at mailbox caches that are littered around the map as you explore, but these are usually simple crafting quests that require you to do a specific thing at a specific place. Once those tasks are completed, you have to wait until you find the next mailbox cache to get your reward. <\/p>\n

Music<\/h2>\n