The Flame in the Flood – Review
Follow Genre: Action, Adventure, Rogue-lite
Developer: The Molasses Flood
Publisher: The Molasses Flood
Platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox One
Tested on: PC

The Flame in the Flood – Review

Site Score
8.0
Good: great soundtrack, rewarding
Bad: bad camera angles, story
User Score
0
(0 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

The Flame in the Flood is the latest game by The Molasses Flood. It’s a rogue-lite action survival game that guides you through the waters of post-societal America. It came to life after an overwhelming success of the Kickstarter campaign, and is now a full-fledged indie title. Travel by raft, scavenge by foot and try to not get eaten by wolves, bears and everything else that wants to kill you.

The Flame in the Flood

Story

The Flame in the Flood is situated in the forgotten post-societal America and your job is to survive and seek salvation. You and your dog Aesop have been stranded in Camp Pinewood, an abandoned camp with no other people. Together with your dog, you take it upon you to survive and thrive in this wasteland and make it upstream down the river, hopefully finding salvation along the way. Your initial quest is to seek out a radio tower that’s been transmitting a very weak signal, but a lot of dangers lie ahead of you.

Story wise, The Flame in the Flood doesn’t have a whole lot of content to offer sadly enough. You’re simply stranded and have to survive, following the river from camp to camp as you go. Sometimes there’s some human interaction, but this doesn’t seem to be of much value.

RiverGame-Win64-Shipping 2016-03-03 14-39-14-67

Graphics

When looking at graphics, you’ll see that The Flame in the Flood is very unique. The graphics aren’t the greatest, but they’re not ugly at all either. It’s beautiful in its own way, which is very awesome when a game can pull that off. The atmosphere itself is very nice and the day/night cycles look very good as well. When going down the river, you’ll be greeted by the sun that reflects on it beautifully from time to time as well, which makes for a very nice sight.

Sound

The music and sounds in The Flame in the Flood are simply amazing. The music itself doesn’t appear that often, but if it does, oh boy… It mostly comes up when you’re rafting down the river and combined with the beautiful scenery, it’s simply an awesome experience. Combine that with the excellent sound effects you’ll hear during your time playing, and you’ve got yourself a very pleasant game.

RiverGame-Win64-Shipping 2016-03-03 14-42-22-25

Gameplay

As shortly said before, The Flame in the Flood is a survival rogue-lite game. This means that you’ll be moving from island to island in order to scour it for supplies, but also have to keep a close eye on your temperature, sleep, hydration and food, as well as diseases and wounds you can get in your journey. The goal of the game is to survive and make your way upstream in order to find the salvation you’ve been hearing about.

The game is played in top-down perspective and is fully controller capable, which is definitely a recommendation. The interface and controls themselves are also very self-explanatory, and the game provides you with excellent hints the first time you play. These hints will teach you how to interact, craft and use objects. It also shows you how you can manage your inventory and how you should always pay close attention to your vitals.

On to the adventure! After you leave base camp, you’ll head up to your raft and start sailing (or rather drifting) away downstream. Along the way, you can find a lot of camps, wildernesses and other islands which you can visit in order to obtain loot or other things. Each of the islands are randomly generated and some favor certain loot heavily over the other. For example, a camp will always have shelter, a lit fire and a high chance of finding flint. Wildernesses on the other hand will provide more meat, plants and other wildlife. You can also find hardware stores, liquor stores, marinas (a place where you can fix up and upgrade your raft) and a couple more. This will require you to quickly prioritize where you want to go, because you can never visit all islands because of the current.

RiverGame-Win64-Shipping 2016-03-03 14-52-30-44

Of course if there’s loot, there’s an inventory, which is fairly small to begin with. You, your dog and your raft each have storage space where you can swap items between depending on your needs. Your raft storage can only be accessed when you’re at the port, but your dog’s storage can be accessed at any time as well as yours. Also, having a bunch of random items doesn’t go a long way either. This is where the crafting system comes in: it allows you to craft food, make clothes, make medicines and much more. Every item has its use and there’s 69 items in total to discover.

Generally, survival can be very difficult, especially when you’re encountering a lot of hostile wildlife. You could of course make traps and kill the animals, but if you’re out of resources to build traps you’re very much dead. Boars can charge you and break your leg, wolves can attack you and cause lacerations, snakes can bite you and cause poisoning and so on. It’s a very hostile world indeed!

Overall, the gameplay is pretty well done and fairly balanced. You have to be on your feet at all times in order to survive and the game challenges you to do so. However, it does feel like the crafting system could use some more items, because once you get thriving, it’s hard to still lose except when you get extremely bad luck.

Conclusion

The Flame in the Flood was a fun ride from start to finish. It’s very hard to get started, but once you get that one good run where a lot goes in your favor, you’re a freight train that can’t be stopped. It has rewarding gameplay and amazing music, but does lack some story value and has bad camera angles from time to time. All in all, it’s very much a recommendation for fans of rogue-lite survival games.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

1 Comment

  1. […] The review of the game on PC can be read here. […]

    VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
    0 people found this helpful
    Was this review helpful?
    Yes
    No

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.