The Flame In The Flood

This game is a hidden gem.
Why Is It Not Popular?
For some reason this game didn't get popular. It's been on sale, bundled, and apparently even free at some point. Basically, you'll be able to get this quite cheap if you want.
I have no idea why this didn't get the recognition it deserves. It's well made, polished, balanced, strategic, beautiful, and fun. This actually really discourages me as a game dev, because this team clearly did an amazing job, and produced a great game, and yet, it still didn't "make it". I imagine they lost money on this, just because no YouTubers jumped on it or something, which is really really sad, because it's a good game.
Gameplay
Many survival games have very confusing mechanics, and a lot to learn right at the beginning. It's a bit overwhelming, and it takes a long time just to get used to what's even going on. This game is a great balance of having good strategic mechanics, while at the same time keeping it simple. The concepts are very easy to learn, and you feel like you're actually playing the game right from the beginning, rather than just learning it.
It's your basic idea of hunger, thirst, temperature, and fatigue. You can also get many different status afflictions (snake bite, food poisoning, wet, etc.). Balancing the risk/reward in many situations makes the game strategic, and the fact that it's real-time makes it more action oriented (rather than turn-based type games). It's a really good balance, and an enjoyable gameplay experience. The part that's different is that you're taking a raft down a river, and stopping at places to get resources, in order to survive longer. It's rogue-like in the sense that the locations are randomly generated with loot. If you play endless, you get even more RNG, making for a unique experience every time you start a new voyage, never knowing what will come around the next corner. It's also quite scary early on, because you don't know if you'll run into something you can't handle.
The Items
Lots of survival games also have TONS of items, to the point it gets bogged down. You don't know what to keep or what to toss, there's actually too many things to obtain, and too many things to craft. This game, again, keeps it simple, while still allowing for depth. There's a good amount of items, so that you still do have to make those strategic decisions of inventory management, but it's done in a way that I can actually predict what I'll need, and make good decisions, rather than arbitrary ones.
There's a good amount of recipes, but not too many. I actually know what all the items do, so I can judge whether I'll need them. It took a little bit to remember what does what, but it wasn't bad at all. Other games have sooo many recipes, I have to look up a wiki article every time I need to make a decision. With this game, there's enough variety that it's interesting, but not so much that it's overwhelming.
TLDR
It's simple, but elegant. The art is unique. It's strategic, but action. It's quite a basic concept, but done with enough openness that it creates a really good experience. I have no idea why this didn't take off better, because I was able to get into it immediately, have thoroughly enjoyed myself, and it has quite a bit of replay value.

Looking at the recent reviews, this game seems somewhat divisive so I'll give you my thoughts on it to sort of even the ground.
Let's start with the good:
- The game's soundtrack is on point.
- The graphics, while they're not stunning, they're very unique and eye-catching.
- The idea behind the game. Scavenging through a post-apocalyptic scenery has something strangely tranquil about it.
Now onto the annoying bits:
- Menu and inventory management. You'll end up spending ten's of minutes in your inventory either figuring out how to craft something or micromanaging your backpacks as to not waste space.
- Gameplay errors. I've had the game crash on me twice, nothing in-game was lost aside starting from the last checkpoint but it takes away from the immersion.
And lastly the outright awful parts:
- Gameplay breaking bugs. Now this is by far the game's greatest flaw. Near the end of the game my inventory lost some items after reloading numerous times. Thankfully there's an alternative to combat via torches, had I not had the materials for those I would have needed to start again from the beginning
Conclusion:
The Flame in the Flood is a beautiful and atmospheric game with a great soundtrack and decent gameplay. If you can look past the clumsy inventory management I highly recommend this game. If you're too worried about crashes I recommend you get it during a sale since it's worth playing through at least once!

TL;DR More of a technical-demo or early access game than a finished product
I'll start by saying that the only reason I'm giving this game a positive review, is that it's an indie game made by a small group of 2 developers and 1 artist.
And I like to support small indie developers, because they grow up into large developers and eventually make great game.
This game is not a great game.
On the positive side:
The graphics are cartoony and unique, and give an original look & feel to the game.
The animations exist for all actions you do, and the game feels finished on that aspect.
The score it pretty good too, and changes fittingly according to the weather and time-of-day.
The crafting is arguably the best part of the game. You have plenty of items you can craft, and the base items needed for them range from common to rare, with a good progression over time.
Now for the less positive sides.
The combat is basically non-existent. You can run away, and you can set traps. You have no real chance head-to-head against the animals you encounter. I was mostly forced to employ game bugs to survive and kill them (some areas enemies are blocked from entering). Otherwise the game would be over pretty soon.
The game has no save feature - which is weird for a modern game. You have very rare save points, which force you to play the game for hours, just to be able to save your progress. You simply cannot play this game 0.5-1 hour, because your progress will not be saved.
The difficulty of the game sucks out all the fun from it, and prevents you from progressing. You are given barely enough resources to sustain yourself and fend-off enemies, which leaves you unable to craft the more advanced items in the game.
And the worst part, which basically makes it a sandbox simulation, technical demo or an early access game:
Is that it virtually has no plot whatsoever.
You raft on the river, from location to location, scavenging (and barely making by).
And that's it.
There are around 5-7 different location types.
And you're forced to do that hours upon hours, without any purpose or end in sight.
Don't be fooled by my 22 hours play time, most of the time was spent reloading from last save after being insta-killed by enemies.
Or playing the game for 1-2 hours, only to discover there were no auto-save points in my gameplay, so none of my progress was saved.
I ended up using cheats to actually get to the ending of the game (by the look of it, it would have taken me 10+ hours of pointless grind to reach it otherwise).
Only to discover it was as underwhelming as the rest of the game.
So to the developers:
This looks like a great technical demo made with minimal resources, and you guys have tons of potential.
Next time please make a full game!

Starts great and has its own rural Americana charm. However there's not much to it. My run became very tedious; yet despite that I want to give it another go, so it's compelling. Definitely great value on sale.

What can I say about this. Well first of all, it should be noted I played this more than my time here will suggest; I actually beat the game on Amazon's game thingy where I got it for free, then decided to buy it on steam on sale cause I wanted to support the developers.
But beyond that. The game is beautiful. The southern, folksy feel you get from it is so relaxing even when you're on survivalist difficulty; you're fighting for your life, sure, but you're doing so while this harmonica music plays in the background or a guitar or a deep voiced man serenades you. It's fantastic.
The issues... there are a few. I feel the game might be a bit longer than it needs to be, considering that there's only 6 types of animals that you interact with and very few people. On top of that you get to a certain point towards the end where you're set and don't really need to land any more. In my last file I had literally every raft upgrade and enough food and water, so I just coasted past region 9 to the game's ending.
But it's nice. It's very, very different from typical survival style games, but you really fall into it. You can tell a lot of heart went into making this and I always appreciate that type of thing.
I'd give it a 7.5/10. Maybe even 8. Hard to say. But overall, I definitely recommend you pick it up and try it for yourself.

It was fun while it lasted
A beautiful Survival Indie Game with great music and attractive graphics. Once you figure out the basics and mechanics of how the game is played it can be quite enjoyable to play, you would find yourself travelling down the river on a raft and explore woods nonstop for hours even if you would do the same things over and over again. It is a really fun experience but I feel like it's one of those game that once you got the best of it everything just goes a little bland. There are also quite a few bugs especially a major one on fighting bears and it happens quite often and its really annoying. Overall this game is wonderful! It makes you feel relaxed without losing the distressed feeling that is a must in survival games.

I can't recommend Flame in the Flood enough. Just seeing it in my library, the soundtrack pops into my head, and I flash back to riding the river with my sad little in-game dog, rainy nights, and just....it's like falling asleep wrapped in a painting. It's fun, comforting, and emotionally immersive thanks to the visual and musical design working together so well. I don't seek out top-down games and I generally dislike ones where you're forced to use a vehicle for one reason or another, but I bought this because some of the design team had worked on Bioshock, and they brought the same thoughtfulness and artisanship to this mini-masterpiece.