The Flame In The Flood

My Playtime: 42h (100% achievement, finished the game twice and played the endless mode)
My First Playthrough: 15h
Grindy Achievement(s): Yes (~1 achievement).
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (33 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.
Intro
The Flame in the Flood is a survival game that takes place in a river. You'll take control of a raft, go from island to island, forage resources, and craft items that you need to survive. The game offers two modes: campaign and endless.
Pros:
- 2 modes
- Randomized playthrough to promote replayability
Cons:
- Too dependent on flint to make most items
- Hard to see what's going on in the background
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Should you buy this game?
Yes.
If you are looking for an easy survival game to spend in short sessions, buy this game at a sale.
In-Depth Review
Visuals
The Flame in the Flood chooses deformed models for the characters and atmospheric surroundings with a foggy effect as a background. The lighting also gives a unique look to the game depending on the time of the day - bright, yellow-ish color in the daytime, and dark, blue-ish color at nighttime.
Story
To be honest, I didn't pay much attention to the story, especially since there isn't much in it. You find a dog that has a backpack and you decide to follow it out of curiosity. The story will revolve around the adventure that the dog and the main character go through, sometimes meeting new people in a desolate place that is almost impossible to live in. However, these dialogues usually tend to be brief and mostly serve as a way to either proceed with the story or present you with a freebie.
The Game
Gameplay
The Flame in the Flood is a survival game. As I said, you need to use your raft to travel between islands, foraging resources that are needed to survive. The survival part can range from your needs that can be filled just by eating food and drinking water, to finding materials to repair your raft that can down you if you crash it several times without fixing it.
Rafting is hard. You need to get used to the controls at first, and you'll hit the obstacles several times before you can master them. There is an upgrade that can make it easier to control, although it'll still prove to be a challenge whenever you go to the high waters, a lane with a faster speed. Going through the high waters will help you to finish the game faster, but crashing into any objects at such speed might prove to be dangerous. You're lucky if you just get a few damages to your raft and survive. However, in the worst case, your raft can flip, killing you in the process.
Dangers
Danger lurks on the island. The islands are the places where you can forage items, whether it's food, raft materials, or other items, but it's also the place where wild animals live. Rabbits might not pose a threat to you - you can even craft a trap and kill them for lunch if you want, but other animals will give you trouble. Crows will shout, alerting other wild animals to approach you. Boars and wolves will hunt you down until you die. Bears will maul you if you ever get close to it and its nest, which usually has items in it. Snakes will bite you and kill you within minutes if you don't treat the poison.
Understanding their attack pattern and how to avoid their attacks will be the key to survival, as well as your decision whether to approach them or not. There is a way to either distract or kill them, of course, although doing so will require some resources that you either don't have or can't afford to waste.
The game might be hard at first, but once you know the basics, it becomes repetitive. Threats won't feel as difficult as long as you have items that can mitigate them. Traps can be easily made as long as you explore everything. Controlling the raft becomes easier with time, and other threatening factors, which are usually determined by RNG, won't feel as hard as it is, especially once you realized that you can return to the main menu to reload your save to prevent your death. Dying will force you to restart from the checkpoint if you play the campaign mode, or start from scratch if you play the endless mode, but all items in your dog's bag will be carried over to your next playthrough.
Combat
Combat is passive. You'll be using traps most of the time to kill any threats. You can craft other items such as bows for the same purpose, but I found it to be cost-ineffective. First of all, crafting the arrows requires flint, which is a rare resource. For reference, I used all of my flints during my first campaign run and had to play halfway through the game without them. It limited me from crafting a lot of useful items, including traps, once my stone knife, which requires flint to craft, runs out. Second, it's hard to aim, and you'll most likely miss a shot or two. Third, it takes some time before you can take it out and shoot, and the few seconds are vital if you want to take down boars or wolves.
Luckily, you don't have to use resources every time to kill enemies. You can lure animals to kill each other, netting you free meat to eat. However, this requires some setup, and it might not be possible to do all the time. To be honest, I prefer to forage my resources from this method since I don't have to use anything to get them.
Length and Difficulty
I finished the campaign in 15h. After that, I beat it again for an achievement in 4.7h. I spent the rest of my playthrough in the endless mode, cleaning all achievements that I didn't manage to get. Due to the randomized nature of the game, The Flame in the Flood is a perfect game if you are looking for replayability value, although the repetitive gameplay might not be for everyone. Heck, I was even bored during the last stretch of my endless run because of it.
As I said before, the game has a rough start at the beginning. You need to learn a lot of things and died several times, but once you get past that, you're basically invisible. Moreover, there are several bugs and exploits that you can use to make it easier to play.
Issues
It can be hard to see objects and your character if you are walking behind some buildings.
Conclusion
As a survival game, The Flame in the Flood balances its gameplay perfectly. It is relaxing to traverse through the river with your raft, and the music really can get your heart pumping sometimes. The foraging part of the game can be repetitive and annoying, but it's how the game maintains its difficulty. Your run will be randomized every time, and although the islands can feel similar after you play it for a long time, they will still have different items in them. It's the perfect game if you are looking to play a game in short sessions.

The Flame in the Flood, the perfect game for those who enjoy constant hunger, thirst, and exhaustion as they casually paddle down a river filled with doom and despair!

The soundtrack fucking slaps

This is an amazing game. If you like narratively ambiguous, often frustrating, procedurally-generated roguelike survival games with a STEEP learning curve, then you'd be remiss not to buy The Flame in the Flood.
The Flame in the Flood is a survival game that places your character—a young woman named Scout—on a dangerous, procedurally-generated River with nothing but a backpack, a stick, a handmade raft, and a faithful doggy companion named Aesop. It’s the player’s job to collect resources and craft tools that will better help them survive in the unforgiving wilderness, all while keeping Scout full, hydrated, warm, and energized—no easy feat, and even then, there’s no promise you won’t crash your raft and drown on the River.
Death is permanent in this game. In the Campaign Mode there are checkpoints every time you enter a new area... but that could encompass anywhere between twenty minutes' worth of game time and a full hours'. Plus, the River won't remain the same as it was before, and there's no way to retrieve your items when you die. You will have to start over and re-collect your inventory very frequently... the only exception being Aesop, your dog, whose inventory carries over between deaths and save files. Being an average-sized dog, Aesop's inventory is pretty limited, but it's enough as long as you're strategic about what you put in there.
The Flame in the Flood is all about trial-and-error and learning from every death. You're going to die a LOT in this game, and that's the point. It makes the rewards all the sweeter when you DO manage to survive a long run down the River. Of course, skill isn't the only hurdle: pure luck plays a pretty big role as well, and that's where the game can become frustrating. Sometimes a new route is just doomed to be a short one. Sometimes you fuck it up early and can't recover. Sometimes you crash your raft once and cause a chain effect of subsequent crashes because the raft just keeps careening into things and there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you rage-quit and stomp around your room sulking for the rest of the night because you drowned during an otherwise extremely auspicious route, and you want to blame the game for having shitty raft controls... but really it's because you chose to horde raft upgrades for the future instead of using them now to get a rudder, which allows the raft to move much more cooperatively.
It's also worth noting that this game is 7 years old by now and still looks as pretty as a freshly-minted penny. The graphics in this game are stylized enough to withstand the test of time for many more years to come. I'm not usually a big fan of roguelikes, but this is a game that I think about and return to often, because it's a perfect balance of challenging and rewarding.

A cool rafting simulator... Jokes aside, rafting physics have been really well done!
I played The Flame in the Flood 3 days and spent around 18 hours on it. I finished it in survival mode, the only mode I played from the start: I failed around 20 times for the first 7 hours, learning without checking guides and trying stuff.
Got 13 achievements out of 36.
After a first wall of steep learning, you will find out all you have learned will make you enjoy the journey and the challenges of survival will start to get more into your control. This is a good experience especially for those players that experienced traveling, I believe.
Music are great and listening to sounds is important. At some point you will find yourself singing or dancing along with the melodies as you are playing.
I played the game with the ps4 joypad and I really had a good time. I liked several things especially how the raft loses a bit of control if your hands are busy doing else on the boat or if you use the environment at your advantage...
The Flame in the Flood just like when you start a fire at home, has not to be rushed.
You have to follow the rhythm of the river, be one with Nature.
The game has 3 modes: a campaign, a survival and a endless experience.
Check the few screenshots I took and consider there are a couple spoiler ones (covered by the "alert" layer)
Enjoy your journey!

Every inch of the game is charming, and the balance is incredible, fully realizing how a "roguelike" is supposed to work. It feels fair from the early days to the late: at the beginning, the player has every opportunity to learn what is important through death and exploration; after the player has strengthened with both knowledge and the resources handed down between deaths, it becomes possible to travel hundreds of miles. The fact that all items and creatures look and feel good makes it worth every minute.

Nothing earth shattering but for the most part a nice little game. The art style is lovely, giving off a mixture of Coraline and Psychonauts and it's sound track is quite fitting and enjoyable. The only issue I have with Flame in the the Flood is that the camera could use some work as more than often you'll crash into something while rafting that wasn't able to be seen thanks to the camera position.