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The Flame in the Flood
Hello and welcome to an "I bought this game on Switch because I had a giftcard balance, the game was on sale, and the cover was pleasing to my eye" post! I didn't even read a DESCRIPTION of this one before I bought it, what a lawless way to live. I only have three more of these reckless-ass purchases left in my backlog, though, so...progress?
Anyway turns out The Flame in the Flood is a ROGUELIKE SURVIVAL ADVENTURE GAME, a series of words I can't believe I understand. I have gallantly avoided spoiling the story, which was very easy, because the story is nonexistent. Okay JK I will probably leave some spoiler space and then LOL about the ending but whatever. Umm there are a lot of mechanical spoilers for a game where part of the experience is figuring out this shit via trial and error but I doubt anyone is playing this. It was good! If you want to play it! Not a hard rec but I found the game satisfying and the soundtrack slaps!
Basically you start at point A, make your way down a river, periodically stop along the way, and see if you can make it to the end. Like Hades, when you die, you start back at the beginning. Like Hades, as you progress you go through different areas that have their own characteristics and hazards. Not like Hades, when you die and restart, there aren't really any bonuses or anything that make you better/stronger, or any currency you can bring back to make your life easier. If you plan well you can bring back half a dozen items but it's hard to remember to plan that properly so I never did. Also not like Hades, there are periodic checkpoints along the river that you can revert back to if you die, so honestly by the time I even realized I was bringing back a random unplanned selection of items every time I died, I think I had already died for the last time because from there I just used checkpoints, which I also ended up not needing often, because I was playing on normal/beginner difficulty, and honestly once I got the hang of things like "if you hear a snake hissing, it's because there's a snake nearby and you should not get any fucking closer," it wasn't remotely hard?
You start at a camp with a giant SOS painted on a cabin, and a dog dragging a pack of supplies finds you. After exploring the campsite, you find a raft and the two of you take off down the river. It's fairly clear once you're out there that there's been a catastrophic flood of the "[insert major city] will be underwater by [year] variety" and you have a radio but you can't pick up any signal anywhere. As you travel down the river, points of interest are highlighted, each with an icon to tell you what kind of site it is, which loosely tips you off to what you can expect to find there (something the game will also explain every time you make land). As an example, campsites will always have a burning fire (weather permitting), farmsteads will have corn, churches and liquor stores will have alcohol, hardware stores and filling stations will have workbenches. Marinas let you repair your raft, provided you have supplies.
You very occasionally find people at these sites, but for the most part the people are gone and the animals have come back. Some places were clearly always rural but there are some that were obviously urban areas, and there are wolves and bears amid deteriorating roads and rusted-out cars. So you go to these places, and you try not to let anything kill you, and you look for supplies. Sometimes you're harvesting plants (corn for nutrition, aloe for first aid, poisonous plants to kill predators), sometimes you're collecting useful items (bandages, penicillin, splints, gloves, storage pouches), and sometimes you're collecting junk that can be turned into useful items (fishing line + fishing hooks = sewing kits, which can be used to make warmer clothes from animal hide, or to stitch yourself up if you're injured). There are also some specialty items - you can craft a couple of tools, and there are supplies you can collect that will let you upgrade your raft. (Adding a rudder was a godsend, but I've never seen the need for a water filtration system because I had SO MANY FUCKING JARS and it's like constantly raining in this game so it was just...so much water. SO MUCH WATER.)
You have four survival gauges - hunger, thirst, temperature, and rest. You need to stay fed, find clean water, keep warm, and find safe places to sleep. There's also an injury system to keep an eye on - the game will tell you what you have and what item will cure it. Some things, like food poisoning will also go away on their own with time (although your gauges will take a hit), some things, like a snake bite, will kill you eventually unless cured, and some things will evolve into other conditions if you don't take action to cure them (ant bites become infections become sepsis which will eventually kill you). Honestly I usually just let ant bites evolve into infection, most of the time I had way more penicillin on hand than I did aloe.
I don't think I've ever played a survival game before but Waypoint recently did a series of Resident Evil streams where Patrick talked occasionally about the survival genre, which was informative for this! Shit like "resources are scarce so you have to decide when it's worth it to kill a threat vs just running away" made me feel very savvy about what was actually me being like "THERE'S WOLVES IN THERE? NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE." Patrick ALSO talked about the phenomenon of starting out with supplies being so scarce that you didn't notice the point where they tipped into abundance until eventually you do the math on how much of the game you probably have left and you're like oh, I have more stuff than I could ever need? He mentioned that more as a recurring feature/bug of the RE franchise than as something inherent to the survival genre, but it applies to this game too! I spent so much time early on just scrounging everything I possibly could and then I was like oh shit I have WAY more supplies than I need to finish this, let me stop looting every single abandoned business I pass.
I had looked up online how many miles of river it took to get to the end of the game (although if I hadn't, I could have made a similar guess based on the regions I was passing through, since the game is upfront about telling you you're in region 6 of 10 or whatever) and there came a point where I was like...I really think I have enough food and water on this raft that now that I have a tent, I might just be able to sail straight through the second half of the river. And I did that! It made the whole experience kind of anticlimactic if I'm being honest! It was a gamble because I wasn't positive the clothes I had were warm enough for the regions I was going into, which they weren't, but turns out I was fine! JUST SAILED RIGHT ALONG. There are a couple of mandatory stops along the river, and I just assumed there had to be one or two more, but...I was done with them, as it turned out, so I really did just sail straight through to the final dock. I did a quick replay after I beat it (because I'm me) and did some back-of-the-envelope math on what I'd need supplywise to make it the entire length of the river, and honestly...it seems doable. I might try again and just see how quickly I can pull together my two jars of water and ten things of jerky or whatever. OOH maybe if I plan my items so that I end the run with everything I need to win the next one...MUCH TO CONSIDER!!!!!
There is a little bit of initial handholding in terms of the game throwing a message up the first time you encounter a situation and giving you some brief tips on how to handle it, but honestly for the most part they just leave you to it. I checked the wiki a lot to get information about items/enemies (I was not about to get the answer to "can a spear trap kill a wolf?" by luring a wolf into a spear trap and hoping the trap killed it before it killed me), but for the most part you really do just learn by doing. Or by not doing, as I realized when I beat the game that I really hadn't needed to be stockpiling half the items I had, because I never fucking used half those plants or supplies. Or you learn by dying! That's how I learned not to fuck with boars! And how to avoid ant bites! And how not to get various lacerations! I did also mercilessly abuse the autosave system the first time around - the game saves every time you pull up to a dock to explore an area, so if I was exploring an area and things went south, I just restarted the game so I could revert back to the dock. You know, like a cheater.
But yeah, for the most part you just feel your way through it, which can make the game very frustrating at first, and there were one or two times that I died where I had the option of reverting to a checkpoint and I decided no, I made a fucking mess of that, but I know what I did wrong now so if I start fresh I can get off to a stronger start. All this to say that when I was like 20 minutes in I considered quitting because I hated it, and then by like two hours in I was shutting down for the night and I was like "I enjoyed that but I think maybe I'm done with it for now and I'll come back to it another time!" and then the next day I played for H O U R S and would have played for more if I hadn't had to leave to get Mom from the airport.
There's a harder difficulty setting and there's also and endless mode, either of which I think would be a lot more challenging, so I might try that out. WE SHALL SEE! [ETA I did try it and it was noticeably harsher - like it says on the tin, supplies are less plentiful and your stats decrease faster - but it was still Fine? The last third was still super anticlimactic. MAYBE I AM JUST TOO GOOD AT THIS GAME.]
Okay now a gap for story spoilers.
SAGJHDGSAHDFGHJDSFHJ SO YOU GET YOUR RADIO AT THE BEGINNING, AND IT'S LIKE "MAYBE IF YOU GOT TO HIGH GROUND YOU COULD PICK UP A SIGNAL?" And you eventually find high ground with a radio relat about ten miles down river, and you hear a snipper of a broadcast telling you there's an evac site at Angel Yards, but then you get to Angel Yards about 20 miles down the river and there's just a dude there who's like "uhhhh IDK what to tell you, there's no evac site here, but if you REALLY want to go look you can fight through all these wolves and snakes and bears we have back there" and you have to make your way through this FUCKING GAUNTLET, which is the one thing that killed me once I got the hang of the game, although it wasn't even getting through the gauntlet, it was that I got bitten by a snake during the gauntlet, and then I fucked up and left the dock after the gauntlet without meaning to, and I needed dandelion tea to cure the snakebite, but I needed to get to a campfire to make dandelion tea, and by the time I got to one I sat down to brew it and DROPPED DEAD, just an absolute fucking mess. But anyway, back to the gauntlet: Underneath a rocket that presumably was once intended to evacuate people to a new world, there is a note (next to the CAVE of the BEAR that has made a home under the rocket) that's like "lol sorry no more evacs but maybe if you make your way to the Kingdom you'll be okay" so now you're heading for the Kingdom.
One thing I do want to say here is that when you arrive at Angel Yards your raft gets destroyed, and once you go through the gauntlet and read the note and come back, you find that the guy at the entrance fixed it up for you. But when I died and replayed this section trying NOT to get murdered by a snake, I was like...do I really have to do this? I'm just reading a note. I already know what it says. Why can't there be some kind of IMPORTANT REWARD at the end, or like, this dude says he'll fix up my raft IN EXCHANGE for me going to the bear cave, or...no? I just need to satisfy my nonexistent curiosity by wading through a lot full of snakes and wolves and a fucking bear? AWESOME. GREAT. LOVE IT.
Anyway I assumed the Kingdom would be another dead end at around the 30 mile mark and then I'd finally reach some kind of safe place at the 40 mile mark, BUT THE KINGDOM IS THE 40 MILE MARK? I just sailed the whole way from Angel Yards to the Kingdom and made like one stop along the way to nap. V boring second half of the river, but again, that might be the difficulty settings although Traveler is sold as standard difficulty as opposed to easy. ANYWAY: THE KINGDOM IS THE MAGIC KINGDOM. YOU FIND SANCTUARY IN THE EPCOT DOME. IT'S FUCKING HILARIOUS. THE PLANET IS DEAD AND WE'VE MADE A HOME IN THE SHADOW OF THE CRUMBLING DISNEYWORLD MONORAIL. RIP!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway turns out The Flame in the Flood is a ROGUELIKE SURVIVAL ADVENTURE GAME, a series of words I can't believe I understand. I have gallantly avoided spoiling the story, which was very easy, because the story is nonexistent. Okay JK I will probably leave some spoiler space and then LOL about the ending but whatever. Umm there are a lot of mechanical spoilers for a game where part of the experience is figuring out this shit via trial and error but I doubt anyone is playing this. It was good! If you want to play it! Not a hard rec but I found the game satisfying and the soundtrack slaps!
Basically you start at point A, make your way down a river, periodically stop along the way, and see if you can make it to the end. Like Hades, when you die, you start back at the beginning. Like Hades, as you progress you go through different areas that have their own characteristics and hazards. Not like Hades, when you die and restart, there aren't really any bonuses or anything that make you better/stronger, or any currency you can bring back to make your life easier. If you plan well you can bring back half a dozen items but it's hard to remember to plan that properly so I never did. Also not like Hades, there are periodic checkpoints along the river that you can revert back to if you die, so honestly by the time I even realized I was bringing back a random unplanned selection of items every time I died, I think I had already died for the last time because from there I just used checkpoints, which I also ended up not needing often, because I was playing on normal/beginner difficulty, and honestly once I got the hang of things like "if you hear a snake hissing, it's because there's a snake nearby and you should not get any fucking closer," it wasn't remotely hard?
You start at a camp with a giant SOS painted on a cabin, and a dog dragging a pack of supplies finds you. After exploring the campsite, you find a raft and the two of you take off down the river. It's fairly clear once you're out there that there's been a catastrophic flood of the "[insert major city] will be underwater by [year] variety" and you have a radio but you can't pick up any signal anywhere. As you travel down the river, points of interest are highlighted, each with an icon to tell you what kind of site it is, which loosely tips you off to what you can expect to find there (something the game will also explain every time you make land). As an example, campsites will always have a burning fire (weather permitting), farmsteads will have corn, churches and liquor stores will have alcohol, hardware stores and filling stations will have workbenches. Marinas let you repair your raft, provided you have supplies.
You very occasionally find people at these sites, but for the most part the people are gone and the animals have come back. Some places were clearly always rural but there are some that were obviously urban areas, and there are wolves and bears amid deteriorating roads and rusted-out cars. So you go to these places, and you try not to let anything kill you, and you look for supplies. Sometimes you're harvesting plants (corn for nutrition, aloe for first aid, poisonous plants to kill predators), sometimes you're collecting useful items (bandages, penicillin, splints, gloves, storage pouches), and sometimes you're collecting junk that can be turned into useful items (fishing line + fishing hooks = sewing kits, which can be used to make warmer clothes from animal hide, or to stitch yourself up if you're injured). There are also some specialty items - you can craft a couple of tools, and there are supplies you can collect that will let you upgrade your raft. (Adding a rudder was a godsend, but I've never seen the need for a water filtration system because I had SO MANY FUCKING JARS and it's like constantly raining in this game so it was just...so much water. SO MUCH WATER.)
You have four survival gauges - hunger, thirst, temperature, and rest. You need to stay fed, find clean water, keep warm, and find safe places to sleep. There's also an injury system to keep an eye on - the game will tell you what you have and what item will cure it. Some things, like food poisoning will also go away on their own with time (although your gauges will take a hit), some things, like a snake bite, will kill you eventually unless cured, and some things will evolve into other conditions if you don't take action to cure them (ant bites become infections become sepsis which will eventually kill you). Honestly I usually just let ant bites evolve into infection, most of the time I had way more penicillin on hand than I did aloe.
I don't think I've ever played a survival game before but Waypoint recently did a series of Resident Evil streams where Patrick talked occasionally about the survival genre, which was informative for this! Shit like "resources are scarce so you have to decide when it's worth it to kill a threat vs just running away" made me feel very savvy about what was actually me being like "THERE'S WOLVES IN THERE? NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE." Patrick ALSO talked about the phenomenon of starting out with supplies being so scarce that you didn't notice the point where they tipped into abundance until eventually you do the math on how much of the game you probably have left and you're like oh, I have more stuff than I could ever need? He mentioned that more as a recurring feature/bug of the RE franchise than as something inherent to the survival genre, but it applies to this game too! I spent so much time early on just scrounging everything I possibly could and then I was like oh shit I have WAY more supplies than I need to finish this, let me stop looting every single abandoned business I pass.
I had looked up online how many miles of river it took to get to the end of the game (although if I hadn't, I could have made a similar guess based on the regions I was passing through, since the game is upfront about telling you you're in region 6 of 10 or whatever) and there came a point where I was like...I really think I have enough food and water on this raft that now that I have a tent, I might just be able to sail straight through the second half of the river. And I did that! It made the whole experience kind of anticlimactic if I'm being honest! It was a gamble because I wasn't positive the clothes I had were warm enough for the regions I was going into, which they weren't, but turns out I was fine! JUST SAILED RIGHT ALONG. There are a couple of mandatory stops along the river, and I just assumed there had to be one or two more, but...I was done with them, as it turned out, so I really did just sail straight through to the final dock. I did a quick replay after I beat it (because I'm me) and did some back-of-the-envelope math on what I'd need supplywise to make it the entire length of the river, and honestly...it seems doable. I might try again and just see how quickly I can pull together my two jars of water and ten things of jerky or whatever. OOH maybe if I plan my items so that I end the run with everything I need to win the next one...MUCH TO CONSIDER!!!!!
There is a little bit of initial handholding in terms of the game throwing a message up the first time you encounter a situation and giving you some brief tips on how to handle it, but honestly for the most part they just leave you to it. I checked the wiki a lot to get information about items/enemies (I was not about to get the answer to "can a spear trap kill a wolf?" by luring a wolf into a spear trap and hoping the trap killed it before it killed me), but for the most part you really do just learn by doing. Or by not doing, as I realized when I beat the game that I really hadn't needed to be stockpiling half the items I had, because I never fucking used half those plants or supplies. Or you learn by dying! That's how I learned not to fuck with boars! And how to avoid ant bites! And how not to get various lacerations! I did also mercilessly abuse the autosave system the first time around - the game saves every time you pull up to a dock to explore an area, so if I was exploring an area and things went south, I just restarted the game so I could revert back to the dock. You know, like a cheater.
But yeah, for the most part you just feel your way through it, which can make the game very frustrating at first, and there were one or two times that I died where I had the option of reverting to a checkpoint and I decided no, I made a fucking mess of that, but I know what I did wrong now so if I start fresh I can get off to a stronger start. All this to say that when I was like 20 minutes in I considered quitting because I hated it, and then by like two hours in I was shutting down for the night and I was like "I enjoyed that but I think maybe I'm done with it for now and I'll come back to it another time!" and then the next day I played for H O U R S and would have played for more if I hadn't had to leave to get Mom from the airport.
There's a harder difficulty setting and there's also and endless mode, either of which I think would be a lot more challenging, so I might try that out. WE SHALL SEE! [ETA I did try it and it was noticeably harsher - like it says on the tin, supplies are less plentiful and your stats decrease faster - but it was still Fine? The last third was still super anticlimactic. MAYBE I AM JUST TOO GOOD AT THIS GAME.]
Okay now a gap for story spoilers.
SAGJHDGSAHDFGHJDSFHJ SO YOU GET YOUR RADIO AT THE BEGINNING, AND IT'S LIKE "MAYBE IF YOU GOT TO HIGH GROUND YOU COULD PICK UP A SIGNAL?" And you eventually find high ground with a radio relat about ten miles down river, and you hear a snipper of a broadcast telling you there's an evac site at Angel Yards, but then you get to Angel Yards about 20 miles down the river and there's just a dude there who's like "uhhhh IDK what to tell you, there's no evac site here, but if you REALLY want to go look you can fight through all these wolves and snakes and bears we have back there" and you have to make your way through this FUCKING GAUNTLET, which is the one thing that killed me once I got the hang of the game, although it wasn't even getting through the gauntlet, it was that I got bitten by a snake during the gauntlet, and then I fucked up and left the dock after the gauntlet without meaning to, and I needed dandelion tea to cure the snakebite, but I needed to get to a campfire to make dandelion tea, and by the time I got to one I sat down to brew it and DROPPED DEAD, just an absolute fucking mess. But anyway, back to the gauntlet: Underneath a rocket that presumably was once intended to evacuate people to a new world, there is a note (next to the CAVE of the BEAR that has made a home under the rocket) that's like "lol sorry no more evacs but maybe if you make your way to the Kingdom you'll be okay" so now you're heading for the Kingdom.
One thing I do want to say here is that when you arrive at Angel Yards your raft gets destroyed, and once you go through the gauntlet and read the note and come back, you find that the guy at the entrance fixed it up for you. But when I died and replayed this section trying NOT to get murdered by a snake, I was like...do I really have to do this? I'm just reading a note. I already know what it says. Why can't there be some kind of IMPORTANT REWARD at the end, or like, this dude says he'll fix up my raft IN EXCHANGE for me going to the bear cave, or...no? I just need to satisfy my nonexistent curiosity by wading through a lot full of snakes and wolves and a fucking bear? AWESOME. GREAT. LOVE IT.
Anyway I assumed the Kingdom would be another dead end at around the 30 mile mark and then I'd finally reach some kind of safe place at the 40 mile mark, BUT THE KINGDOM IS THE 40 MILE MARK? I just sailed the whole way from Angel Yards to the Kingdom and made like one stop along the way to nap. V boring second half of the river, but again, that might be the difficulty settings although Traveler is sold as standard difficulty as opposed to easy. ANYWAY: THE KINGDOM IS THE MAGIC KINGDOM. YOU FIND SANCTUARY IN THE EPCOT DOME. IT'S FUCKING HILARIOUS. THE PLANET IS DEAD AND WE'VE MADE A HOME IN THE SHADOW OF THE CRUMBLING DISNEYWORLD MONORAIL. RIP!!!!!!!!!!!