The Flame in the Flood: Complete Edition

Genre: Survival Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Flame in the Flood is a Survival Adventure-style game (like Don’t Starve), where you play a young girl trying to survive on a river in a procedurally-generated flooded area, scrounging up food and resources, fending off wild animals, and repairing your raft as needed.

I’m not going to mince words here, this game is hard. Players have four health meters that are constantly ticking down, plus any number of potential illnesses they can contract if things go wrong, you have very limited inventory space, and not only is each new island you stop at a mystery in terms of what supplies you’ll be able to scrounge up, but it also may present dangerous hazards that could leave you worse off than when you arrived.

The game has a surprisingly deep crafting system that forces players to juggle their inventory while they try to craft the tools and materials they need to feed themselves, purify water, make themselves more protective clothes, repair their raft, or stitch up a wound. It makes hunting down supplies a game of trying to weigh what you need versus what you want, deciding whether it’s worth a trip back to the raft to drop off supplies, or if you should just get the essentials and head to the next spot, or even hunker down for the night to avoid the storm that seems to be closing in.

The visuals look pretty good, save for the stylized look of the main character, which I just didn’t care for. There’s nothing impressive here, but what is here does a good job of conveying the dangerous environments, the solitude, and the feeling of being abandoned by society in the wake of a disaster.

The version of the game on the Nintendo Switch is the Complete Edition, which includes director commentary, an Endless mode that replaces the story with a simple “see how long you can survive”, and other unspecified “gameplay enhancements”.

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a challenge junkie, and survival games frustrate me and make me nervous, but I can definitely see the appeal of The Flame in the Flood. It’s a nerve-wracking experience, and I suspect most players will be dying a lot before they get the hang of it – and miserable, gruesome deaths at that. But the feeling of hunting down supplies and crafting what you need to survive is a fun experience if you can stick with it.

tl;dr – The Flame in the Flood is a Survival Adventure where you raft down a flooded area scrounging through wreckage for supplies to stay alive. It’s punishingly difficult, but it’s a rewarding experience if you stick with it.

Grade: B-

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