Housing ex-talent from Bungie, Harmonix, and Irrational Games; The Molasses Flood, an Indie studio of self-described “AAA refugees,” is nearing completion on their first project, and you should be excited. Kickstarted in 2014, The Flame In The Flood is a wilderness survival roguelike set on a post-apocalyptic, raging river. It’s an exceptionally seamless combination of Don’t Starve and (to use a dated reference most people will not understand) the river fording sequence of 1992’s Oregon Trail for the Macintosh.
Each new game opens as your silent protagonist and K9 companion, Aesop, meet for the first time. Aesop presents you with a backpack he just removed from an innocuous nearby corpse. After dying and restarting several games, I came to realize that this frustratingly unskippable cutscene insinuates that the corpse is actually yours. Or, to be more specific, that of the previous protagonist, thus setting the tone of bleak desperation that wonderfully permeates the entire game.
While often compared to Don’t Starve, the gameplay of The Flame In The Flood is very different than that of Klei Entertainment’s quirky survival game. The most notable difference is, of course, the river, which is both your means of survival and your most dangerous enemy. The Flame In The Flood is a unique survival game in that in addition to the gathering, exploring, and crafting found in other games of the genre, you must also raft down the river, continuously searching for resources. Settling down to build a base camp is simply not an option in The Flame In The Flood. Eventually, you will scavenge all the available resources of each randomly generated island or port and be forced to hop back onto your boat to run the river’s unforgiving gambit, where one wrong move can lead to disaster.
Having put hundreds of hours into Don’t Starve, I arrogantly fancied myself a regular Bear Grylls of video game survival when I started The Flame In The Flood. After succumbing to dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, and wolf attacks a few dozen times, I realized that I needed to rethink my strategy. Life on the river is very fragile, and the nomadic lifestyle is fraught with peril. Once I began to slow down and adjust to the game’s high-stakes risk/reward system, my chances of survival increased tenfold. In The Flame In The Flood, you need to know when to take risks, and when to cut your losses. Leaving an unexplored, resource-rich island is tough, especially when you’re exhausted, but when the island is crawling with wolves, sometimes it’s the best decision.
Literally a Scott Sinclair painting brought to life, the hauntingly gorgeous, ultra-stylized world of The Flame In The Flood is complimented by a rich, alt-Americana score composed by Chuck Ragan. Together, they create a superbly mournful world that is lonely, mysterious, and beautifully tragic.
While thoroughly a roguelike, The Flame In The Flood does contain a unique feature that allows observant players to pass on some supplies to their next life. As I mentioned earlier, while you repeatedly bite the big one, Aesop (your dog) lives on. Therefore, any supplies you allow Aesop to carry are available in your next life. By passing on the right supplies, you can potentially make your next life a tad easier. Thus, I found myself in the grim position of hurriedly reorganizing my inventory when I realized that the end was inescapably near. This distress was unintentionally magnified by the game’s currently cumbersome menu navigation with a controller. However, the game is still in early beta and this issue — along with other bugs — will undoubtedly be addressed before the final retail build.
Despite currently consisting of only the first two biomes and playable only to it’s early Kickstarter backers, The Flame In The Flood is incredibly fun and challenging, even for survival game veterans. Although still rough around the edges in this early stage, it’s coming along very nicely and is sure to make a big splash (sorry, I had to) in the survival game genre. While no solid release date has been announced for the PC and Xbox One versions, The Flame In The Flood should be available for through Steam Early Access later this year. For more information on the game, or on The Molasses Flood, check out their site here.