The Flame in the Flood hits a little close to home. In the fall of '98 I watched as the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers near my home swelled out of their banks to drown miles of the surrounding countryside, carting off whole houses and trees with the same ease that ants carry away crumbs of bread. The waters cut us off for days, and least 31 people died.
Up until now I don’t think I've ever seen a game properly capture the despair and (yes) beauty of those days, but this visually attractive procedurally generated survival sim comes frightfully close. It’s hardly the toughest survival sim around, and it’s hobbled by a needlessly complicated menu system, but in those wonderful moments when it finds its flow, it’s a game to remember.Survival games don’t often lean heavily on hope, preferring instead to focus on the humdrum drive to simply last until the next day. But The Flame in the Flood succeeds in part because it’s a game about pushing us toward a promising something, placing us as it does on a river that’s jumped its banks and engulfed the world. In the little islands dotting the river and in the banks beyond, dark conifers and grasses thrive on land once suffocated under cement. Rabbits, wolves, and bears evade rent in crumbled apartment buildings, all while the occasional fiddle or harmonica strain suggests the American spirit need not die, even if our cities do. The Flame in the Flood rushes us through all this on the current of a destiny that’s never exactly manifest. I could think of far less appealing apocalypses.
Along the River Bank
It’s ostensibly the story of a young woman named Scout and her dog Aesop, although the campaign (such as it is) never really offers much elaboration beyond that aside from specific NPCs and the hunt for a mysterious radio signal downriver. Most of the fun’s in the Endless mode, which happily chucks the story bits and focuses on the core gameplay of riding the currents while attempting to steer toward camps and wilderness areas. There, you hunt on foot for the supplies necessary to either keep starvation and injury at bay or to repair and upgrade your humble vessel.It’d be difficult to overemphasize the importance keeping the raft in passable shape. Scout’s raft starts out as an unwieldy beast that lurches, sloth-like, even over placid waters and it barely allows control over rapids. Experience tells me that’s pretty accurate as far as piloting a real raft goes, but I did nevertheless find it much easier to handle with a gamepad in place of the keyboard.I’ve died of dehydration, sleep deprivation, drowning, and even from the jaws of a wolf when, moronically, I chose to fight rather than flee.
Good control is essential, as there’s no going back. Once you’ve passed a spot on the river, it’s gone for good, a design choice that adds a welcome dose of tension. I still find myself frowning at the time I died of starvation because I chickened out while trying to cook food at an existing campfire near a nasty boar, reasoning that I’d have another chance at the next island. The next one was a long time coming. Too long, in fact, as the berries I’d munched on weren’t enough to get me there. A new encampment marker had barely popped up on the screen before Scout slumped over dead on her raft, her hunger meter drained entirely. That’s to say nothing of all the other times my negligence led to Scout's demise. I’ve died of dehydration, sleep deprivation, drowning, and even from the jaws of a wolf when, moronically, I chose to fight rather than flee.“
The Will to Survive
The good news is that the actual business of staying alive isn’t all that complicated so long as you can find the supplies. Indeed, some jarring gameplay questions pepper the scenarios, such as why I have to scrounge for drinkable and initially non-potable water on islands when there’s a huge river rushing right around me. (It does, after all, let you gather rain.) But otherwise, the recipes compiled in the journal make life as easy as it can be, showing me how to make a rabbit snare with some sticks and ropes, how to skin the rabbit with a flint knife I made, and how to cook the meat over a fire.In these moments, The Flame in the Flood plays more like a traditional survival game, although with recipes that mercifully keep things simple while still delivering appreciable depth. Sometimes you’ll find components like wood and string in old trunks or in the rusted guts of long-dead buses; at other times you’ll have to make them, generally by picking up things like reeds and flint, and making everything from clothes to medicine with them. Sometimes you’ll even get stuff like arrows from the few other survivors, a creepy bunch who always seem to regard me and my little dog as potential meals.In time, even The Flame in the Flood succumbs to the monotony of mere survival.
It’s managing all this stuff that ruins some of the appeal. Scout has a laughably small backpack with just 12 slots, although she gains six more spaces by tossing some extra items on the dog. She can store the least essential supplies on the raft, but even it only allows for 12 extra slots. The trouble? I ended up spending most of my time in the menus managing the precious junk I scavenged, transferring some items to Aesop or eating some food on the fly in order to make room for nuts and bolts—pretty tedious stuff.“
Though I can accept that it’s part of a mini-game that’s designed to force me to think carefully about what to take, The Flame in the Flood makes these moments more time-consuming than they need to be, forcing me, for example, to transfer stackable items I’ve just picked up to Aesop’s inventory where the rest of such items are, even though the mutt never once leaves my side.It's little things like this (not to mention an unfortunate tendency to crash, particularly on the PC version) that slowly wear down the charm after hours on hours: in time, even The Flame in the Flood succumbs to the monotony of mere survival. The journey may be more important than the destination, as they say, but the strength of that saying usually rests on there actually being an end to begin with. There's never one in Endless. But does that mean I regret my time with this unique vision of the end of the world (or at least the country)? Not for a moment.
