Withstanding the deadly rapids on The Flame in the Flood

The survival genre of video games has ratcheted the intensity when The Last Of Us was released in June 2013. We knew from the start that The Last Of Us will combine horror and survival seamlessly, and players spent nearly half of 2013 journeying through ravaged America which has suffered a great scientific calamity that transformed an immeasurable number of people into man-eating, zombie-like creatures. As it turned out, The Last Of Us crashed expectations and climbed further up the pedestal, primarily because the game slightly reinvented the horror-survival by nailing the dramatic build-up between Joel and Ellie coming together as an indomitable pair of wanderers trying to survive a world that has gone through a state of absolute decay.

The concept of surviving in pairs will be once again explored in The Flame in the Flood. Developed by The Molasses Flood, this indie title explores how much difficult it is to live in a world drowning incessantly in river water, with only a nameless young girl and a dog named Aesop surviving the cataclysm, while the rest may have been carried away violently by the antagonistic currents sweeping remaining settlements the player will need to come into contact with, essentially for the protagonist’s relentless quest for survival. The Flame in the Flood is courageously developed as an indie game where you go against the unstoppable flow of calamity, while altogether staving off threats like wolves and thunderstorms.

Early gameplay footage had shown how the female protagonist and her dog will go from one habitable location to another. As the protagonist, the player will control a makeshift raft, rowing it to safety and avoiding visible obstacles like  islands that have drifted away from each other and small patches of civilization where people once lorded over . Players will also have to contend against the powerful currents sweeping the world the protagonist is living in. Crashing the raft badly enough will cause the player to fall and drown to her death. The protagonist can also die if left exposed too long against the elements.

Surviving the uncooperative currents is only a small part of the game’s challenging nature. The protagonist will regularly need to make stopovers at abandoned settlements to scavenge for basic supplies like food and clean water. Fundamentally, the protagonist can die if left dehydrated, hungry, sleepless, and cold. There is one depressing situation during the gameplay footage where the protagonist nearly gave in, and it’s clear that the game wishes the player to seriously track the physical condition of the protagonist throughout.

The Flame in the Flood is a [possible] peek into a world devoid of human life, where comfort zones and the progress that mankind have supposedly established are totally eliminated from the bigger pictures. President and Lead Designer Forrest Dowling and talked about how uniquely different their product is from the competition.

“There are a couple key points that differentiate us from many of the survival games out there. The biggest and clearest is the river and the raft. That’s not something I’ve seen much of out there, and it serves as a driving force that will always be pushing you forward.”

After receiving overwhelming financial support on Kickstarter, The Flame in the Flood will be released on Steam and Xbox One on September 24.