Very beautiful but poorly designed.

This game shines in terms of art and music. It does a great job of conjuring an environment not commonly explored by videogames. The result is beautifully atmospheric.

It is a shame therefore that the gameplay is so uninspiring. It's all about inventory management and crafting following set out rules. There is little to no room for creatively organic play. It is entirely a mechanical process of "to solve problem A get items B and C from location D and craft them to make item E ..." This could be OK in a more forgiving game, but it wants to be a roguelike, survival game. So you end up restarting a lot and working through the same sequence of early crafting processes -- get flint to build a knife and a hammer, build a trap, catch a rabbit, skin the rabbit, etc ...

Most good roguelikes (e.g. Nethack, Spelunky) are built around fine-grained mechanics which interact with one another in interesting ways, so the random level generation creates a wide variety of novel situations. TFITF doesn't have that kind of granularity or organic interaction. Each location is basically a big random loot-drop, perhaps with an enemy guarding it.

On the top of all this, there are a bunch of bad UI design decisions. For a game that is mostly about inventory management, the inventory UI is cumbersome. E.g. you can't access your inventory while looting a container. So if your inventory is nearly full, you'll find yourself clicking back and forth between the inventory screen and the looting screen. Likewise when you are crafting.

I really wanted to like this game. I keep coming back to it to give it another go, and each time I am disappointed.

This could have been a really good and enjoyable game, if it wasn't for the random and unfair parts which you just cannot avoid. I don't have a problem with punishing games, but after a while you'll just be in a constant hurry to fullfil your characters needs and as items spawn randomly throughout the islands, it's nothing but a matter of luck if you survive or not. I feel that because of that you miss out on the interesting features this game has to offer, as there is never time to wander around or plan your next move. You'll also spend a lot of time in the menus (managing inventory, crafting etc.). I usually like that sort of gameplay, but as the ingame time doesn't stop while browsing the menu/inventory you'll spend your time rushing through things and eventually making a mistake caused by lack of time which leads to your characters death. Like I said before, I wish the game wouldn't be so hectic (and still be challenging), but the way it is designed just wasn't for me and because of that I can't recommend it.

While it's a great idea, it gets old VERY fast. You can't directly fight any creatures, so if you don't have anything prepared, you're pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥, especially the further down the river you go. It hit the point where I was always fighting wolves and it was raining everywhere I went, and though I had the best gear and enough traps and weapons to handle everything, it was just annoying. The soundtrack isn't really my style, but I have recently fallen in love with Landsick and Flame in the Flood.

It had a lot of potential, but fell short.

I really wish I could recommend this game because it has good potential and strong art. Sadly, the game mechanics felt just a few rounds of testing away from being satisfying over the length of time needed to complete the game.

• The soundtrack takes a big leap of faith using a number of country/folk style songs with strong vocals. Most games tend to avoid vocals to avoid noticeable repetition.
  
• The visual art is pretty good. The locked camera and repetition through your travels diminish it somewhat.
  
• Recipes and remedies are kept simple and shallow. Every item has a basic purpose. Clothing is rather linear though.
  
• The concept of a travel-centric survival game with a river raft as your permanent home is novel and satisfying.

• Rafting is both the most deadly activity and the least intuitive. On land you get used to WASD moving you in cardinal directions. On the raft, it rotates you, but then it subtly restricts that based on where you're allowed to go and whether your raft is upgraded. Meanwhile, rowing hard will hurl you at full speed in odd perpendiculars, the camera is locked diagonally to make it really frustrating orienting yourself to these controls, and collisions are absurdly violent regardless of how slow you're going.
  
• The river currents themselves aren't accurate enough for how fast-paced the rafting is. It feels more like you're fighting the game's interpretation of a river than the actual river on screen. Despite giving the impression that you control the raft, you can't row backwards in calm waters or cross behind certain islands. It's all fuzzy and unreliable.
  
• The menus don't pause the game, so you'll probably get murdered by a boar while looking for your spear trap. The inventory button opens the last tab, not just the inventory. After several hours, the recipe icon still hasn't clicked--it's a campfire, the symbol of resting/camping in almost any other game.
  
• Repetition sets in quickly. Once you figure out the game, you stop needing to play it. My inventory is just one stack of everything.
  
• Survival becomes unimportant after a short while. You don't need medicine if you know how to avoid injuries, nor do you need the ingredients to make it. I've never used penicillin or found another moldy lump. I almost never drink from jars. Water filters are useless since it rains constantly which means charcoal is useless. Sleeping is useless. Health and eating are nearly useless. I stockpiled all my non-spoiled foods, and by the time I had 20 jerkies I started finding them on every island. I've still never eaten one. I spend 5 zones getting just three raft schematics, and now they're everywhere including one car with two schematics. Part of me is tempted to sail straight through to the end zone whatever that is.
  
• Traps and archery aren't satisfying. Literally drop a snare over the rabbit hole and walk away. 100% chance of catching that rabbit. Meanwhile you can't move with a bow and have no idea how many shots it takes to kill anything (many). You can't collect your arrows either, so when the bow refuses to aim no matter how long you wait, you either never use it or you waste a shot. Spear traps are weird for the same reason that traps don't work in RPGs: the player does all the moving. By the time you know there's an animal worth hunting, it's already chasing you and you won't have time to set traps. Of course, you can always go sit in the safety buffer at the level's entrance and take your sweet time abusing the animal's limited AI.

• Snakes can be found everywhere, including behind buildings where you'll never ever see them. Every single snake bite I've ever had was from an invisible snake. They hiss, yes, but all twenty of them hiss constantly all across the island. The camera being zoomed in and top-down doesn't feel right for snakes either.
  
• Bears are frustrating unknowns to me. I met one, it ran through three spike traps, mauled me several times, then went home and... died? I can't tell. It's laying in its cave and I can step all over it, yet the only "search" action I have there gives a boar's corpse. Is it invincible? I don't know. Clothes don't seem to matter and bears literally stay put until you walk up to their face so why on earth would I ever investigate this further?
  
• The quick menus should only be used when you're absolutely certain that you're safe. The quick menu blocks your arrow keys and forces you to walk in whatever direction you were moving when you opened the menu until you close it and hit those arrow keys again. Oh, and the only way to close the quick menu is to move your hand off of WASD to hit Escape. Worst of all, you can access this control-blocking menu while on your raft. I nearly drowned getting a jar of water.
  
• Quests actively encourage playing badly. If I were already injured, it would make sense to reward me for healing up, yet that's never been the case. I have quests to eat worms and grubs, yet I've only seen a single worm in all this time. The rewards are worthless and the objectives unrelated in context. It's not clear that you can get one magical quest from every quest box. Then there are the main quests which sit untouched until, hours later, you complete them with no input of your own.
  
• Guidance is minimal after the first few minutes. Because the game is procedurally generated, it has no control over how you encounter most new elements in the game. As you might have noticed, there are quite a lot of unfair ways to meet those elements. My first snakes were invisible. My first wolf was in a pack of three. The only bear I've met used all my offensive resources and nearly ended my entire game. I met the White Wolf and it ran away after I closed my quest window and haven't seen it since. Most of my quests offer me sticks for eating grubs and worms. The game basically overcame my survival challenges for me. The story is somewhere in there but it's unfolding so slowly that I only know it exists because of other people's reviews.

It's not often that a game's mechanics take me so far out of the experience that I can go on and on about what could be improved. The review above is the sort you might expect to see on an Early Access game. Many of the flaws I've listed are largely fixable or avoidable. Given that the game's been out for a few years, this is clearly its final state.

I could recommend buying it on sale, enjoy its rafting music, and giving it a few hours.

I couldn't recommend playing it all the way through. Stop playing when it gets frustrating and let those pleasant first hours rest in peace.

DISCLAIMER: This review is based upon experiences in endless mode. There is a campaign mode with a "Survivor" difficulty mode you can select. I will explain my feelings about this in the negatives section of this review.

I'm gonna be honest I really wanted to love this game and mark it as another gem in my library, but the negatives outway the positives too much. So first lets give this game credit where it's due and start off with the positives.

The good:
The soundtrack. Just about every user review here will tell you the same thing, "This game's soundtrack is amazing, beautiful, gorgeous!" And it is. The wonderful country atmosphere of Flame in the Flood is brought to life with the upbeat fast-paced music as you're traveling down the river through a ruined land or exploring your current stop on your trek of survival.
The graphics and art-style. This game looks gorgeous, props to whoever created this wonderful eye-candy. The lighting makes you the world feel desolate at times and alive at others. Shelters look abandoned and the river looks either calm and floaty or fast and ferocious. Animations are pretty good too, but nothing particularly special.

The bad:
The gameplay. Personally I feel pretty mixed on this, but really it's more about repetitiveness of the survival in this game. Basically your usual game of endless or campaign starts out like this: Pick up all items on starting point, start down the river with your first taste of the rapids and how it feels to control on the river, stop at every possible pit stop you can to gather important resources such as flint, saplings, cattails, etc, spend your first night in a shelter or under the stars, kill rabbits you found, poison meat, supply yourself with food from farms with as much corn as possible for ash cakes, kill wolf with poisoned meat, make more poisoned meat and repeat process. Eventually you will begin to gather enough resources to upgrade your raft, make better tools, craft better clothing, make a bow to ward off predators, kill a bear! But that's when you begin to realize the simplicity of the game. Once you have everything, which doesn't take long, you start to just repeat the process of making spike traps to kill boars, wolves, and bears and navigating through the river without taking damage becomes a breeze with the motor on your raft as if it weren't already easy enough. Bears are the most dangerous enemy in the game... until you realize you can setup three spike traps in front of their cave, shoot them with one arrow and have them run into your traps and instantly die. Pretty much all survival games have a boring late game, but Flame in the Flood's late game happens too fast because of how easily exploitable the mechanics in this game are. I see some of the reviewers here talking about challenge and exciting gameplay, but you can exploit the "safe zone" at the start of an island to be rid of any threats in your way. Progression in this game is too quick and the difficulty is faulty ESPECIALLY when RNG is in your favor at the start. Food is almost never a problem, in fact during my endless run I hunted so many animals that I had entire stacks of cooked meat rotting because of how much you can find. Water isn't hard either as you start out with a safety net in the form of a water filter with 3 uses as if it didn't already rain enough to supply you forever and if you're really unlucky with rain it's extremely easy to craft water filters.
Replayability. A staple of survival games with endless modes this game seriously lacks with it's repetitive nature and quick progression system. There are plenty of locations in this game, though only a few become relavent to you with how easy this game can turn out to be. The characters you meet are not great in number and do little for you, making meeting them in a different playthrough the same as last time.
Difficulty. I pretty much already critiqued this in my "Gameplay" section, but I'm gonna write down the finer details in a list here. The only real "danger" to the player character, known as Scout, are wolves. They are the only animal that attacks you for existing. Boars only attack you for entering their territory of the location you are at and are easy to bait into spike traps by setting them just outside of their aggro bubble and making them chase you only to stupidly run straight into the trap and die. Bears are the exact same as boars the only difference being that they require 2 more spike traps to kill and a bow and arrow to aggro and cause damage. Bears disappointed me, because of what little threat they pose to the player. Afflictions are a joke. The only threat they pose is early on and that's if you get extremely unlucky with loot. Now I did see a "Survivor" difficulty option for campaign mode, which I didn't play through as I only played through endless mode. Now for whatever reason, this difficulty isn't an option for endless, though if you decide to play campaign instead of endless I highly recommend choosing this harder difficulty as the game is just far too easy to overcome it's obstacles in it's current state.

Overall: Now I really wanted this game to be good. I got it when it was in early access, because it did look really good. Well, now that it's out of EA I'm going to criticise it as a completed product and to tell it plainly I was disappointed. This game had so much potential yet fell so short from the finish line. My final verdict for The Flame in the Flood is a 5/10.
It's not amazing, but it's not horrible. I recommend getting this game through Humble Bundle or buying it on sale when you have money to spare. If you want a true survival game with realistic elements and you're looking to spend your money now, I would rather suggest The Long Dark. If you want something more wacky and casual go out and buy Don't Starve with the RoG DLC and SW if it's on sale. Both of these games exemplify what a survival game should strive to be; a true test of your wits and skill with the highest of stakes being your life. Now something I really plead the devs to add to Flame in the Flood are more hazards, difficulty settings for endless, and slowed down progression so you don't complete the game in a day. I thought I was going to run into a form of raiders or bandits at the industrial region, but there were just more boars and wolves, nothing special just usual procedure. I think this game can still be good and fun, but it feels more like a "rainy day" kind of game for when you're bored.

If you have anything to add or criticise about my review, I encourage you to rate and comment so I can improve my critique of games and offer better formed opinions for fellow gamers. I hope this helps you and have a good night.

This one is a tough one for me to review. In the end, the negatives outway the possitives for me. I received this game through Humble Bundle Monthly. Which signifacantly reduced the cost of this game for me. I don't think that it's worth the $15 price tag.

Pros:
1. This game has an incredible soundtrack.
2. The dangerous wildlife requires you to strategize with the resources you have at hand.

Cons:
1. The gameplay ended up being extremely repetative. You dock your raft, gather resources, and move on the the next location. Rinse and repeat.
2. The campaign offers little to no storyline
3. For being a survival game, resources were never an issue. I never came remotely close to running out of food or water.
4. There is constant rain throughout the game that cuts out the soundtrack. The soundtrack is one of the few things I enjoyed about the game. Yet, I would say you end up listening to rain for about 75% of the campaign.

The Flame in the Flood has a great start, you're a lone teenager in a post apocalyptic world, warming yourself next to a fireplace, when a dog comes carrying a bag in his mouth, demanding you to rise up and survive. The radio cracks. A message of hope is being transmitted, but you can only hear parts of it. You have to go down the river, find a better connection, and a possible rescue.

The last hope. A possible return to normal life, or at least something akin to it.

So, you grab up your bag, and depart from your miserable island, reading the posters and notes along the way as a form of tutorial of what's to come. A raft. You use it, to go downriver, of course. A few abandoned places along the way, a mill, maybe a fishing cabin, all of these, separated as islands. Something very wrong has happened in the United States.

And that's the good part of the game. The gameplay revolves around controlling this raft downstream, in a clunky way, of course. Receiving damage from it. Going to islands to get loot, craft something to help you in your journey, and try to get to the end, with a few wild animals along the way. The closer you are to your objective, the higher the difficulty, and trying to survive the attack of a few feral animals at the same time is almost impossible, since combat is nonexistant in this game.

So, it's repetitive and boring. There aren't random events, interesting NPCs, or surprises. You get what you've been seeing since the start, and that's about it. That's why it starts great, but falls after a while.

There's nothing in this game to push you, to keep you going. It's just boring. The soundtrack is quite good, a mixture of country and old school sound. The graphics are quite interesting and unique. The controls are really simple and nothing to talk about.

So, it's a no from me. The meat of a game with this premise is both the lore and the gameplay, and they're both faulty after a while.

I really liked this game followed by really hating it.

A number of unintuitive/lacking functions will cause you to die. Because this is a survival game, you can absolutely not leave these functions out:

Canceling the raft boarding - If I accidentally right click the raft, I cannot cancel. This is absurd considering players will be spending a non-zero amount of time accessing the raft inventory, and will invariably initiate a board on accident.

Re-entering an area - once you leave, you cannot go back? wtf? So after I accidentally board the raft, I can't re-enter to complete the life-saving tasks I need to?

I love hard games, but I can't like poor design. Fixing these oversights would take this game to a slam-dunk.

The Flame in the Flood is another Roguelite. It borrows the general structure of FTL (moving forward but branching) and its main gameplay from Don't Starve (craft stuff to not let you vital meters reach zero).

So you're navigating a river and visit different islands/shores, with an arcade touch because you have to avoid crashing into rocks. Once ashore, you must gather resources and craft stuff to eat/drink/keep you warm/defend against wild animals. But it's all extremely basic and repetitive. We're nowhere near the complexity of Don't Starve. Also, the process of managing one's inventory is needlessly frustrating, purely because of a badly thought of user interface.

It's not a broken game, and the audiovisuals are more than decent. It's clearly not one of those games where you feel the developers just try to rip you off. But there just wasn't enough variety to carry me to the end, so I cannot recommend it.

I like this game but can't recommend it. Here's why:

Flame in the flood is a survival game split into locations spread along a very long river, and the river itself. As with most survival games, you need to collect resources in each location and use them to stay alive or craft new items to, well, stay alive a bit longer.

There is a campaign mode, which can be set to checkpoint-based or permadeath, and an endless mode. I have just finished the campaign on permadeath mode and am contemplating whether to play one endless game until I get bored, or to mark the game as completed and move on to something else.

I would recommend this game on A BIG DISCOUNT and only if you're looking for a very charming, fairly-relaxing, tricky-at-times survival game that is also kind of relaxing to play, with great music, and if you can tolerate it being buggy or awkward and fairly repetitive throughout.

Lets start with some of the bugs or annoyances:

- none of my achievements have been recorded
- resources and hazards (that can kill you) can be obstructed by the scenery... I overcame this mentally by role-playing it (snakes are good at jumping out at you from behind things) and for looking out for other signs (your dog barks at snakes and snakes hiss, so if you hear hissing and you're near a house, don't go behind the house)
- the movement has a strange style that takes some getting used to
- a near game-ending bug (Angels Yard) that prevents the next section from loading. I restarted the game multiple times until it just worked
- the upgraded motor on the boat, using keyboard on PC, is unusable and almost caused me to die on the final stretch of the game, I would have gone mental if I hadn't made it through
- almost no story, the handful of characters you meet are really weird, but the ending is a nice twist!
- if you lose concentration early on then you will definitely die, you have to concentrate
- asides from that, it's not really challenging

Some people have said that the raft on the river is very awkward and difficult to control. I assume this was intentional from the devs and I actually like that part of the game. Yes, I was frustrated when I crashed but white-water-rapids-sailing is damned difficult and dangerous.

So if there are all these problems why do I like this game?

I don't really know.

- The music is excellent. It's really not just 'nice music', it's music that I would buy and play even when the computer is off, it's really good.

- There is something about that dog. That companion has some character. He got me into trouble by calling me over to him to pick up some plants that were in dangerous places, but he also saved my life quite a few times too by snarling at snakes. I enjoyed having him with me on my adventure.

- The whole game has a charm. It's a bit hard to explain.

If I can get the achievements to work somehow I'll play a game to get them all, otherwise I'll uninstall, but I'll sort of miss playing this game, a bit like a book with boring characters and no real story being told by a good storyteller.

I got the game back in May 2020 for less than $2. If you can do the same, yes get it. At full price, hmmm I am 51%/49% on the side of no.