The Flame in the Flood Analysis
1 Overview
The Flame in the Flood is rogue-like survival game developed by The Molasses Flood and published in January, 2017. The game takes place in a procedurally generated flooded world, consisting mainly of a river and many islands and river bank settlements, which the player may visit to scavenge for supplies.
2 Formal Elements
2.1 Players
The Flame in the Flood is a strictly a single player experience and is played from the third-person perspective, with a 3/4 top-down non-rotatable camera that follows the player avatar, a young girl named Scout, around. She has a small dog companion named Aesop, who is not controllable by the player, but by a simple AI.
2.2 Objectives
Some apocalyptic event has triggered flooding, and the local area is more or less abandoned and emptied of people. As a young girl with only her small dog to accompany you, you must make your way down river on a raft in order to investigate a radio signal that spoke about a safe haven. Along the way, you will encounter rabbits, crows, snakes, wild boar, wolves, and bears, and you will need to make sure you have enough food, water, and body warmth to stay alive, besides managing health conditions such as snake bites, broken bones, open wounds, stomach parasites, and infections, and of course trying to avoid the deadly predators mentioned before. While traveling on the river, you will need to steer your raft to avoid colliding with rocks and floating debris, and will need to navigate rapids and decide where and when to land, as the developers went out of their way to make sure that it is impossible to visit every settlement and island in a single playthrough.
2.3 Rules
Although The Flame in the Flood is a rather small game, it features rich interactions.
2.3.1 Movement
Scout, the player’s avatar, can move around on the mostly flat ground. She cannot climb or jump or swim, but she can run until her stamina bar is depleted. She can also wave her walking stick to scare away crows and wolves, but this also reduces her stamina.
She cannot move while interacting with a crate or other container or object, but she can cancel the interaction in order to run away from an attacking animal.
While on the boat, the player only controls the movement of the boat, although the inventory and crafting screens may still be accessed. This is not such a great idea most of the time, as these menus do not pause the game, so the boat will continue moving down the river and may crash into something. The player may use stamina to stroke hard, causing the boat to move more quickly for a short time.
2.3.2 Gear, Items, and Inventory
The player starts with a few items, and must scavenge the environment to make more complicated items. Gear comes in a few categories:
- Clothing: This plays a key role because as the player progresses in the game, the temperature will decrease quite rapidly, and drops even more during the night. The player may equip pants, boots, a jacket, gloves, and a hat.
- Tools: The player can create stone knives and hammers, and steel knives and hammers. These are necessary for crafting other items.
- Traps: Using crafting materials, the player may make a variety of traps. Snares and box traps are suitable for capturing rabbits, while spear traps work for wolves, boars, and bears, although bears will need several traps before dying.
- Kits and Healing Items: The player may craft basic materials into leather kits, stitching kits, and a variety of healing items to treat food poisoning, broken bones, cuts, and other ailments.
- Food and Drink: The player can find many items to eat. Fresh or raw food will spoil after a certain amount of time, while cooked or salted food lasts longer. The player must also worry about getting enough to drink, but rain water is clean to drink, and river water can be filtered at a fire, providing you have crafted a filter.
- Crafting Materials: The player can pick up and gather many objects in the environment, from crow feathers and dandelions, to fishing line and nuts and bolts. Most of these are not useful in and of themselves, but they are crucial for making other items.
The player has a limited inventory starting at 12, which can be expanded by crafting pouches to a maximum of 28 (each pouch expands your inventory by 4 slots). The boat’s inventory may also be expanded to 16 by upgrading it at a Marina. Aesop, your dog companion, may also carry a maximum of 6 items. Certain items may be stacked, but the amount in each stack depends on the item type. Jars of water and some food items may be stacked up to 5, but penicillin and other items may be stacked to ten.
In one of the rogue-like elements of the game, if you die and start a new campaign, the items which Aesop is carrying are carried over into the new game.
2.3.3 Crafting
Crafting may take place on the boat, on land, at a workbench, or at a fire. Certain items can only be crafted at a fire or at a workbench. Each item requires specific materials, which will be consumed upon crafting it. The player may only craft an item if they have room for it in their inventory, or if the items consumed in crafting will create room for the item. Each item requires only one inventory slot. Crafting does not pause the game, so you cannot craft an arrow or trap to get you out of a jam, unless you first reach a safe spot.
2.3.4 Quests
The player may find mail boxes on random islands. These may contain a cache of useful items, but they may also have a task or quest for the player to complete. This could be eating a certain amount of meat, killing a creature or a number of creatures, or performing an action such as making a fire, or healing yourself. Completing a quest will magically give you an item. This part of the game doesn’t really make much sense.
2.4 Procedures
The Flame in the Flood has a few basic procedures.
2.4.1 Talking to an NPC
On random islands, the player may encounter an NPC or two. These do not move around, do not attack the player, and will only engage in limited dialogue or trade.
2.4.2 Searching an Area & Scavenging
As a post-apocalyptic game, a common procedure will be to either be tasked with finding an item, or the player might want or need to find a health item, or just collecting scrap parts or plants for crafting. This will involve moving around the island or settlement and checking boxes, buildings, and cars for items. During exploration, encountering an animal is highly likely.
2.4.3 Killing an Animal
Bears, boars, wolves, and rabbits are killable in The Flame in the Flood, but snakes, ants, bears, boars and wolves pose a danger to the player. Boars will charge and chase the player for a short distance, causing a broken bone or laceration which may later become infected if left untreated. Repeated charges can kill the player. Wolves will hunt the player and jump in to attack, causing lacerations. These attacks can also be fatal if the player does not escape or heal themselves. Wolves and boars can be scared away briefly by waving Scout’s walking stick. Wolves and boars can be killed using a single spear trap, and or several arrows. Wolves can additionally be killed using tainted meat or poisoned bait. Bears will only attack the player if the player gets very close to them, however this is extremely foolhardy to do without preparation. Bears move very quickly and cannot be scared away by waving the player’s walking stick. It takes 3-4 spear traps, or many arrows to kill a bear, and unless these are ready, the bear’s repeated attacks will probably kill Scout. Ants bite the player if you walk across their nests, and snakes will also bite and poison the player if you get too close. The ant bites can lead the way to staph infections and death, while snake bites can be fatal by themselves.
The killed animals provide meat and skin for the player to eat or to use in crafting other items, such as bait, pouches, or clothes.
2.4.4 Managing Health Conditions
There are four main health bars the player must manage: hunger, thirst, sleep, and body temperature. Hunger, thirst, and sleep all gradually decrease until the player eats, drinks, or rests. Different food items will refill the hunger meter to different amounts, while any beverage will replenish the thirst meter by 50 points. Resting can be done in 1 hour increments. The default is 4 hours, which will give +50 to rest, and deplete hunger by 8 and thirst by 10.
Body temperature depends on the current outside temperature, whether you are wet, and your current clothing. Each item of clothing has a heat rating, and this is compared against the current temperature to determine whether you maintain or lose body heat.
Besides these health bars, there are numerous other conditions that effect Scout’s survival. If she has been attacked by a wolf, boar, or bear, she may get a laceration, which will cause her rest bar to be decreased by 20 points, and cause her hunger bar to decrease 3.5 times quicker. If it is not treated, it could cause a staph infection, which will continue the punishing drain on hunger, and add a similar drain on thirst. This condition will lead to death if not treated after around 8 hours. Snake bites similarly reduce rest and hunger, while also causing thirst to deplete 7.5 times quicker. Broken bones decrease Scout’s speed, and cause hunger to decrease as the previous afflictions. Eating raw meat, spoiled food, or drinking dirty water can all cause their own different problems, from dysentery, giardia, parasites, or blood flukes, each of which could lead to death or cause your hunger or thirst meters to drop rapidly to zero, killing you indirectly.
Animals are not the only threat in The Flame in the Flood. There are also patches of brambles and poison ivy, which cause small cuts and itchiness, respectively.
Luckily, all these conditions can be treated. Snake bites can be cured by drinking dandelion or sumac tea, broken bones can be splinted, poison ivy can be rubbed with aloe, etc.
2.5 Resources
Like any survival game worth its salt, The Flame in the Flood comes with many resources.
2.5.1 Tangible Resources
- Food: Food comes in many forms: it could be raw, cooked, or jerked meat from rabbit, bear, wolf or wild boar, raw or cooked yucca, or several other varieties. Each will give the player a different amount of energy.
- Beverages: Beverages are generally limited: the player may drink dirty or clean water, teas, and alcohol.
- Crafting Items: There are many different crafting items in the game, ranging from saplings, old lumber, and nuts and bolts to fishing line, various animal hides, and moldy lumps (when food spoils it turns into these). Each takes one slot in the player’s inventory, but most can be stacked into groups of 5 or 10.
- Clothing: Each item of unequipped clothing takes up a slot in the player’s inventory. Unwanted clothing can be shredded into rags, which are used for making bandages and other items.
- Traps, Bombs, and Weapons: There are three kinds of traps: snares for rabbits, box traps for rabbits, and spear traps for larger animals. The player may also may bows and arrows, however, it usually takes several arrows to kill a boar or wolf.
2.5.2 Intangible Resources
- Hunger: This gauge measures how full you are, so as it drops you will become weaker and weaker until you starve. It is replenished by eating.
- Stamina: This gauge measures how much energy you can use in a short time. Running, pushing hard when on the boat, and waving your walking stick all deplete it.
- Rest: This measures how rested you are. It slowly drops the more time you spend awake and moving around. It can be refilled by sleeping.
- Thirst: Slowly drops over time until you drink something.
- Body Temperature: If this gets low enough you will die of hypothermia. Keep it high by staying close to fires and by wearing warm clothes.
- Raft Condition: The raft has ”health” which can be damaged by running into rocks. If this reaches 0, the raft will sink and Scout will die.
- Tools: Once crafted, these do not take up inventory space. Their condition will slowly deteriorate as you use them to craft more items.
2.6 Conflicts
There are many conflicts in The Flame in the Flood. You cannot visit every location that is generated along the river, so you must choose which you wish to visit. Do you go to the campground/wilderness and try to pick up some rabbit skins and flint, or do you go to the gas station and collect some gas for your boat? Either choice could have profound consequences.
Once you reach a settlement of your choice, you need to decide whether you wish to explore it. It may be night time, and wolves are more plentiful at night. You need to ask yourself: Is the risk worth it? Can you stay away from any wolves you encounter, or are you prepared to deal with them using traps, arrows, and poisoned bait?
You must also deal with inventory. You cannot carry an infinite amount, so you must prioritize accordingly. Do you need those extra mulberries, or would the space be better used by old lumber to use for raft upgrades?
2.7 Boundaries
2.7.1 Map
The map in the campaign is limited to a certain distance and number of regions. The game will begin its ending sequence after that limit has been passed.
The settlements can only be explored to their limits, and there is no climbing, swimming, jumping, or flying allowed, making the horizontal exploration of each area crucial.
The river, likewise, may only be explored in a single plane, and there are no branchings: at most, there are islands in the river which must be navigated around, but you will always rejoin the main flow.
2.7.2 Inventory
The player, the raft, and the player’s dog (Aesop) all have limited inventory, which have already been described before.
2.8 Outcomes
There are two main outcomes: the player may die by many different events, as outlined above, leading to a game over screen and the choice to load from a previous checkpoint or to completely start fresh, or the player may struggle all the way to the end, and be awarded with the happy ending of the game.
3 Dynamic Elements
There are numerous dynamic elements in The Flame in the Flood.
3.1 Day/Night Cycle and Weather
The time of day will slowly change between daylight and nighttime. This is accompanied by changes in lighting and temperature changes. This also affects how likely wolves are to appear.
3.2 River and Island Placement
As a procedurally-generated game, the exact curvature and width of the river, the placement of the islands and settlements, and the exact layout of of each settlement is dynamic. This is discussed in detail in this GDC Talk.
3.3 Patterns
This section focuses on game patterns as discussed by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.
3.3.1 Slow Cycle
The main use of the slow cycle pattern occurs in the day/night cycle. This influences the temperature and the chances of wolves appearing.
3.3.2 Stopping Mechanism
The stopping mechanism is used in several places. You can find it in the limited stamina bars, preventing you from holding wolves at bay indefinitely and from simply steering or stroking against the flow of the river and going wherever you want. It also appears in the inventory limitations, preventing you from carrying those 200 stacks of reeds and saplings you’d really like to, as they are so usefully.
3.3.3 Escalating Challenge
The main component of the escalating challenge pattern is found in the steady drop in temperature as you proceed further down the river. Wolves also become more common, and resources become scarcer.
3.3.4 Static Friction
The static friction pattern is used extensively in many survival games to simulate the drain of hunger, thirst, sleep, etc, and The Flame in the Flood is no exception. It is used for the items mentioned above, as well as in the crafting times and scavenging times for different items. Since they take time, you cannot just spam the button, but decide carefully whether to invest the time in it or not.
3.3.5 Trade
You sometimes encounter other characters who will engage in limited trade. You do not have much control over this: they will peek at your inventory, and offer you something in return for one of the items. You can either accept this, reject, or try for a different deal.
3.3.6 Unified Analysis
In the two graphics below, you will find most of the patterns above mentioned. The first works something like Frogger: you must move from location to location as islands and rocks move by you. You may choose to enter an island, where the second mode takes place. If you encounter a rock, the raft takes damage.
In this mode, you may move around and scavenge item and craft them. You can also encounter animals which have a chance of injuring you and inflicting different maladies.
4 Dramatic Elements
Since The Flame in the Flood relies heavily on procedural generation, designed dramatic elements are rather limited. There are a few NPCs which the player may encounter and speak with, but their dialogue is extremely limited, at most about 5-8 lines, and does not feature any role-playing elements of choosing different options, which then affect your standing or reputation with that NPC or group of NPCs. Of course, this is not the focus of the game, so the lack of these elements allows the player’s own adventure and journey to survive to shine all the more.
There are quilts which tell small stories that can be found in certain settlements, but these do not add much in the way of information about where everyone is, what exactly happened, or why.
4.1 Characters
There are a handful of characters, although there is almost no dialogue and almost no meaningful interaction among them.
4.2 Story
The story, such as it is, is this: there has been some kind of disaster that has caused the world to become flooded. You take control of a young girl known only as Scout, who appears to be a member of the Girl Scouts. She is accompanied by her dog, Aesop. During her journey she encounters a few children, and several different adults. These interactions are limited to a few lines of dialogue, and a few different choices, which do not seem to have a large effect on the story.
At first she will make her way down river to find a radio signal. After finding the tower, she will have to continue down river to find another location, and finally she will reach a ”kingdom” or theme park area with many other girls and dogs who have survived similarly harrowing adventures.
5 Conclusion
The Flame in the Flood is a relatively small and short game. After dying, reloading, dying and restarting several times, I was able to make it to the final area in about 13 hours. I felt like I had really survived and gone through all the trials and rough spots that Scout had. I shouted in dismay when a wolf attacked me, I cringed and grimaced when I made a bad raft maneuver and drowned. When fever or sepsis caused me to collapse, I sighed and went back to another save, determined not to make the same stupid mistakes again.
The music adds to the atmosphere, coming in and fading out at all the right moments.
As a survival game, the cute arts makes you think you are in for a gentle experience, which is dashed as soon as you try to take alive for more than a few days. Your water will run low, you might eat some rotten food and come down with parasites, or any number of other accidents might befall you. It will take careful planning, thought, and no small amount of luck to make it to the end. Should you do so, you will have had a delightful, and difficult experience.
