Some reviews for the recently released rogue-like The Flame in the Flood:

Kidzworld:

Beautiful, challenging, at times frustrating but ultimately rewarding when things click. The Flame In The Flood is a solid and welcomed entry in the growing rogue-like survival simulation genre.

Score: 4/5

Pros

• Engaging gameplay
• Wonderful art style
• Fantastic music and atmosphere

Cons

• Clunky menus
• Occasional glitches

Gameindustry News:

I’m a fan of gaming as a relaxing way to get away from the real world for a while, hence my profound love for the Elder Scrolls games, but there is some part of me that enjoys the pragmatism, maybe even the fatalism of doing the best you can and still dying. I mean that’s life, right? So The Flame in the Flood is a tiny little simulation of life where you’re lucky enough to get a raft and a dog, and that’s pretty great.

The Flame in the Flood earns a perfect 5 GiN Gems for being so amusingly awesome.

Score: 5/5

Kotaku:

As I navigated The Flame in the Flood’s dangerous river, I felt that same merciless pull. Despite its flaws, this game perfectly captures what it feels like to live on, with, and against the water. My journey downstream has been studded with unexpected victories and dramatic failures, tall tales to rival any told by the characters I’ve met. It retold a part of my life in a strange but familiar way, offering a glimpse into another world that felt both foreign and like home.

James Billcliffe of OnlySP posted the second part of his interview with developer Molasses Flood that talks about their new rouge-like game The Flame in the Flood.

With The Molasses Flood now up and running, they needed something to work on. Funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign backed by more than 7000 people, The Flame in the Flood is their first game and tasks the player with surviving the harsh realities of the world they find themselves in, as they travel down a river in search of their next meal while trying not to become one themselves for the ravenous beasts that roam the wilds.

Read part one of the interview here.

“Pretty soon we arrived at the idea of the journey, a travelling survival game,” says Forrest Dowling, designer and co-founder of The Molasses Flood. “We started thinking about, ‘what makes sense for travelling?’. Then we thought, ‘well, a river’s a really good vehicle for travel’. From the river came the question, ‘what kind of river do we want to do?’. That’s where we moved into the idea of the American backwater. It’s actually where a number of us are from and grew up, so we’re fairly familiar with it. It just snowballed from there.”

Set in an unforgiving and mysterious world, The Flame in Flood combines survival focussed gameplay with ‘rogue-lite’ elements such as permadeath and procedural generation to create a deep, replayable experience. “This isn’t something you sit down and you play through once,” says Dowling. “It’s something that we want to build up over time. Every playthrough is different. You’re not going to encounter everybody and you’ll only encounter some of the conversations that they can have with you. Next time you play, you’ll encounter different people, or the same person, but they have a different thing to say.”

James Billcliffe of OnlySP had the chance to interview developer Molasses Flood, and ask a few questons about their rouge-like game The Flame in the Flood.

The Molasses Flood’s first game, The Flame in the Flood, comfortably achieved its $150,000 Kickstarter goal, raising $250,000 by its conclusion on November 7^th 2014. While still a brilliant achievement, this sum pales in comparison to the rumoured budget for Dowling’s last project, Bioshock Infinite, which a New York Times analyst estimated cost $100m to develop – a claim which Infinite’s creative lead Ken Levine denies.

“The main difference that I see between the two is what resources that you have at your disposal. Working on a big AAA game, there’s a sense that you can set your sights on anything and you can do it. You can spend your way through any problem.” Dowling explains. “With the six of us working off of, initially, savings and now, the money we got from Kickstarter, there’s never been a point where what we can do is anything. From the beginning we needed to think very explicitly about scope, how much can we do in a reasonable amount of time, what we can do well.” he adds.

The Flame in the Flood is now funded on kickstarter with twenty two days left, and the games developer The Molasses Flood talk about the games stretch goals.

We did it! We have officially hit our goal! Thank you everyone who has backed us, who has spread the word, who has offered help. The outpouring of support and kind words has been overwhelming.  

We really didn’t know how the campaign was going to go. There’s been a lot of talk among developers about the decline of crowd funding, about how it’s an extremely unpredictable route to go. Scary stuff to hear as we readied our project. Doing well can help secure the future for a team, doing poorly can torpedo projects. If a pitch with an investor or publisher goes poorly, it’s pretty private. If a Kickstarter campaign goes poorly, everyone knows.

So thank you. The support of everyone is helping us in a huge way, not only in helping get this game made, but in putting us into a position that can help us well into the future. Our long term goal hasn’t just been to make a game. It’s been to build a studio that makes many great games for years to come. We are taking the first steps on that journey with all of you, and hope that through your support, we are all ensuring a future where we can continue making the sorts of games we love.

This is step one. Very soon, we plan on announcing stretch goals. We have a lot more we’d love to do, and we still have weeks of this campaign ahead of us. We didn’t want to talk about stretch goals until our initial goal was hit. Maybe it’s superstitious, but we didn’t want to start talking about best case scenarios until we hit our initial target. We are extremely excited to talk about some of our additional plans, and can’t wait to start sharing them with you.

Thank you all so much for being a part of this.