The most beautiful part of The Flame in the Flood is when you’re on the open water and rafting your way toward the future. The world of the game, a strange bleak southernist apocalypse space, has been overrun with water. One has to assume that it has destroyed everything in some kind of scenario that has changed the land permanently. One gets the sense that there is no going back. It’s a post-lapsarian fantasy of humanity sunk beneath waves where no waves should be, and the navigation of those waves is some of the most peaceful excitement in memory. There should not be peace in this action. The player controls a raft that travels along what might be a river that’s swelled so far beyond its banks that you can’t even estimate where they might have been. The raft is made of barrels, tires and planks, so scraping land or running full-on into the supports of shattered overpass is bad for you. Each hit makes the model a little more ragged. There’s a meter that tells you exactly how close you are to drowning in floodwater muck, and you can get down to the smallest sliver, praying that you can make it to the next marina so you can spend some nuts and bolts to get a little bit of safety back into your life.
