I really wanted to like the Flame in the Flood. The music is fantastic and immersive, the setting and concept are interesting, and I love survival games. Despite framerate and quirky input issues (Mac), the game charmed me enough to make maybe a dozen runs before regretfully concluding that I was not having fun. Maybe I just wasn't getting it, but here are some of the things that irked me: - Food. The hunger bar ticks down so fast that the game feels like a time trial to get from snack to snack, but of course, you have no idea where the next snack is. I like taking my time in games, but that didn't seem to be an option because of how fast your hunger ticks away. I died once because my hunger bar was at about 20% when I got on the river. I couldn't manage to steer and manage my inventory at the same time, so I starved to death with a pack full of food when the hunger bar hit 0 on the water. - Speaking of, the game doesn't pause when menus and dialogs are open. That created alot of very frustrating circumstances, often involving dying of hunger/thirst because I couldn't navigate the menu quickly enough, or being gored by a boar because I was fumbling to close a dialog. - There are lots of procedurally generated quests that I never actually got to do because they didn't match any of the procedurally generated areas that I encountered. - I actually thought it was cool how illnesses work: Start off fine; If you don't treat them, they get worse and make your life harder, and eventually kill you. In practice though, there aren't enough opportunities to actually deal with your illnesses at ALL, so an illness is a death sentence with a 15 minute delay. - The rafting part is actually really cool, but sometimes the controls just do the wrong thing. I'm not talking about rapids and currents-- That part seems to work pretty well-- I'm talking about my controls not responding to input. Overall, I thought TFITF was almost good, but it just got too much wrong to be fun.
