Learning the river used to be a big deal. It's most of what a pilot did, I think, although pilot may be the wrong word in a trade that had a lot of idiosyncratic terminologies. Regardless: you learned the river, and a lot of what you learned about was underwater and invisible. With lines and weights and poles, the riverboat crew came to understand every inch of the stuff that lay beneath the surface - branches they could snag themselves on, rocks that would be their undoing or that might snarl up the currents in problematic ways. The river was always changing, too: every few months, you had to learn it all over again. The river was alive, and you had to remember that it was alive, because it could kill you using all of its hidden tricks and arcana.
I love the river in The Flame in the Flood, a pretty survivalist rogue-lite from a start-up filled with the typical industry luminaries. But I can see why others might not be so keen. On forums and in comments sections, the same things come up over and over. The river is brutal, and the raft you use to navigate it doesn't control very well - at least not before a few upgrades. Yet this is a survival game at heart, and things that don't work very well are to be expected.
The Flame in the Flood is a fairly traditional survival game on land, as it happens: scavenge and craft your way from weakness to fleeting strength as you explore this ragged chunk of downhome, post-apocalyptic, post-Katrina Americana that's delivered in watery greys and greens with sudden bursts of orange or throbbing blues. The levee has not held and the stuff of humanity has turned to rust and rot. Manage a handful of problems, covering hunger, thirst, temperature and the need for sleep, and fight off wild animals who are as spindly-limbed and desperate as you are, cartoonish and angular and not to be messed with. But the spars of land you explore are fairly small, and they're scattered. They're scattered along the river, and the river is a whole other beast.
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