The six-person team at Cambridge indie games startup The Molasses Flood has been through a lot, both good and not so good.
“We are a company of AAA refugees,” the group says on its website, referring to their migration from the higher-budget games industry, which has been hurting in recent years. Several on the Molasses Flood team were last at Irrational Games, the maker of the popular BioShock series that abruptly shut down in February; they include co-founder Scott Sinclair, who’d held the pivotal role of art director for BioShock and BioShock Infinite.
So it’s fitting that surviving hard times — while still managing to find the silver linings throughout it all — is a central theme of the startup’s debut game, “The Flame in the Flood.” Though it’s still in development and seeking funding on Kickstarter, the promo video points to this being a game that is beautiful, sad and hopeful all at once.
The game is a stylized depiction of a person surviving in a “post-society” America — in which “society has given up” and nature has reclaimed many human spaces, said Molasses Flood co-founder Damian Isla. It’s a post-apocalyptic Huck Finn, of sorts.
Interest has been strong so far. The Kickstarter campaign, which ends Thursday at 9 p.m., has raised more than $230,000 so far*. That's well above the initial $150,000 goal — a goal the game surpassed in six days. It's also the fourth best-funded game on Kickstarter out of Massachusetts to date. “The Flame in the Flood” is being developed for PC and Mac first, and eventually the plan is to get to a PlayStation 4 version.
Isla said the game aims to be more than just a melancholy journey — it seeks to generate a range of feelings and experience for players.
“It’s not just the periods of darkness, but also periods of beauty, periods of calm,” he said. “The river itself is a huge element to the game. There are definitely parts that are meant to be white-knuckle, hanging-on-for-your-life, but also moments of relative peace — drifting down the river and enjoying the scenery.”
“It’s not just the periods of darkness, but also periods of beauty, periods of calm."
He added: “We are pulling from interesting sources that are not typical sources for games. We’re pulling from Americana, literature, river culture, Bayou culture.”
That is, this isn’t a shooting and fighting game. There will be enemies, but they’ll most likely be wildlife, Isla said. And the way to survive will be to evade rather than confront.
Ultimately, “The Flame in the Flood” is aiming to convey something approaching poetry, which is not the goal of many videogames today. But judging by the demand for the game, maybe that’s about to change.
*Update: "The Flame in the Flood" Kickstarter concluded Nov. 6 with $251,647 raised.
See related:
