Connection and Survival: Stardew Valley and The Flame in the Flood
On this week’s Crockpot, Tom and I discuss two games, Stardew Valley and The Flame in the Flood.
We spend some time talking about how, while many games are implicitly an escape from the sometimes hollow, soul-crushing overstimulation of modern life to a simpler existence in which all the empty static falls away and we can savor the things that “really matter,” Stardew Valley explicitly sets itself up as serving that purpose.




Dear Caro,
If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of a change.
The same thing happened to me, long ago. I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life…real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong.
You could argue that Stardew Valley is less about connecting with people and more about capitalism, producing goods and making money and building a bigger operation that lets you produce more goods that let you amass more and better stuff, and so on. But there is some satisfaction in the act of doing the work yourself, creating something tangible, laying out your rows of crops, tending to them, watching them come to fruition not instantly but over time. Working for it.
But you do develop relationships in Stardew Valley. And like the crops, they take time and care to bring to fruition. I’m not sure they are “what matters most” in the game, despite what the letter from your grandfather says, but they are present.
Tom and I had a lot of kind things to say about The Flame in the Flood, but in retrospect I wish we had discussed the contrast in focus between the two games. If Stardew Valley is saying that connection with people and with nature is what matters most, then what is The Flame in the Flood saying?
The Flame in the Flood is a survival game. You play as a young woman named Scout, struggling to make her way downriver and just stay alive in an America where society has collapsed.

You occasionally meet other survivors who may spare a few words or a kind gesture, but that’s it. Your only real connection is with a dog named Aesop. But maybe, in a harsh and hostile world, maybe that’s enough. It’s something to hold onto, anyway.
For Scout, the kinds of connections that Stardew Valley asserts are “what matters most” are completely unavailable. And yet she still fights to survive, just to make it through another day, just to make it a little farther down the river.
I’m deeply concerned with connection, as a theme in art and as it manifests in my own life. But, while I have never known anything like the kind of struggle to survive that Scout is enduring, I have known long periods of real depression and despair, periods when I wasn’t sure what I was living for at all, and when just getting out of bed and facing the world each morning was an undertaking.
And part of what is beautiful about a game like The Flame in the Flood is that it says that this matters, too, that it is meaningful just to survive, just to endure.
The game’s soundtrack is by Chuck Ragan and it is outstanding. In the title song…
…he sings, “There’s no failure in true survival.”
And all I can say to that is, Amen.
Notes
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